Often financial success is not a question of talent or even hard work but a question of opportunity. Warren Buffet acknowledged as much when he said "Stick me in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru and we'll see how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil." Without the proper social capital and economic infrastructure in place, in some places, no matter how hard you worked you might still be in poverty. In Guatemala's red zones, for example, where over 50% of the population lives in poverty and gangs dominate the area such that even the police are afraid to enter, youth often have difficulty escaping the crutches of poverty.
Fortunately, Children International's community center is one of the safe havens for children, providing educational services and even job training. For teenagers born into the red zones like Fernando Reyes who are often stigmatized as gang hoodlums, such job training is monumental. Thanks to such training, Fernando now oversees the distribution and stocking of a hardware store all over the city and can help support his seven brothers and sisters.
Thursday news
In Mexico, over half of the population lives in poverty and over 7% of children under the age of 5 are malnourished. To combat this Children International has partnered with a local restaurant association and created a campaign to bolster feeding programs there. In participating restaurants, donation cards encouraged restaurant patrons to donate to CI's nutrition program with the purpose of getting more than 1,500 malnourished children back to healthy weights. Such feeding programs not only provide children nutritional supplements but also monitor their progress and offer workshops that teach parents about nutrition.
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