To speak of work amongst children in the Province of Buenos Aires would fill a book. The Christian workers of the Evangelical Union of South America are doing noble work in the Sunday-schools. We have not time to visit Tres Arroyos, where each Sunday two hundred children listen to the “Old, Old Story of Jesus and His Love,” or Las Flores, Coronel Suarez, Campana, or San Fernando, where the children are gathered together Sunday by Sunday.
The difference between these Argentine children and ourselves is just this, that everything here in Britain is done to help the children, and to surround them with a pure atmosphere and holy influences. Out there it is not so; everything is against the children growing up to be even morally good men and women.
They are so familiar with sin that their sense of sin is destroyed, and they are therefore harder to reach than pure pagans. If ever a city needed a “Blossom Home,” it is Buenos Aires, where we find children of all nations.
One of the finest institutions for children and young people in the whole of this continent is, however, to be seen here at the present day. We cannot leave Argentina without paying a visit to the suburb of Palermo, where are situated the schools superintended by the Rev. William Case Morris, the “Dr Barnardo of South America.”
While in business, in the Boca district of the city, some years ago, Mr Morris saw the poverty and ignorance of the children about him, and he longed to see something done for them. Of his own accord, and with his own private funds, he commenced a school for poor children. Upon this he spent years of labour and much money, seeking to better the lot of his juvenile friends.
With the South American Missionary Society at his back, he established day-schools, Sunday-schools, and schools of industry, through which hundreds of Spanish-speaking children have passed since their foundation.
Who are the scholars? With the exception of a very small number we find they are children of the poorest class. Many are children of invalid parents, others of widowed mothers. In the case of several, the father is serving a long term of imprisonment for crime. Some are almost alone in the world; many are quite alone—“nobody’s children,” waifs, to whom life is a dreary, desolate solitude.
Numbers of the children had been surrounded by an atmosphere of ignorance and sin, and would a few years later have been a cause of trouble to the police, had it not been for such an institution as this. It is not only a training place for the mind, but a school for character, where the children’s souls are lifted out of the mire and trained in the atmosphere of heaven.
What sweetening influences must now be at work, where every youth and maiden is who has passed through this school! Think of the five thousand who are being trained to be witnesses for Christ to their own people in this continent, where we see still so much darkness, degradation, and superstition.
The whole secret of successful work amongst Spanish-speaking children is splendidly summed up by Mrs Strachan, an E.U.S.A. missionary in Tandil. She says:—