A large percentage of the children Hola Junior works with come from the slum suburbs of Bogota. They live in broken homes, in deep poverty and violent surroundings, and are subject to physical and psychological abuse. Most of them grow up in large families, under the responsibility of single women whose only source of income is through occasional low-paid jobs.
“In this camp, I felt that there are people who care about us. And this is just a small part of God’s love for me. Although I have problems, God is with me and He will never abandon me.”
“We learned how to get closer to God through worship. We also learned how to be tolerant with everyone and respect the people in our group and our leaders.”
From a mother: “I’m very thankful for all the Hola Junior Club volunteers because they are instruments of blessing to my children. They have always treated my kids with love. I have also learned that the most important thing is to educate my children and give them a foundation based on God’s Word, something the ministry has helped me with a lot.”
Like most Latin American nations, Colombia developed as a segregated society, divided between the traditionally rich families of Spanish descent and the vast majority of poor, indigenous people of mixed races.
This social inequality and the disparity of incomes have fuelled the decades-old civil war. The impoverished population provided a natural constituency for the left-wing insurgents, while the wealthy minority has been supporting the right-wing paramilitaries who sprung up from the vigilante groups set up decades ago by landowners for protection against rebels. All the armed groups have also been involved in drug trafficking, which provides a permanent and lucrative source of funding for the warfare.
Some statistics show that more than 12,000 children are soldiers in the conflict, and over 400,000 lost one or both of their parents in the confrontations. The situation is so dramatic, in fact, that in 2004 a United Nations report called Colombia's 40-year-old civil war the worst humanitarian crisis in the Western Hemispher
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