Pedro Pablo Ramos Sastoque

In Bogotá, Colombia, idle teenage refugees, torn from their homes in the provinces and transported to the poorest city slums, are joining violent street gangs. Pedro Pablo Ramos has created a successful education program, using people from the local community as teachers, to keep teens off the streets and out of gangs.

Pedro has created a comprehensive learning program tailored for refugee teenagers coming into the slums of Bogotá, offering them a realistic alternative to gangs, drugs, and violence. Pedro’s classes are simple and fun, similar to those offered by many other teen-rescue programs that once operated in these neighborhoods. However, Pedro’s classes—a mix of theater classes, job training, and leadership seminars—are taught by people from the local community rather than outside professional teachers. As part of their coursework, these community teachers assign their students projects requiring extensive interaction with the community. The teens clean garbage from the streets, open new pizza parlors, and generally get to know their new neighbors in Bogotá. Locals begin to see the teens not as dangerous gangsters bent on tearing the neighborhood apart but as upstanding citizens. At the same time, as teens have daily contact with long-time residents, they begin to feel connected to the community, making them less likely to join the gangs that seek to harm that community.

For decades, war and violence tore apart the Colombian countryside, forcing over two million rural Colombians to flee from their homes and seek refuge in sprawling city slums. Unemployment in these areas is nearly 25 percent for those under 29 years of age, a rate 50 percent higher than the average of Colombia, which is already the second worst in all of Latin America.

Forty-six percent of these refugees are under fifteen years old, easy prey for the organized gangs that run the slums. With no foreseeable job prospects, thousands of teens join gangs as the only alternative to a life of poverty. Gangs introduce them to drugs, induct them into guerrilla groups, and run terror campaigns against the local community. Displaced and rootless, these teens have no connections to the neighborhood and no qualms about terrorizing the locals.

In the past, educational programs meant to keep teens out of gangs failed because the promise of distant, future benefits of education couldn’t overcome the lure of gang membership with its immediate payoffs. Because these programs never integrated refugee teens into local society, there was no reason for these teens to worry about how their behavior affected their neighbors.

Pedro has developed a three-year learning program to train youth and integrate them into the community. People from within the community teach the classes, at first catering to the interests of the students with art, dancing, singing, and acting lessons. The early sessions may be fun and games, but gradually teachers begin to raise social issues in front of their classes. Teachers encourage students to really think about their role in the community and imagine class activities that would allow the students to have a positive impact on society—activities like picking up street litter or building new recreational parks. Teachers also assign each student a local mentor from the community, someone who can support and guide the student and make them feel welcome in the city.

As local residents see the kids that they once feared as vicious hoodlums now hard at work to improve the community, their distrust of refugee teens diminishes. The community comes to see every socially conscious teen as “one of its own,” someone to be mentored and nurtured. Some residents even protect Pedro’s teens from “social cleansing,” murder sprees conducted by gangs against unaffiliated teens, and help them find jobs to keep them from falling into gang life. No longer just refugees, the teens eventually come to be treated as true, integrated members of the community.

Pedro has already convinced the best government training institute, a major university, and numerous artists to offer classes for Ciudad Bolivar youngsters according to Pedro’s model. The Cooperative University now offers diplomas for successful completion of Pedro’s classes. By working with these institutions, Pedro has been able to train 1,500 youth on a total budget of US$150,000 per year. In addition, the program employs 10,000 community teachers and mentors from around the region, five of whom have already started their own schools following Pedro’s model.

As a result of Pedro’s program, refugee teenagers can avoid gangs and get a quality education while also becoming valuable integrated community members. Some who finish school continue on to receive a university education; others create jobs by starting new businesses in the community.

Eight different cities from around Colombia have asked Pedro to start similar programs in their refugee communities. Pedro’s ideas are easily replicable, since the major alliance partners already exist in these other cities, and a large part of the funding would come from each city’s council budget. Graduating students who want to give something back to the community are ready and willing to start new schools in 20 different locations as soon as Pedro has consolidated and systematized the entire approach.

Pedro grew up in a major refugee community, so he experienced firsthand the pressure to join a slum gang as a child. He resisted the gangsters’ entreaties, left school at age ten and fled to another community, where he worked for money to send back to his family.

At 16, he returned home to resume his schooling. After high school, he joined IMAGO, an arts program sponsored by artists from a wealthy sector of Bogotá, where he majored in singing and dance. The director of IMAGO quickly realized that Pedro was a natural people person—he could easily attract new students for IMAGO from the surrounding community and convince non-students to attend IMAGO’s public performances. She asked Pedro to work full-time for IMAGO, doing outreach to youth in the community. Three years ago, Pedro took over as director of IMAGO, changing it from a mere art school to part of an integrated program that, together with five other schools, promotes community development and helps at-risk youth.

Pedro is a tenacious teacher who takes more pride in the good that IMAGO has accomplished than in the praise he has received as its leader. Through his work as director, he patiently works with different university and government groups, as well as ordinary community members, to help teens throughout Colombia escape the poverty of the slums and the violence of gang warfare.