Former Child Soldiers Wear Don Bosco's Uniform

Former Child Soldiers Wear
Don Bosco’s Uniform

(ANS – Cali, Colombia – October 20, 2021) – Colombia’s guerrilla warfare began in 1952 and has caused over 300,000 deaths, while at the same time fueling the growth of powerful drug cartels. At the Don Bosco Center in Cali, however, young people who have known nothing but guerrillas and guerrilla warfare are welcomed and accompanied on their path toward rehabilitation.

Upon their arrival at the Salesian house in Cali, the young ex-guerrillas are given the uniform and tools that correspond to the profession they have chosen to learn. This is because they always wore uniforms when they belonged to one of the armed groups which are still blocking the peace process in Colombia. Already from the age of 7-8, they were torn from their families and enrolled in the various guerrilla factions: forced to shoot, to throw bombs, to become servants of “officers” or, worse still, sexual slaves.

The Salesians have been running a specific facility to accommodate these young people for about 20 years now. Youngsters who arrive are those who have been practically deprived of their own identity and self-esteem and have lost their trust in others.

At the Salesian center, however, together with the clothes for the workshops and schoolbooks, they also receive the recognition of their personal identity and pass from slavery to freedom. Educators insist on their future, to free their memory and give them back their soul. How to restore the faith lost during the years spent in the bush without making them feel guilty? How to bring them closer to God without denying the trauma left by the crimes, when they had to trample their conscience in order not to go mad? The decisive challenge is: to forgive what has been done to them, and to forgive themselves. It is something that can be done  through the experience of loving-kindness, the one that Don Bosco always wanted to transmit to young people.

The young people of Cali find a team of professionals who help them to establish a plan of studies and to choose a profession. Five Salesians are very concretely involved in supporting 30 teenagers. The workshops serve as the cornerstone of youth development – for learning safety regulations, for handling machines and products, and for learning concrete skills for their future. The specializations offered are paths to their career as electrician, industrial mechanic, automobile repair technician, cook, tailor, beautician, welder, computer operator, accountant, librarian, commercial secretary, etc., And all of these are accompanied also by their inner search for their personal qualities and the integral development of each individual.

For security reasons, the lives of these young people are lived almost exclusively within the center. Their names have not been deleted from the lists held by the guerrilla leaders, who are always ready to absorb them into service or to take revenge. Young people leave only accompanied by their educators and according to a program compatible with the processes developed internally.

It is necessary to have them to re-adapt, to get used to free relations again, to sharing meals and free time, and gradually to regain the sense and the rules of coexistence.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, they had to give up even small and limited movements into the city. But they made themselves useful by converting part of their activities to the production of masks: a way to rehabilitate themselves as citizens.