About Honduras

Honduras is located on the Central American land bridge. It is a country in which poverty is the common denominator of many social problems. According to government statistics from 2006, 78.5% of the 7.7 million Hondurans live below the poverty line, of which 43% live in extreme poverty. Besides Haiti, Honduras is the second poorest country in the western hemisphere. There are considerable differences in the conditions of life between city and countryside. Poverty is even more common in rural areas than in urban centres.

In concrete terms, this means that

• over 5 million people in Honduras are struggling to survive every day.
• 2 million people suffer from starvation.
• more than 1 million children are malnourished or undernourished.

In this critical social environment, there is a vast number of risks to which hundreds of thousands of girls and boys are exposed. Many parents cannot offer their children a humane existence. For this reason,thousands of children flee the poverty or the physical violence of their parental homes and end up on the streets, where many of them become involved with drugs, are obliged to beg and possibly even become criminals. Others commit to dangerous and hard work in order to earn a little money. Yet other children are abandoned by their mothers or fathers and end up growing up with strangers.