Is it hard working with street children, especially from another culture?
Smith: It is enormously difficult. Probably the street children in Brazil would be more like children in the United State in terms of their hardness. The more developed cultures just make different characteristics come forward. In Ethiopia, because it is very much a developing society where family is so highly valued, in times of starvation the family would die and give the children the last morsel of food and the children actually grew up with hope. Sometimes that hope was the only thing that kept them alive. In Brazil, we sometimes see children dying simply because they don’t have hope. They lost hope because of abuse, the father abandoning the family, and the mother turning to prostitution and all those kind of factors. So it is enormously difficult to work with these children. When we started our first year we brought in our first group of 35 kids and every one of them ran away. That has been the experience of many people who have tried to work with these kids. That is why frankly
