Dolorita weaves strands of blue and red yarn together into bracelets she gives as presents.

SAN MARCOS, Nicaragua --- Dolorita rubs her index finger back and forth across a two-inch-long, pencil-thick scar just above her forehead. It still hurts, she says, tears streaming from brown eyes that look everywhere but at those to whom she is talking.

One night a few years ago when her mother was especially drunk, Dolorita’s mom beat her badly, smacking her around the face and striking her on the top of her head with a stick. Dolorita, now 11, typically suffered more because she tried to protect her younger siblings from the beatings. But this time, Dolorita says she was really afraid because she was bleeding from her head and face. Her mother blamed her as the reason she didn’t have a husband and declared Dolorita didn’t deserve to be her daughter. The blows caused the mark on her scalp and a scar on her heart.

She would tell me a lot of different things,” Dolorita says, “and she would treat me bad.”

Dolorita and her three younger sisters are among 26 girls now living in a shelter called Yahoska – a place of protection and opportunity for abused and abandoned girls who would otherwise lack both. Yahoska – pronounced Jah-ose-kah – was started five years ago specifically for girls by its parent association, Los Quinchos, the first nongovernmental organization to care and advocate for Nicaragua’s street children.

At Los Quinchos, Dolorita says, “They don’t mistreat me or abuse me.”

Dolorita knows she had a birthday recently but doesn’t remember the date. She had never attended school before she came to Yahoska 10 months ago. Instead, she cooked the family’s meals, cleaned the house, and minded her brothers and sisters. In her navy pleated public school uniform skirt and white blouse, a teal-and-blue Powerpuff Girls backpack slung over her shoulders, she stands a head or more taller than most of the other girls in her first-grade class. While a group kneels on the sidewalk playing with a toy dollhouse, Dolorita keeps mostly to herself as she waits outside the classroom for the teacher. She clutches a stiff sheet of white paper – the project she created for her Spanish class. It depicts a living room, with a sofa, two chairs and two tables made from matchbooks she covered in bright multicolored wrapping paper. The teacher only had to demonstrate how to do it once, Dolorita says proudly, and she is anxious to show it to her.

Dolorita says she generally likes school. But that wasn’t always so. When she first came to Yahoska, she was too sad to go.

“I didn’t like to go to class because I was crying all the time,” she says. But it got better.

“I was thinking that my mom didn’t know how to write and read, so I wouldn’t like to be like my mom. She would tell me I was worthless, that I wasn’t good for anything,” Dolorita says in nearly a whisper. “So I wanted to show her I wasn’t worthless, and that I could go and do something.”

The war between the Sandinistas and the U.S.-backed contras may be long over in Nicaragua, but the country is losing the battle for its future. It is a fight against poverty, unemployment, alcohol abuse and family turmoil that is leaving the country’s next generation – and the nation by extension – with grim prospects. But Los Quinchos and Yahoska are fighting for the country’s future, grappling for the fates of its abused, neglected and exploited boys and girls.

“Los Quinchos is like a little drop of water and it’s getting bigger,” says Zelinda Roccia, the project’s founder and director, from her cramped, dark office at its main cultural center in San Marcos, in the southeastern department of Carazo.

Not only do more than 80 percent of Nicaragua’s 5.4 million residents live on less than $1 a day, but it is a country where more than half are under 18, and in which one in three children suffers some degree of chronic malnutrition. It is the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and as many as 12 percent of its kids work or live on the streets.

Roccia, an Italian woman whom Dolorita and the other Yahoskas call mamita, visited Nicaragua after the war to see how the new government was working and was terribly affected by all the children she saw in the street. She’d been to Nicaragua before in the 1980s and hadn’t seen that. But in 1991 she saw all the kids – little kids inhaling glue, sick, cleaning windshields, begging on the streets, beaten.

“These are kids that have been living on the streets or have been rejected all their lives,” and she felt she had to do something, she says. “The government only takes care of other interests, not the children.”

Back then, Los Quinchos was the only group protecting Nicaragua’s street kids, she says. Now the project itself has grown to include programs in numerous cities, and other organizations also arrived to help.

Driven by the motto “¡Nunca más un niño en la calle!” which means “never more a child on the street,” Los Quinchos supports 300 boys and girls, including the 26 girls at Yahoska. The association’s other programs include a farm for boys, also in San Marcos; a center in Granada for teenage boys going to high school or trade school; an assistance center in Posoltega that serves 100 children and teenage survivors of Hurricane Mitch; and a “filter” house in Managua, where boys from the street must spend six months off drugs and in school before being integrated with those in the other programs.

“What we do is to give them back their childhood – a childhood they didn’t have before,” says Carlos Vidal Ramos Paladino, co-founder and co-director of Los Quinchos. “So we say it’s a change from hell to paradise.”

Los Quinchos also provides meals to about 65 street children – most of whom are hooked on shoemaker’s glue they sniff all day long from baby-food jars – living in a former garden park in Managua called El Parque de Ciudad Jardin. A Los Quinchos street coordinator named Francisco Quant visits and works with these kids, bringing them to the library, talking to them, and explaining the Los Quinchos programs. He also calls on some 200 families living in a barrio in Nicaragua’s largest landfill, the Chureca. Los Quinchos is building a kitchen and dining area on one of the dump’s massive garbage hills, where it will feed some of the kids living and working there to collect plastic, cans, glass and other trash to make money.

Children in Los Quinchos’ programs must attend school, remain free of drugs and alcohol, and not become pregnant. Social teachers, social workers, a psychologist, administrators and volunteers look after the kid’s needs. There are possibilities and a future, but Quant says too many will never escape from the street or the glue and into the program.

Unlike some other protection agencies in Nicaragua, Los Quinchos doesn’t confine its kids. “It’s not a closed place we have here. It’s open,” Paladino says, spreading his hands and arms out in front of him. “These kids need to know what society is like. We don’t want them to see just walls and that they cannot go out; we want them to feel free. And they feel that this is their present and their future.”

Even with all of their own needs, the kids of Los Quinchos engage in broader issues. Despite, and perhaps because of, the sadness and situations they have faced in their own lives, they are sensitive to the needs of others, and the issues confronting their nation and the world, Paladino says. For example, boys from the Grenada program participated in all of Nicaragua’s major protests against the war in Iraq. They demonstrated alone in front of the U.S. Embassy in Managua, and released publicly a statement expressing their solidarity with the 4.5 million Iraqi children suffering in the war. More recently, girls from Yahoska and boys from several of the other Los Quinchos programs protested in Managua against a proposal to privatize the country’s water services.

Funded almost entirely by donations from groups and individuals outside of Nicaragua, particularly in Italy but also in the United States and elsewhere, Los Quinchos originally aided both boys and girls. The mix didn’t work well though, so for several years it served mainly boys. But in 1999, when the association was able to pull together enough money to build a place for girls, Yahoska was born.

It costs about $300,000 a year to fund Los Quinchos’ basic needs, says Paladino. That amount wasn’t available this year, so they are doing the best they can with the $180,000 they were budgeted. The rest they’ll try to get from their “angels,” individuals who send money to fix a roof, buy a bunk bed or purchase school supplies for their distantly “adopted” children.

“We know that the future of the girls is not in the stars,” Paladino says, “it’s in their backpacks from school.”

Yahoska

The road to Yahoska is a rough one. The emotional paths leading the girls here are similar: winding back and forth, scarred with deep ruts and scattered with waste. The compound is surrounded by 8-foot-high cement block walls and a white metal chained gate – daily reminders of the girls’ separation from their families and their need for protection.

But it doesn’t take long to realize that Yahoska isn’t a place. It isn’t the buildings where the girls crowd together four or more to a room in bunk beds, the brightly muraled walls or the open-air roofed patio where they eat their meals wrapped in plastic when it rains. Yahoska is the girls who live here; the warmth and openness they show despite all they have endured in their short lives. Without hesitation, they rush to greet strangers who look different and speak words they don’t understand, bestowing unsolicited hugs and kisses on the cheek.

“Their (kids’) spirit is the thing that is the most amazing to me – that they haven’t been broken, that they’re willing and able to trust people, willing and able to open up. The amount of love is incredible,” says Jennifer Tee, a Seattle, Wash., volunteer from ProNica, a U.S.-based Quaker organization.

“The program instills confidence and self worth, so then in the future if any of them are put in a situation where they don’t like what’s happening to them, they may feel like they deserve better, and have the opportunity to defend themselves or to create a different life for themselves. That seems to be the backbone of it all,” says Tee, a recently arrived master’s student from the School for International Training in Vermont, who will spend the next five months or so working with the Yahoskas and the boys at the Managua filter house.

Up at 4:30 a.m., the girls begin their packed days, washing themselves out in the open dressed in light undergarments, pouring water over themselves with a pail they use to scoop it from a barrel. School starts at 7. At noon they return for lunch to Yahoska – a common Nicaraguan girls’ name and also of a northern river – after which they undertake chores, recreational activities and school work. After dinner at 6, the teachers read the girls stories or they watch a little TV before going to bed by 8 or so.

Those closest to the girls say they faced dubious futures had they remained in the circumstances from which they came – violence and beatings, drugs, forced labor, prostitution. Most would not be going to school, and many would be compelled to beg or sell plastic baggies of water, tortillas or candies on the street, and confront the inherent dangers.

“It’s a life without a future,” says Cora Emma Silva Alfaro, one of Yahoska’s teachers. “What they would wait for is death – death at a young age.”

The Teachers

Cora Emma stands at the gate to Yahoska, her arms draped around 8-year-old Seina’s neck. Not even a head taller, Cora Emma’s chin and mouth rest against the back of the girl’s shiny, dark hair. Dolorita strides through the gate and around to the back end of an old, rusty pickup parked outside. She hops over the tailgate and into the back, joining a group of 14 girls already lining the bed’s edges. They comprise Yahoska’s soccer squad on the way to an awards ceremony.

At all times, a “teacher” – what they call social teachers – accompany the girls, who range in age from 5 to 15. While Cora Emma remains behind with those left at Yahoska, Jazmina Mejia travels to the gathering with them – though she rides in the cab with the driver.

Cora Emma, once a public elementary school teacher, can’t help but worry whenever the Yahoskas head off. She is haunted by the murder of one of the girls with whom she worked several years ago in Managua. The girl was living on the street and sleeping in one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods in the Oriental Market, said to be the largest in Central America.

“They burned her with matches until she died,” Cora Emma says, crying. “That scene would just always be in my mind – to see the little girls in the market by themselves at night exposed to so many horrible things like rape, even death.” Now, when the Yahoskas go out she says she frets “that all those bad things will happen to them.”

Cora Emma is one of six teachers at Yahoska caring for the girls seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and among the 30 total working at the Los Quinchos programs. More like moms, the teachers basically raise the children – they help them get ready for school in the morning and for bed at night, work with them on their homework, mediate arguments and act as role models. They teach them to count, to read, to write; ensure they do their chores; play and sing with them; and talk to them when they’re sad.

“What we provide to the girls here is a family environment,” says Cora Emma. “We are not their real mothers, but we let them know that we love them and we care about them as if we were their real moms, so they have a normal life that any girl would have with all the normal activities that a home would have.”

Other women cook the 90 meals a day in a room no bigger than a kitchen in an average American apartment. They cut the vegetables and meat by hand and heat them on a stove fueled by firewood. Others scrub the girls’ clothes in a cement tub, hauling the water in from a well and hanging the wet garments on ropes strung between trees and buildings. When there is money available, a psychologist helps the girls work through some of their trauma and sadness, and a social worker assists getting them back into society. A nurse used to care for them, but there is no money for one right now.

“You have to be tolerant, you have to have understanding, accept the girls the way they are, give them a love that they can see and feel so they can do the same to others,” Cora Emma says. “Because if we don’t give them this real love, what are they going to be able to give to others? They come from families and homes where they don’t see this; they have never had a family relationship.”

That lesson – and that education is of paramount importance – provides perhaps the most vital keys to each of these girl’s futures, the teachers and administrators say, and likely to the country’s prospects as well.

“If they live under a roof or in a place where they see violence, when they’re adults they’re going to follow that model, and they’re going to treat their kids the same way they were treated with all that violence, and the next generation is going to be the same,” teacher Maria Antonieta Aburto says from her modest home one morning before work. “It’s like a chain.”

In Nicaragua’s paternalistic, machismo society, dominated by men who still believe women serve only one purpose and that girls have no right to an education, the program for girls may exert the greatest impact on the nation.

“Our objective is that they (girls) go back to society to be useful to themselves, and also to the country and society in general and not be a burden to anyone,” Cora Emma says.

Los Quinchos’ teachers earn just $100 a month. The association knows they deserve more and would like to raise their salaries, but it’s impossible, says Paladino.

Here, says Cora Emma, “We work for love.”

The government sees it differently

While the objectives of Los Quinchos and the Nicaraguan government are the same – to reduce violence and rebuild the nation’s families – that’s essentially where the accord between the groups ends. And despite its heavily financed interest in Nicaragua in the ‘80s, the U.S. government – and others – have largely pulled out of the country, leaving it to deal primarily alone with a growing rage among its people fueled by poverty and unemployment so severe they aim their anger at their children.

The problems are better, says Lila Eunice Zapata, a technician in family attention for the Nicaraguan government’s Ministry of Family, which oversees the county’s 80 or so child-protection organizations. “Mucho, mucho, mucho” better, says Zapata, who has worked for 21 years for the ministry’s Jinotepe office. She and four other technicians work in the office, which supervises Los Quinchos and the Carazo department’s five other child protection organizations, serving nearly 600 children. The technicians investigate not only the centers to verify they are treating the kids right, providing them proper food and ensuring they go to school, but also the complaints of parents who say they can no longer cope with or care for their children.

“It’s getting worse,” Roccia says about the level of physical and sexual abuse. That’s one of the reasons they started the girls program. She says a news program reported recently there were “thousands and thousands” of cases of sexual abuse alone.

The organizations also maintain very different ideas about what’s in the best interest of the children they assist.

The ministry’s first rule, Zapata says, tapping her fingers repeatedly on the blue cover of a ½-inch-thick book titled “Centros de proteccion en Nicaragua,” is that “the center is not a solution.” It is a statement she repeats several times during the course of a 45-minute conversation.

“The process is not working” because the kids end up staying longer at one center than the six-month maximum, she says. A child who has more than one problem may need to move to another center for an additional six months, but they shouldn’t be growing up at the centers, which is what is happening.

“The purpose of the centers is not to raise the kids. The kids don’t belong to the centers. They have to go home to their families.” And the problem, she says, is because some organizations “don’t accept the norms of the Ministry of Family.”

Not surprising, Paladino and Roccia say the ministry isn’t doing all it can to help the country’s next generation. And Paladino, who himself was forced to work on the street as a child and suffer its violence, wonders how it’s possible to resolve in six short months the massive issues confronting these kids at home, particularly when their parents don’t want them there or have abandoned them altogether.

These children need stability and love, Paladino says, and it doesn’t help to put them back into the same bad situations from which they came, or to switch them from center to center.

“What they (ministry) should do is get them out of that life. The kids suffer and we need to solve that problem immediately,” he says. “We don’t care if they give us authorization or not; what we care about is that the kids are safe. They (ministry) don’t give us any help, they just come here with their bureaucracy.”

For the last two years, the ministry has funded Los Quinchos with 3,000 cordobas a month – about $187 – to care for its 300-plus children.

“Do you know why these kids aren’t a priority?” he asks. “Because they don’t vote.”

Yahoska’s little women

Following Jennifer’s lead, a group of Yahoska’s little women begin to sing, clapping their hands and slapping themselves on the legs.

“Flea. Flea Fly. Flea Fly Flow. Kumala, kumala, kumala vista...” they sing, each verse faster than the last, and the clapping and slapping growing increasingly feverish. It isn’t long before many of the words are slurred, but even Yahoska’s youngest, 5-year-old Alazne, whose name means miracle, can manage to get out the “ah ha, ah ha.”

Seina, who was raped by a neighbor and sent away to Yahoska by her mother, joins in, her usually sad eyes glowing with delight. Marta, who is often by herself, stands away from the group watching. She lived with her mother, a prostitute, in a section of the Oriental Market called “death’s dead-end,” beaten and abused until the woman disappeared altogether one day. Her father couldn’t work and take care of Marta. Several girls hear the song and run from their rooms, flocking to the group lining the picnic table benches. Dolorita also chimes in enthusiastically, giggling with glee.

Dolorita says she enjoys living at Yahoska “more or less.” She’s glad to be back living with her three younger sisters – Sophia, 10, Inez, 9, and Pabla, 8 – whom she cared for until they came to Yahoska about three years ago. They were removed from the home at their mother’s request after a Ministry of Family inspection. Dolorita first came to Yahoska about two years ago, but she didn’t last long before she returned home. She thought her mom needed her, teacher Antonieta says. The girls often worry their families need them, but their families often require the girls for things that aren’t good for them, she says.

In total, Dolorita and six siblings live at Los Quinchos: the four girls, a 13-year-old brother at the farm in San Marcos, and two brothers at the filter house in Managua, the youngest of whom is 5. There are three younger kids still at home, the teachers say, and Dolorita’s mother keeps having more.

It has been tough for Dolorita to be a kid again after acting as the mother in her own home, but she’s learning. And Dolorita says she feels safer and happier since she came to Yahoska. Still, something is missing.

Barely audible, she says, “I want to be back with my mom.”

NOTE: The girls’ names have been changed to protect their identities.