Getting to Know Your International Contacts—Part 1

Delfena Mitchell 

Delfena Mitchell is Director of the Liberty Children’s Home, on the outskirts of Belize City. This program opened in the summer of 2005 and is licensed to house up to 40 children, predominantly between birth to 5 years of age. However, older children who have younger siblings in care are and will always be accommodated. All of the children at the care center have been abandoned, abused or orphaned and many have disabilities, special needs.

From the podcast I learned that the Liberty Children's home is located in Central America. Belize City, unfortunately has the number 1 incidents of child abuse in the Caribbean. There are 42 children in Liberty Children’s Home. Children come to the Home because they have been physically or sexually abused, neglected or abandoned. When the children arrive, they are really broken down and need time to heal. So the workers there will give the children time to transition and get them back into school. They get to the know the child and let them open up when the are ready.

She gave an example of one young boy who came to them at 9 years old with 6 other brothers and sisters. He had not spoken in over a year because he came from a home where he was physically abused and observed his sister suffering the same. They started off homeschooling him because he wasn't ready to be in a normal classroom. When they did enroll him in school, he was kicked out in the first week. She took him horseback riding, and in that 30 minutes he began to talk about his abuse from his grandmother and how she would beat him with a stick and he'd take his food under his bed to eat so no one would take it away. Delfana had trouble understanding him at times because he had regressed in language development because of the abuse he suffered. He began to say a couple words as the weeks went on. They would give him informal sessions of school for a few hours a day and let him spend most of his time in the gardens because he loved it. With the combination of his meds and going back to school, he began to change and talk more as the weeks went on.

I have not heard back from Delfena yet, so I read information on childhood poverty and here are my 3 New Insights Regarding Poverty from http://www.childhoodpoverty.org/index.php

1. There is a crisis of childhood poverty is heartwrenching. An estimated 1 in 4 children (that's over 600 million kids) worldwide are living in poverty. In many countries there are over 60% of children whose family are living in poverty.
2. One of the effects of poverty is that over 10 million children under 5 years of age are dying from diseases that can be prevented. I believe that children, especially in developing countries that are bearing these effects, should have more advocates because these children are bearing both the physical and emotional costs of poverty such as death, malnutrition, poor health, life-long learning difficulties and lost opportunities.
3. Poverty tends to be passed on to children from their parents. This is why I love my job teaching in a Title 1 school. At my school 90% of our students are on free/reduced lunch (living below the poverty line) and 220 children out of about 500 benefit from our FUEL program. (FUEL program is through Kroger stores.... people buy FUEL bags of snacks for our students in the program to take home every Friday for days they can not benefit from food at school. I believe teaching my kindergarteners and giving them a good start to their education is the first step in tackling childhood poverty. To give them the necessary tools (to read, write, and do math) they will need to become whatever they dream to be.