"Kalimán en Jerico" - Àngel Burgas

As we are working  and learning how important are human rights, today I would like to talk about a book that I recently read: “Kaliman en Jerico”. The author of this book is Angle Burgas, from Figueres.

In August 2011, Angel Burgas travel to Medellín and there, he visited the Fundacion Faro, in Jericó, where the boys of the street are treated to join the society. Most of them get it and some of them, then, became volunteers to help others boys in the same situation as they to get out of this kind of life.

Burgàs wanted to explain the stories of this young boys as a denouncement to our western mentality and eyes and as a help from this side of the world that had become in a bitter novel.

In the story, Àngel transfigure in Santiago, a basketball coach that travel to Medellín with a mission: “I came to Medellín looking for Adrián and I met Nahum, Hernán Darío, Jonathan,  Víctor Manuel, Fernando, Juan Esteban, Rubén Darío, Wilinton, Douglas, José Daniel, Ángel Antonio, Julio and Fabio. In Barcelona I am Santiago, but here at the Foundacion Faro in Jericho, I am Kalimán*, the hero who hear the real stories about boys injured, abused, outcasts of the good life. You cannot erase what lived, and learn to walk again is not an easy task. But “los pelaos” of Faro are also Kalimanes, they have left the street, the drugs and the bad life to start looking to the future with hope. For all of them, Kalimán never gives up.”

“Los pelaos” are children who survive or barelysurvive on the streets of Colombia immersed in the world of crime, prostitution and drugs. It’s hard to explain the stories of this guys, sometimes, of an unimaginable cruelty and brutality, without something breaks inside you because the stories that Àngel tells to us are as real as the boys that star in, what makes the story more hard because at the end, you realize that even the things that all these boys have done and have lived, they are just kids not very different from us at this ages, with so short live and, at once, so long full of hardships, drugs and violence: they only want what all boys of these ages want, a PSP, be an astronaut or play in Barça. The only difference is that they don’t have family or anyone who take care of them so they have had to make living in the streets of Colombia stealing, selling drugs, working with mafias and other criminal organizations and even, killing. For this, although Santiago is seen as a hero for all the boys of Faro, the character leaves clear from the beginning that this boys are the real heroes.

With this book we are able to see how a lot of children in Colombia, Mexico and other cities live. Most of them don’t have family so they have to make living on the street, doing and seeing things that are so far from what correspond to any child of this ages: instead of play football, going to school or going to the park with their parents, this boys are selling drugs (and in some cases, consuming it), are stealing and in some extreme cases, they are members of criminal organizations that required them to torture and kill.

This is a big injustice: all child deserve an infancy without worries and nowadays, there are a lot of kids without this right so is laudable the work of many organization as Faro that is working for remove children from the streets and try to give the childhood that they lost or without going further, get that boy stay away from this life is an achievement

*Kaliman is a comic hero born at the beginnings of the sixties in Mexico and that nowadays, is famous throughout south America. In the book, Kaliman is also the name that the guys of Faro give to Santiago, seeing him as a hero.