DUNCAN DYASON

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Duncan Dyason MBE was born in Canterbury in 1960 and due to many factors had to move every 2-3 years, which affected his education and early life choices.

Duncanīs book, Miracle Children, tells the story of how his life quickly led to crime in his teenage years and then to drinking heavily and eventually to attempting suicide.

His life changed when he was 21 as he cried out to God and sought help in his desperation. To his astonishment Duncan heard an audible voice speaking to him and this led him to seek God and become a Christian.

Soon after becoming a Christian and dedicating his life to God, Duncan began to work with young people at his new church in Tunbridge Wells and felt a particular call to help children and youth who, like him, had or who were struggling with life. Duncan knew in 1981 that his life would now be committed to championing the cause of children and young people who were on the margins of society.

In 1984 Duncan studied youth work and theology at Moorlands College in Dorset and it was there that his passion for mission began as he helped begin a mission project to help the struggling church in Poland. The early trips were fraught with danger as he and his friends had to smuggle in bibles and medical supplies through communist East Germany and saw first-hand the miraculous protection of God in getting all supplies through to the Christian church in Poland.

YOUTH WORK & MISSION TO AT-RISK KIDS

In 1992 Duncan watched a TV documentary on BBC Everyman entitled “They Shoot Children Donīt They?”. The programme was of massive challenge and this led Duncan and his wife Jenni to move to Guatemala City, Guatemala in 1992 after founding The Toybox Charity.

Duncan began working on the streets of Guatemala where there were an estimated 5,000 children and youth living on the streets. The early days were very difficult for Duncan who had death threats and learned the bitter reality of those children on the streets, so many of whom he had to bury after being killed by police, private security forces or found themselves in the midst of gang wars on the streets.

In 2000 Duncan parted from Toybox Charity and founded Street Kids Direct, a unique online charity that guarantees 100% of all donations going directly to the project the charity partners with.

Duncan continues to live and work in Guatemala with high-risk children and youth and volunteers with the SKDGuatemala project to date, a charity he founded to help reach children living on the streets and to impact the lives of high-risk children who were at risk of street life.

The specialist mentoring programme Duncan wrote after three years of research has helped prevent many at-risk children seeing street life as an option and the mentoring programme has also been used in Honduras, where a mentoring centre has opened and now reaches over 200 children at-risk and also in the UK.

AWARDS & ACHIEVEMENTS

In 1998 Duncanīs book, Miracle Children was published and was awarded Christian Book of the Year in the United Kingdom by Hodder & Stoughton at the Christian Booksellers Convention.

In 2002 Duncan received the Paul Harris Fellow award from The Rotary Foundation, sponsored by the Great Missenden Rotary Club for his work in Guatemala.

On the 13th January 2015 Duncan moved back to live full-time in Guatemala after taking time out in the UK for his degree in International Development. Over the next three years Duncan researched and wrote and published the Street Kids Direct Mentoring Manual to train volunteer mentors to reach children at high-risk of street life.

In August 2017 Duncan embarked on the first Camino por Amor (Walking for Love) sponsored walk from Costa Rica to Guatemala City. The walk was the first of many and the longest he has achieved to date, walking 750 miles in three weeks.

In 2017 Duncan was awarded an MBE by Her Majesty the Queen and presented to him by the then Prince Charles. The honour was sponsored by the British Ambassador to Guatemala, Carolyn Davidson, and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, in recognition of his work over 25 years on the streets of Guatemala City and in seeing the reduction of the number of children on the streets from 5,000 in 1991 to zero.

The Guatemalan Municipal Government acknowledged Duncanīs work as a street worker in 2017 when the City Mayor and his wife received Duncan to the city after his sponsored walk from San Jose, Costa Rica to Guatemala. City police met Duncan on the outskirts of the city and give him a police escort to the city centre where he was greeted by city officials and the press and also accompanied by British Ambassadors Carolyn Davidson and Tom Carter.