Shakira energizes inspirations & dreams: this singing sensation is helping to improve the lives of displaced children in her homeland of Colombia through the Fundacion Pies Descalzos, implementing programs involving educational opportunities as well as health and nutrition.

• Author: Holston, Mark

Taking a trip from the center of Bogota to its most distant outlying suburbs is a telling way to shed light on some of Colombia's darkest realities. As blocks of neat brick apartment houses and sparkling shopping malls give way to grimy industrial neighborhoods and nondescript, working-class barrios, the dilemma faced by hundreds of thousands of Colombians becomes visually apparent. Mounds of trash burn in littered streets that look like battle zones. In the median of an expressway, a man in tattered clothes, gripping his young daughter's hand, casts a pleading stare at passing buses and cars. He holds a hand-lettered sign that has become all too commonplace along the byways of Colombian cities in recent years: "We are refugees from the violence," announces the scrawl. "Please help."

Over three decades of non-stop and often bloody conflict involving the government, paramilitary groups, and rebel combatants has extracted a shocking toll. An estimated two million Colombians have been forced to flee their homes in the countryside and seek refuge in the country's large cities. Unfortunately, scant human and financial resources have been committed to address the most basic needs spawned by this human catastrophe--which shows no sign of abating. Every day of the week, dozens of new refugees arrive on the doorsteps of Bogota, Medellin, Call, Barranquilla, and other large cities where they instantly become the poorest of the poor. Their fate is to end up on the rutted streets of the most neglected and impoverished barrios, bereft of the support of a network of family and friends and with little hope of finding meaningful employment. Most troubling is the quandary of the children of the displaced, who are particularly vulnerable. They have few opportunities for adequate schooling and suffer debilitating effects of poor nutrition.

While many middle and upper class Colombians are haunted by this picture of endless violence and chronic poverty, finding effective ways of transforming the situation has proven challenging. One Colombian, however, has taken forceful steps to confront the national dilemma and to identify and implement processes that are slowly but surely bringing positive results where they are most needed--in the lives of the displaced. For over a decade, her singing has mesmerized tens of millions of fans around the globe. Today, when she talks about the plight of her country's displaced masses and the children who are the most vulnerable victims of the endemic violence, Colombia's best-known pop star is equally gripping. Thanks to the leadership of the pop culture phenomenon known simply as Shakira, her homeland has begun to make small but significant progress in addressing what is widely considered to be the second worst humanitarian tragedy in the world and the direst in the Americas.

Shakira Mebarak Ripoll was born in 1978 in the city of Barranquilla on Colombia's Caribbean coast. The daughter of a Lebanese immigrant father and Colombian mother, she failed to pass the audition for her school's choir because, blessed with a strong vibrato that in time would become one of her stylistic trademarks, the director said that she sounded "like a goat." But it was clear to all who knew her that her love of music had become the focus of her young life. She composed her first tune at the age of eight. By the time she was in her mid teens, Shakira, whose name in Arabic means "graceful," was beginning to attract the attention of Colombian record company executives. Although her 1991 debut album, produced when she was barely 15 years old, sold less than 1,000 copies, her Pies descalzos (Bare Feet) release four years later was a sensation. Its combination of poignant, socially conscious themes and the singer's emotive style made her an instant force in the fiercely competitive world of Spanish-language pop music. Three years later, her follow-up release, ?Donde estan los ladrones? (Where are the Thieves?), solidified her surging popularity in the Americas and Europe.

Since the...