A new roof and a second floor

The walls of the old building are fading; the windows are barred; the plaster is crumbling in places. The entrance consists of a tall wooden door, and above the first-floor windows are the words “Instituto Ballester de la Sociedad Escolar Aleman”. The home is a building with a long history.

Back in 1877, Maria Luisa Schulz, the wife of the former Austro-Hungarian consul, founded a charitable society in Buenos Aires with the aim of helping Austrian and German immigrants who came to Argentina. Over time, this became the Hogar de Niños Maria Luisa – a home for traumatised children from the growing Buenos Aires slums. In 1972, the home was moved to the Villa Ballester area in the San Martín district. Since then, it has been a shelter for children who have been forced to grow up in this mega-city without their parents or family.

The reason for this is the harsh reality that even today, thousands of girls and boys are abused, neglected or abandoned. They often live alone, are malnourished and have never been inside a school. For many, the Hogar Maria Luisa is their last hope. A temporary home where teachers and childcare workers look after the children until they are adopted by new parents.

But until recently, the roof was quite literally at risk of caving in. The old structure was becoming decrepit; the tiles were leaking; the drains were dilapidated. When it rained, water streamed into the building, seeping into the old walls and finally flooding the lower floors, until many of the rooms had to be vacated. Everywhere there were puddles, faulty wires, damp walls.

Was that the end of all hope?

That’s why the second floor is particularly important for them. After all, many of these abandoned girls will have to manage life completely on their own. To do so, they not only need to develop faith in themselves and other people, but also to learn to do laundry, do maths, clean, cook, shop and budget. Not an easy task, because many of the children who end up in the home only know the relentless life of the slums: beatings, violence, crime.

“The children who come to us have completely different needs, depending on their age”, says Analia Masolli, 40, the home’s psychologist. “The little ones often need to get used to completely different things from the older ones. Some of them soil themselves at night because they’re scared of the dark, while with others our first task is to encourage them to speak, because they’re so distraught.” That’s another reason why it is so vitally important to refurbish and redesign the second floor: the teenagers need space to tackle their own problems. To be able to develop. To carefully find their way forwards to a well-adapted life.

There’s also another reason why the second floor is crucial. The plan is for it to provide space for siblings who have been separated in the slums, often for years, to be reunited in the home. Little Benjamin, for example, who is seven years old, has three siblings. His brothers and sisters, however, lived with their uncles, aunts and grandparents – somewhere in the mega-city. They no longer had any contact and were torn apart in their early years. It’s the same story everywhere: poverty and violence in the daily struggle for survival. Often, parents are so unable to cope that they give their babies away – and some brothers and sisters don’t even know of each other’s existence later on.

The new floor of the home is intended as a space for the older sisters in particular. And it represents a ray of hope for plucky little Benjamin, too. The segunda planta is therefore much more than just a second floor. For the abandoned children from Buenos Aires, it means a second chance in life.