Vida Plena, Paraguay

Market Children in the playground

The Vida Plena Foundatio day centre provides them with breakfast or an afternoon snack and help with their homework. The children also have access to games and can do other activities with the day centre director and staff, two of whom, Benita and Daily, were trained by Lailah Armstrong in the International Child Development Programme (ICDP) methodology in 2001. The other staff members are receiving ongoing training in weekly sessions. “The aim is to offer these children more learning opportunities than they get at their homes and at school, as standards in Paraguayan public schools are extremely poor, especially concerning human relations,” explains Benita.

ICDP is central to Vida Plena’s philosophy and way of working. The Foundation has been using the programme for the past 7 years. Before this, Vida Plena had already been running a kindergarten based on a renewed Montessori Method, which worked very well for the children - but not with parents. ICDP proved to be the right method to sensitize parents and other caregivers.

Vida Plena´s work does not stop at the Abasto, however. The Foundation is  a member of the Paraguayan Child Protection Network, and as such participated in the civil society report to the Committee of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 2008.

Foundation activities with the market community

And for the past three months, the project has been helping implement a pilot programme run by the National Government´s Department for Children and Teenagers (Secretaría Nacional de la Niñez y la Adolescencia) whose aim is to help several children’s homes in Paraguay comply with the laws around child protection and child development. Since 2002, Paraguay actually has some very progressive legislation on child care/protection, based on the Convention on the Rights of the Child, but unfortunately the law is not always properly enforced.

In April 2009, the Department for Children and Teenagers carried out a comprehensive survey in order to evaluate children’s homes throughout the country. The result was that several were closed down for not reaching basic standards of infrastructure, hygiene or other criteria. Others have agreed to receive support from organizations like Vida Plena in order to help them improve their practice and comply more fully with the law ... What distinguishes the work of Vida Plena from that of its peers participating in the pilot, is that Benita and Silverio insisted on being able to carry out ICDP training with the children’s home staff as an integral and essential part of the programme. Only by doing this would they be able to ensure that the children living in the homes would get adequate care and attention.

Contact:
Benita Elizabeth Gavilan,
vidaplena@tigo.com.py