Youth Transformation

On a recent Friday afternoon, a dozen young men and women gathered in a brightly-painted hall filled with ping-pong tables, a foosball table, and cushy sofas. The scene resembled one you might see in thousands of college dorm basements in the United States—except that the landscape outside the windows was filled with the small cement-block and wooden homes typical of Tegucigalpa's poor outskirt settlements, and the young men and women were not college students but rather residents of one of the poorest, most crime-ridden pockets of Nueva Suyapa, one of the poorer, more dangerous neighborhoods in Honduras' capital city.

Both the room itself and the spirited young people gathered in it are testaments to the success that the AJS-supported Youth Transformation project has had in its relatively short existence.

The young people gathered in the room are part of a group started with AJS support one year ago, called Jóvenes Marcando Diferencia , Spanish for “Youth Making a Difference.” Over the last year, around fifty young men and women from Nueva Suyapa have participated in numerous leadership-training workshops supported by AJS, and are now putting those trainings into practice.

These motivated young people have done most of the manual labor involved in preparing the recreation room, and will be in charge of running it when it opens to the public next month. They have organized soccer tournaments and a community festival and concert that drew in hundreds of neighbors. On the Friday afternoon in question, they were planning a series of presentations on basic safety to be given in local elementary schools, in the wake of a recent rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl from the neighborhood.

“These youth are learning that they really do have the ability to change their community,” says Nahún, the AJS project staff member in charge of youth transformation. “Young people are often looked down on, or even suspected of being delinquents. So showing the youth and other community members all the good they can do is really a way of doing justice.”

“Prevention work is very important,” says Luís, a lawyer who works for the AJS-supported Peace & Justice project, which provides legal and investigative aid to poor victims of violent crime. “We can make a neighborhood safer and healthier for a certain amount of time by prosecuting people who are robbing, killing, or raping others. But children and young people in these neighborhoods will become violent as they get older unless they are given more opportunities to grow and contribute positively to the community.”

Recently AJS-supported youth transformation efforts have expanded to Villa Nueva and Flor del Campo, two other poor neighborhoods where other AJS-supported projects already have a presence. In August participants from all three neighborhoods went on a weekend retreat to a camp in the mountains.

“Getting to know youths from other neighborhoods who want to improve their surroundings just like we do was exciting,” says Nilson Reyes, one of the youths from Nueva Suyapa.

“We are going to change this neighborhood,” says Wilson Andino, another member of the group from Nueva Suyapa. The confidence in his voice is enough to make you believe that he and his fellow young people really will change Nueva Suyapa into a safer, healthier, more just place to live.

The Association for a More Just Society (AJS) oversees and funds initiatives carried out by Honduran partner organization la Asociación para una Sociedad más Justa (ASJ). AJS is a US-registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so all donations to AJS are tax-deductible for US taxpayers.