Chicle Children

I am in Quito, Ecuador staying at the Hilton. The first Ecuadorian I encountered when I left the hotel was a five-year-old girl who begged me to buy Chicle. She was soon joined by others in her age group - some just asking for money and others selling gum.

I was on my way across the street to the pharmacy to get drugs for my piercing headache. The diet coke in Ecuador tastes very different from the US-based Diet Coke that I’m addicted to, and I was beginning to suffer from caffeine withdrawal. I had been waiting a long time to check in because an American tourist in front of me was berating the hotel staff. I couldn’t tell exactly what for, only that he was finding his stay “unacceptable” and was certain that he was due either a refund or better accommodations.

Many hours after that rocky entry into my Quito experience, I can’t get those three things out of my mind: the children begging on the street, my diet coke-driven lifestyle, and my fellow American tourist.

The Chicle children have been on my mind since I was a child and my family lived in Guadalajara for the summers. My father taught at the University, I was no Chicle child. But the wall of separation between me and the kids selling Chicle on the street seemed tenuous. As a child I was puzzled about how the adults kept going-on their way to the theatre or the bakery - when they could see a small kid homeless and starving right there, so close you could touch her. I used to wonder if the adults were just too tall, because as a child in Mexico I could look straight into their faces.

I came back to my hotel room and tried to figure out where the five year old girl got her Chicle. Cadbury Adams (CA) owns Chicle, one of the original chewing gums. CA is the “worlds’ top confectionary company” according the CA website, with brands like Trident, Certs, Swedish Fish, Dentyne, Halls cough drops, and Sour Patch. The most popular distribution point for Chicle is Mexico. “In Mexico, as you are stopped for a light in your car, you will have a street vendor come to your window to sell you Chiclets. This is one of the biggest market for Chiclets”, according to CA.

According to the Netza Project, tens of thousands of Mexican children as young as 3 and 4 work on streets, beaches and in fields instead of going to school. Many of these kids are feeding themselves and their families with Chicle sales - and they are an important segment of gum sales for CA that top $1 billion annually.

I then wondered if CA used some of its profits from the children street vendors to solve some of the social and political infrastructure that perpetuated this extreme poverty and violence. I found a charitable wing of CA, but no investments in Latin America and no mention of any sense of responsibility for the sales force of street kids who create “one of the biggest markets” for Chiclets.

I did, however, find some great NGO’s that are serving street kids in Ecuador and Mexico. Lisa Martin’s Netza Project is raising funds to break the barriers to education, like monies for schoolbooks and shoes and even school buildings. One Ecuadorian NGO built a computer center for homeless kids to connect via the internet. A charity on the outskirts of Quito provides housing, education and job trainings, and enrichment for homeless kids.

A Canadian-based nonprofit called Street Kids works internationally to empower impoverished youth. They were the 2007 Finalist for the Conrad Hilton Humanitarian Award. It’s a great organization started by Peter Dalglish, a former UN field worker assigned to Sudan in the 80’s. Mr. Dalglish’s response to being robbed by a street kid was to organize an effort that empowered street kids to find occupations where they could thrive and grow.

I felt a little better about staying at the Hilton knowing they contribute a tiny amount to the worldwide humanitarian crisis of street kids. In this hotel - and at the Mercado across the street, at the pharmacy, at the fruit stand - politeness reigns. People haven’t just launched into sentences or orders. They begin with “good morning” or “good afternoon”. It is not unusual throughout Latin America for someone to say, instead of “goodby”, “que la vaya bien”, which loosely translated means, “may all go well with you”.

I am thinking about my diet coke lifestyle here. I am feeling so trapped in my privilege that even half a day without my particular soda blend causes me physical pain. I am wincing at the American who is demanding that he be treated better. I don’t know this country, I only know that on this block there is a 5 year old child approaching strangers to sell gum, there is an American convinced that he deserved better than what the Hilton has offered, and there is me, who looked at this child forty years ago in Mexico and thought I would never be the adult who walked on by.