Children in Orphanages

Someone asked me to explain more about orphans in Peru. A fair number of these kids living in orphanages are not true orphans, in the sense that the still have one or both parents living. Many of the kids in San Juan de Dios are have single mothers, often from rural areas surrounding Puno, who have been widowed or abandoned by their husbands with several young children. Some have disabled fathers. Many children go to the orphanage because their parents cannot support them. When I was there parents would visit their children, bring them bags of yogurt or juice, and help wash clothes, usually once every few weeks, depending on the distance. Sometimes the kids in the orphanage have little brothers or sisters that are still living at home.


Many of the families considered this a temporary arrangement when I first met them. However now, two years later, at least five of the kids who have families living outside of Puno and four who have living families in more rural areas are still in the same situation, living in an orphanage because their parents are poor. As Father’s Day approaches we have helped them make Father´s Day cards. There are some who don’t have fathers, mothers or any close family, true orphans, and they are making cards for the workers at the home. However a fair number of the kids have family members, and they make Fathers Day cards for parents who they have been separated from by poverty.


Class discrimination runs deep here. Class is tied in with skin color, money, education and family. The kids at orphanages get an education but other than that they are at the bottom of the class pyramid. They are mostly dark-skinned, almost all from very poor families or have no family at all. Despite the emphasis on learning practical skills (shoemaking, pharmacy, tailoring, computer skills, carpentry and coffin making, raising animals, cooking, farming…) they have trouble getting good jobs when they leave the home. In general people are mistrustful of them simply because they are from an orphanage. I have heard people say they are bound to grow up “bad” or that they are delinquents, or accuse of being thieves or a bad influence on other children for no reason other than that they live in the orphanage.


Microfinance gives me hope that maybe if the mothers or fathers of these children receive help from a microfinance institution they could reunite their families. Or that microfinance might enable other mothers and fathers to never have to give up their children for lack of money. The fact that poverty can have similar effects to the death of a child’s parents was shocking to me and I hope that our work with microfinance this summer may prevent one child from being “orphaned” or allow one child to return to his or her parents.

Jessie