Salgado Photo No. 7

What do you see when you look at this photo? When I first saw this picture, I saw happy children, maybe at day care while their parents are working high-powered jobs in the city. In fact, that's what I've seen every time I've looked at this picture over the past few months (which has been quite a few times). I thought the picture was just an artful depiction of normal kids who would grow up to have normal lives.

But it's not. Each of the nearly forty children in this picture were abandoned on the streets or given up by parents that could no longer care for them. Four hundred and thirty children lived at the pictured facility, an FEBEM (Foundation for Child Welfare, now called CASA) center. Those four hundred plus children didn't have much chance for normal lives later either. Many of the kids would become street children, roaming São Paulo at night, addicted to crack or sniffing glue. 

10% of children were abandoned for a long time in São Paulo, but approximately when this photo was taken, in 1996, that proportion jumped to 35%. The population shift to the city is partly to blame for this huge abandonment rate. With thousands of people moving to the cities, so many people are seeking to share the same space that resources become scarce. Terrible though it is, families are sometimes forced to choose which mouths to feed when there isn't enough to go around. Children are sometimes forced to go into prostitution or other illegal activities in order to provide for themselves or their families.

Children live on streets in conditions like these all over the world. Even here, in Utah, homelessness rates of children have gone up in the past few years. These homeless children have a high possibility of committing juvenile crimes and then growing up and committing felonies. 

These types of problems that affect what our children will grow up to be, and what the world will be tomorrow, should be at the top of our list of things to solve. These types of problems are difficult to find a solution to; children need to be helped, but they also should be taught so that when they grow up, they don't perpetuate the problem by falling into old habits. I certainly don't have an answer. I only know that there are children that need help.

And what wouldn't you do to help a child?

Bello, Marisol. "Report: Child Homelessness up 33% in 3 Years." USATODAY.COM. USA Today, 13 Dec. 2011. Web. 18 Mar. 2013. 

Lyon, Julia. "Number of Homeless Utah Kids Skyrockets." The Salt Lake Tribune. The Salt Lake Tribune, 14 Oct. 2010. Web. 18 Mar. 2013. 

Salgado, Sebastio. "Landless Voices: The Sights and Voices of Dispossession." Landless Voices: The Sights and Voices of Dispossession - Error. School of Modern Languages, 16 Feb. 2012. Web. 18 Mar. 2013. 

Salgado, Sebastião. Migrations. New York: Aperture. 314-15. Print.

"Street Children." Childhood USA. Childhood USA, n.d. Web. 18 Mar. 2013.