Children who are welcomed into the mission come essentially from the favelas of Barbacena, dangerous peripheries where degradation due to misery creates the worst survival conditions.
Sheet metal roofs, rough bricks or woods and cartoons become walls leaning on the ground between garbage and open sewers, all this in spaces that barely reach 10 square meters where sometimes more than a dozen people are crammed.
The “favelados” are millions, usually immigrants from the countryside who believe in the city’s dream, and then realize that there is no spaces or work for them. Poor and inadequate nutrition, illness, illiteracy, promiscuity, unemployment, family conditions that steal the kids, forced to work from early age, their childhood.
Some of them, despite their young age, were small criminals and thieves (stealing for hunger), some of them still “wear” the indelible signs of the street’s violence, someone else the scars for a violent alcoholized or drug addicted father, others of a hungry mother who sells her own body for a piece of bread under the eyes of her child that will follow the same example.
But there are also those who have been subjected to violence by their father, or who knows who, and even those that for months and years lived of crumbs collected in the garbage. It is important to known that not only to shake the souls but because, whether you agree or not , it is the reality here.
