Who am I?

In Guatemala an alarming 600,000 children are without any legal identity. The law states that babies should be officially registered within a year of their birth, but although the registration process itself is free of charge many families still have to pay to travel long distances to registration centres. For poor rural families this is, unsurprisingly, low on the list of priorities.

Unfortunately having no legal identity is a great disadvantage to children and can even put their lives at risk. Not only does it mean that they struggle to get access to education or health care, it also puts them at increased risk of being targeted for child prostitution, forced labour and involvement in drug cartels.

Once a child is a year old and has not been officially registered it gets a lot harder to establish their legal rights. It is possible, however, and many of the projects within our city-wide network in Guatemala City are working hard to do just that. Let’s pray for them this week…

• Pray for all of the churches and childcare projects in Guatemala who are seeking to serve the country’s ‘invisible’ children in this way. Pray that they would have wisdom and good understanding of the complicated legal processes involved so that many more children can be registered

• Pray for the hundreds of thousands of Guatemalan children who do not currently have a legal identity. Pray that more and more of these children would be reached by projects and churches like those in the network, so that they can get access to their basic rights such as education and health

• Pray for those responsible for deciding how the registration process works. Pray that God would give them the grace to make this process as easy as possible, especially for poor rural families, so that no child is put at risk of ‘disappearing’ into child prostitution or drug gangs