September 2008

Pastoral Team News
(Translated by Joe Pirtle - Companeros Moderator)

Greetings from the Pastoral Team

Fear: Situation of the children and youth in Berlin.

General data: In El Salvador we have a law of protection and the "Statement of the Rights of the Children and girls", but the reality is that the country determines the living conditions. In our country the majority of the people is of poor class, between the sectors of laborers and rural. In this context other social problems are originated that affect the children and young, as the family disintegration, lack of education and illicit works that induce them to drug addiction and/or prostitution. Among the damages that the children suffer are:

1- Violence of the family

2- Abandonment of the parents or mothers

3- Work of risk

4- Sex Abuse and prostitution (average of 12 years)

5- Vagrancy and drug addiction

6- Begging

Many children and girls work to help the economic support of the family and they do not have time for play. Their toys are the tools of work and their areas of recreation are the streets, the markets or the agricultural fields. Read more...

Reprinted with permission of the National Catholic Reporter

Why El Salvador Matters

By NCR Staff
Publication date: June 27, 2008
Section: C. Editorials

In 1981, only weeks into the first term of Ronald Reagan, Secretary of State Alexander Haig addressed the president’s obsession with fighting communism by assuring Reagan that El Salvador is “one we can win.”

Nearly 30 years later, as El Salvador approaches crucial national elections, it remains one of history’s tragic ironies that the fate of this tiny Central American nation may still hang on what we mean by an American victory there.

Peace accords in 1992 ended a brutal 12-year civil war that killed 75,000 people, mostly civilians. El Salvador might have emerged to become what nature had blessed it to be -- a tropical paradise -- and what real friendship with the United States could have helped it become -- a model for development and democracy. Read more...

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