Urbanization and industrializationbegan in Argentina as soon as 1890, first than in most of the other Latin American countries. Since the beginning of the century, Buenos Aires other big cities has been concentrating more than 70% of the Argentina population. Today, only in the "Great Buenos Aires" live more than 8 millon people.

Industrial growth between 1940 and 1970 attrackted poor people from the rural areas and from the bordering nations (Bolivia, Paraguay, etc). They became a wide range of cheap manpower, and of underemployed or unemployed, specially affected by the economic crisis of the '80s and '90s.

According to official statistics, 30% of Argentina homes have unsatisfied basic needs. In fact, even those who have a regular salary find difficult to arrive to cover their families needs. Stadistics say an average working family with two children would need around 1.100$ (1$ = 1U$S) a month to cover their basic expenses. Real facts are that industrial worker salaries are around 400$ or 500$ the month, and women usually earn even less.

Poverty makes "Villas Miseria" ("Misery cities") grow in the surroundings of big cities. They are usually built on fiscal or private lands ilegally occupied. People lives there in huts made of cardboard, tinplate or pieces of wood, without current water and in stacking conditions.

Some "Villas miseria" improve their conditions little by little, as people slowly builds brick houses and organizes them selves to get water, streets and legal appropiation of the lands.

In other cases, real states firms sell small lots of land in long form of payment (and sometimes with bad conditions to working people), in "urbanizations" that most of the time have litle more than a line of electricity, and non pavemented streets that get muddy and impassables each time that it rains a little hard. Lots of these "urbanizations" are on inundable lands, and with each flood people has to move and come back, loosing or having dammaged their few belongings.

In these poor quarters around big cities public transportation is bad and insecure, schools and public hospitales are far away and poorly aquiped. Alcohol, delinquence, ill-treatment, family crisis, are common responses to the difficulties of daily struggle. In the other hand plaing and effective solidarity and religious feeling that leeds to build communities are also strong and positive trends among people living in these places.

This is the social environement in which FAAF developes its action in favor of children and families.

In fact, children are great victims of poverty: 40% of the children under 2 years haven't enough to eat, and around 30.000 children a year died because of desnutrition. Public schools are badly equipped and overcrowded: most of them give only four hours of class, because the same building is employed for two different primary scools -one in the morning, one in the afternoon-, and a high school or an adult school center at the same time.

The hard social conditions give origin to children abandonement, and to the phenomenon of "street children", "children at the street", and "children left alone".

Street children live at the streets that become their contention place. They have left homes where they hadn't enough to eat, they felt their lives were not important for their parents, and they were charged with heavy responsabilities.

Instead children at the streets still find a place of contention in their family. Some of them sell candies, flowers or religious prints in trains or restaurants, sometimes under the control of their parents. These children are exposed to great risks and dangers, but adecquate preventive intervention may avoid them to become street children.

Finally, there are children who are not obbliged to work in the streets, but their parents -or singles mothers- have to be out working or looking for a job all day long. Unless they have a relative who can take care of them, these children are left alone at their home, or under the care of a good will neigbor, all day long, five or six days a week.

The younger are frequent victims of domestic accidents, and lots of them have died burned by fire in Houses locked by their parents to keep them "safe". The elder, lacking of contention, are more likely to drop out school or become "children at the street" or "street children" than those with a better familiar contention.

Support this last group of children and their families is the main goal of FAAF.