During the first week of December we will be focusing our fundraising efforts on raising funds to help children who live in the streets of Guatemala and Honduras in Central America.

It is very hard for us to imagine what life is like for a child who has chosen to live on the streets or has been forced into street life by adults who are supposed to care for them.  Most children on the streets are runaways from abuse and see the streets as a better option than being with their family.  Very few chose the streets because of its independence and the lure of drugs.

Street kids are very strong; you have to be to endure hunger, cold, physical and sexual abuse, boredom and the way the body begins to respond to such a life.  The average life expectancy of a street child is just four years!

These two girls live on the streets of Guatemala City!  When Duncan took this photo he didn’t realise that both these girls, aged 5 and 7, were living on the streets.  When he discovered that they spend 1-2 nights a week sleeping with their mum and then spend the rest of the time sleeping near the bus terminal in zone 4 of the city he found it very hard to deal with despite years of helping street kids.  Duncan said ‘nothing in life prepares you enough to deal with situations like this.  As a parent you just want to scoop them up and bring them home’.

Street Kids Direct’s founder and Director is Duncan Dyason.  He has been working with street kids in Latin America for nearly 20 years.  Duncan, his wife Jenni and daughter Katelyn, moved to Guatemala in 1991 and began to work on the streets.  Duncan’s passion for street work takes him back to Guatemala and neighbouring Honduras about three times a year.

The money we raise during Radio Christmas will go DIRECTLY to help street kids.

Street Kids Direct is helping to support a consortium of agencies that work directly with street kids and is working hard to implement an nationally and internationally recognised Diploma for street workers that will both validate the street worker as well as their work and hopefully draw more professionals and volunteers into this work.

The charity will also respond to the work Duncan does on the streets when out in Guatemala and Honduras.  During one of his trips to the streets Duncan and a volunteer team came across two boys playing by a cardboard box.  'One of the boys was ‘high’ on glue and the other boy told us that inside the box was a baby!', Duncan said.  He added 'we pepped inside the box and discovered a 15-day-old baby who had been abandoned by its mother that afternoon'.

The baby was taken to the hospital and was surprisingly was found to be in fairly good health.  After a night in hospital the baby was taken by Duncan and Pastor Jorge Pinto to the magistrate’s court where he had to be registered as an abandoned baby.  After waiting, what seemed to Duncan like hours, the clerk passed on the papers and said the judge had to make a decision about what to name the baby and decided to call him Duncan! 

Baby Duncan is now four years of age and this photo was taken recently of the two Duncans.

Your donation will help us reach more kids on the streets like baby Duncan and provide them with the option to leave the streets and start a new life.  Please give generously as every penny can change a life.