who we are - photo-report + the street

In Guatemala City , as in many places in the South of the world, many girls and boys live in the street.

To escape from the situation of misery and despair, many girls and boys choose to live in the streets. They are more than 5.000 and their number is still increasing.

For them the street is not only violence, hunger, diseases, sufferings, humiliations, rapes, tortures and death,

 

negative values: click on the photo to zoom it to full screen (to visualize the full mosaic click here)

but also home, family, friendship, love, the sharing of the same feelings, rebellion, freedom and happiness.

 

positive values: click on the photo to zoom it to full screen (to visualize the full mosaic click here)

They go downtown, where they find light, shops, life.

They live grouped in bands, each having its territory, often either a square or a park, sometimes only a pavement, where at night they meet together to sleep, sharing friendship and protection against the cold temperature and an unfriendly world.

The most of them create a couple, and, around their fifteens, many girls become mothers and often they grow up their children in the streets.

The youngsters are the majority in Guatemala; the children are precious, even if they are not wanted when they are born, and either their mothers or their parents give them the best, showing the most of patience and love even if the circumstances are always uncertain.

The streets are difficult to live, but they have their joys, their moments of friendship and intimacy, their ways of expressing feelings. It is always a victory on resignation, on nonsense, on drugs, violence and prostitution.