Juan Andrade

Juan Andrade has formed a grass-roots social movement to rehabilitate and empower street children and eradicate the forces that compel children to the streets.

Juan Andrade, a Catholic priest and human rights lawyer, is methodically building an Ecuadorian grass-roots movement of street children that supports them while also working to prevent the phenomenon throughout Ecuador and the wider Andean Region. His "Mano Amiga" (Friendly Hand) approach is driven by a powerful vision of communities reclaiming their children through voluntary initiative. The underlying vision, however, is animated by a detailed plan of action in which skilled and unskilled volunteers fit specifically into a clear program of services. Juan first finds an underutilized building owned by the church or state–of which there is no shortage–then obtains a lease to create a center for street children on the premises. With this venue for organizing services for street kids in hand, he recruits and trains volunteers from the community who share the vision. With as few as four or five volunteers, they begin to reach out to children on the streets.
Juan elicits an extraordinary commitment from the volunteers, who tithe income, attend biweekly meetings and spend an average of ten hours a week either in the center or, by night, on the streets with the kids. In addition to the programs directly for the street children, the volunteers engage the community by systematically spreading information through public education about the problem of street children and seeking to integrate the center deep into the heart of the community.
His pilot center in Riobamba provides a permanent home for those street kids who live there and education, training, meals and work for those who visit daily. It also offers classes and productive/creative activities (gardening, ceramics, wood working, baking, leather working and painting) that also generate income for the children. The children are encouraged to become spokespersons about the problems and rehabilitation of street children. The kids in his pilot center in Riobamba now have their own one-hour show on the local radio station on Saturday mornings.
The public education strategy of the volunteer teams has shown results. The police and judges from the youth court now bring children who have broken the law and have been abandoned by their families to Juan's center instead of to the detention centers or, as is more often the case, to the adult jail where they are routinely violated.

In Ecuador and throughout the Andean Region, thousands of children and young adults are left homeless and abandoned by their families because of poverty, alcoholism, substance abuse, physical abuse and broken homes. From these desperate beginnings, street children are denied the chance to realize their human potential and typically end up living in the dark recesses of society, without voice, power or access to opportunities and vulnerable to the predations of addiction, crime and corruption. Police, for example, are involved in developing rings of young thieves who provide kickbacks to the police from their booty. Ecuadorian society has no comprehensive response to the deep structural causes of this parading social tragedy. Neither state nor political parties, nongovernmental organizations nor the church have independently or concertedly begun to address the symptoms let along uproot the causes of street children. Instead, street children are more often used–by interest groups to gain funding, by politicians in order to gain votes or by the religious actors to convert souls. Street children are dumped into poorly run state juvenile homes, sometimes given handouts of food and clothes and generally branded as "no-good." Existing service programs provide street children with very little guidance, care or respect, and street kids often run away or stay on for long periods of time–and there is almost no evidence that the public juvenile services are anything but relieved that another bed becomes free for the next intake.

Juan goes right to the root of the problem–society's indifference to these kids. The core objective of Mano Amiga is to persuade society to reclaim its children and in so doing reclaim its humanity. Overall, Juan has two strategies to do this. The first, which he initiated before launching Mano Amiga, is to affirm at the social and constitutional levels that every child has a right to the basic necessities–loving concern, a home life, education, health services–that can offer the chance to realize her or his full human potential. Juan created the Commission on Human Rights as a national network of local human rights offices to struggle for these rights for children.
The second overall strategy is represented by Mano Amiga, which blends a highly committed social movement of volunteers with a carefully crafted program of services for street children. Because it is rooted in a committed and expanding social base, Mano Amiga has the capacity to address the root causes that lead to children being thrown onto the streets. For the same reasons, the service aspects of the program are sustainable and replicable. With this approach, the initial work of defining the social commitment and building a critical mass of "fellow dreamers," as Juan calls them, of the vision, is slow. But once the core is established, says Juan, "like a colony of ants, nothing can stop its spread."
There is nothing dreamlike about the way Juan has gone about establishing his pilot program in Riobamba. He knew the street children well from his human rights work and the time he spent with them at night on the streets. He concluded that what they needed most was a safe and healthy environment of their own. So he sought and secured the right from the Social Security Administration to take over an unused public youth detention center for his program.
In order to manage the center, Juan recruited an initial core of ten volunteers, including a married couple, who manage the center while living there with their own children. Juan recruits both professional (especially teachers, social workers, health workers and small-business persons) and nonprofessional volunteers through visits to social and sport clubs, universities, churches, youth groups and other civic organizations. Juan and skilled volunteers provide initial training for volunteers, who are then rotated over six months through outreach work with the street children at night and in the center's activities during the day.
Volunteers-in-training form teams who reflect, analyze and participate in the diagnosis of the problem and come up with solutions and a work plan to carry out their plans. This training takes approximately six months. The volunteers work the public markets and parks at night locating the children, making contact, gaining confidence and then bringing together a group of street children to make up a team so they can talk, reflect and analyze the events and experiences of their lives.
The street children, both those who sleep at the center and those who drop in by day, come and go voluntarily. But while there, they have chores and responsibilities for the daily routine in the center. They must follow rules and regulations in order to stay there. There are gardens and small businesses (leather, ceramic and wood workshops, a bakery, a vegetable garden, etc.) within the complex run by the children with supervision from volunteers. Education activities are ongoing and varied, concentrating around the teaching of basic skills and manners. "At risk" children from the community are also invited to participate in the small businesses. The products are high quality and markets have been secured so both the center and the children earn a small income.
Training and support are provided for the children at the center for all activities, but at some point, the children are given complete autonomy so that they become independent. The children are part of the program's evaluation process. Juan stresses equality and sharing in the projects, both in terms of workload and profit.
The children are also encouraged to participate in civic life. Mano Amiga holds occasional art exhibits of paintings and ceramics at the Center of Art in the City of Riobamba, and even some sculpture. Some of the children are planning to present their critique of the programs that operate in their name in Riobamba at a community meeting in 1997. They will also present a proposal for the coordination of services based on their own needs assessment.
Juan describes the strategy to spread Mano Amiga as the "work of ants." He has built an irresistible force at the bottom of society that will slowly spread out by the work of committed volunteers. This model presents a social movement vision. After the initial formation and training of the volunteer teams, they participate at all levels of the program–identifying street children, bringing them to the center, and forming the small businesses. Their work also involves educating the public. Every barrio in Riobamba has a neighborhood group with a committee of directors. The volunteers contact the leadership committees and offer to give a workshop to the group. This often has no results because the neighborhood groups have been politicized and they do not want to go against the mayor or the head of the police. So now the groups enter the communities through direct action like building bonfires and singing Christmas carols to attract crowds. When they have the crowd together they explain their work with the street children, how to get in touch with the Center and how to help the abandoned children in their community. They form singing groups and go to the police headquarters, prisons and churches. During the event they identify themselves as Mano Amiga and explain the program and how everyone can help. Contacts are also made through sports groups.
With the Riobamba pilot now fully demonstrated, Mano Amiga is beginning to spread systematically to other communities that are ready to adopt this approach. In 1996, Mano Amigo worked with volunteers in Esmeraldes among the black population of Ecuador to complete a diagnostic study of the possibility of replicating the program there. Contacts were originally made through an activist who was already working with street children in the region. Volunteers from Mano Amiga in Riobamba went to Esmeraldes for a week-long training workshop of volunteers in the new Mano Amiga group. A building has been identified as a center for street children and the new Mano Amiga program for street children is scheduled to open in 1997. The volunteers have also made contact in Manabi and plan to train a group of volunteers and open a center there as well.

Juan grew up in difficult circumstances and left home to be on his own at the age of thirteen. With encouragement from a priest who took an interest, Juan managed to study at night while working during the day all the way through high school, university and law school. At the age of eighteen he made a "life option" to work for the service to the poor and while at university he became a Catholic Priest. He spent two years at his first parish before reaching the point of irreconcilable differences with the conservative Bishop over Juan's human rights work. He left the parish at this point to devote himself full-time to establishing the Permanent Commission on Human Rights, which has since developed more than 30 local human rights centers in all parts of the country.
Juan sees a natural partnership between his human rights centers and Mano Amiga, both as an infrastructure to spread the word about Mano Amiga and as a way to encourage those already involved in human rights protection issues to take the next step to address the causes of those abused by re-weaving the social fabric such that the children are not finding themselves on the streets in the first place.
As his work has gained legitimacy and proven its value to society, Juan has been very relieved to be on increasingly good terms with his Bishop (he has always maintained the most positive relations with progressive elements with the Church). His Bishop now authorizes donations of food and materials to the Riobamba center and encourages Catholics to participate in Mano Amiga as volunteers.