In 2010 we opened a new school in Bogota, Colombia, which our friends from Dublin were sponsoring, and having moved both of our new schools (Piura and Tarapoto) to better locations in 2009: in 2010 we turned them over to the Ministry of Education. We placed the Bolivia on standby until the American donors, called Christadelphians (who approached us to go into Bolivia) fulfill their obligation, and in Venezuela our associate and friend Patricia Castillo is facing even more resistance from the Regime than we had anticipated.
In April 2001 our founder arrived in Trujillo, Peru to put into practice certain theories he had been working on designed to solve the growing problem of school age children not receiving education. Throughout Latin America between a fifth and a quarter of all children are not in school.- most but not all of them are qualified Street Children. He did not come unprepared. His first project for at risk children was in 1960, and he started his first NGO in 1976...In Trujillo he went right to work proving and disproving one theorem after another. Sponsor 15 mothers clubs if every mother agreed to let him get their children into school. Open a chain of free soup kitchens for children who agreed to let him put them into school. Use theatre, music and dance to captivate street children and register them into school. Funding came from his own means and those of his family. Soon he was joined by others - teachers, social workers, psychologists, service personnel and lots of university students; some were paid staff, most were volunteers... For three years he and his team struggled against ignorance, poverty, indifference, corruption, mediocre results and what seemed to be a conspiracy to cover up the true number of children being denied their right to an education: (the Government said 96% of children in Peru attend school, UNICEF quoted this figure) - but the Bruce team produced evidence showing that only 76% of the nations children were actually in school. Since the magnitude of the problem is thus concealed, no other institution is focused on getting these particular children educated.
During this period lots of extremely poor children did get fed, clothed, medicated and educated by us: but never enough fast enough for us to believe we had found "The Solution" .. Then in early 2004 we began to implement what later developed into our current, effective solution to locating, recruiting and educating street children. Since then we have implemented this solution throughout Peru, and since 2006 have been introducing it into other Latin American countries.