World Street Children News

Kids struggle to survive Moscow streets

Baltimore Sun
January 20, 2002
Many youths prefer homelessness to cruel treatment in shelters
By Douglas Birch
Sun Foreign Staff

MOSCOW - They flutter through the Kursky railway station like flocks of dirt-smudged pigeons, sniffing glue fumes out of plastic bags, begging for money from strangers and scattering as police approach waving nightsticks.

These are Russia’s lost children, part of an army of millions of homeless boys and girls who have fled unhappy homes or escaped from the harsh discipline in state orphanages. Mobs of them, some as young as 5, haunt the capital’s subway stations, highway underpasses and railroad terminals.

The Kursky railway station, just east of central Moscow, is home to about 150 children who have drifted here from all over the former Soviet empire. By day, they roam the city, begging in subways and stealing what they can from shops. At night, they return to the station.

It is a filthy, disease-ridden and violent home. Some of the boys and girls work as prostitutes. Some have contracted hepatitis or HIV. After a day of begging, some wander holding bags containing glue over their mouths to get high. Others discreetly inhale the fumes under their coats, hiking their collars.

Station police occasionally administer what seem to be random beatings. Early Friday, two uniformed officers cornered a boy of about 16 in a station entrance. One slammed the boy with a truncheon as more than a dozen bystanders watched. Then the police led the youth away.

The children’s begging and stealing create problems for passengers, said another policeman, who would not give his name. "They say that we beat them and take money from them," he said, "but we don’t."

Why do the children stay? "The police beat them here," said Pavel Novikov, an evangelical Christian who feeds homeless children at the railway station. "But they don’t get beaten as often as in the shelter."

Sasha Vasiliyev, 17, said he came to the railway station in 1991, at age 6, after his parents died. When he was 10, authorities sent him to an orphanage in his hometown outside Moscow. He stayed about 18 months. The routine was boring and the discipline harsh: As punishment, the director sometimes forced children to stand shirtless in the winter cold.

Vasiliyev returned to the station. The police periodically try to evict him. "They push me out into the street, even if it is minus-30 outside, and they say, ‘Never come back here!’" he said. But he returns.

Jan Korin, 8, arrived a few months ago from Belarus. He keeps his 50-cent tubes of plastic cement in a plush yellow bag that hangs on a string around his neck. The glue has made his gaze wander and his movements jerky. He cockily claimed he was happy sleeping in his nook, a space on the concrete floor next to the gates to the subway.

Where is his mother? "I miss her," he said, tears making his brown eyes seem larger. "Though my mother sometimes hit me, I still love her."

Jan’s older sister, Tatiana, loitered in the station’s underground shopping arcade, her face bathed in the light of a video game. She claims to be 16; her brother said her 13th birthday was coming up soon. Asked about her mother, she didn’t look up from the video game.

"I don’t know where she is," she said. "She doesn’t care about us, so why should I care about her? I have a little brother to feed and clothe."

Their prospects are growing worse because of the gentrification of the neighborhood. In November, merchants and city officials ordered the Salvation Army to stop feeding homeless adults out of the back of a truck. In December, police swept through Kursky and other railway stations, rounding up homeless children and detaining them overnight.

"It appeared we were being blamed for the crime rate," said Gordon Lewis, the Salvation Army’s coordinator for social services in Moscow.

Now there are rumors that another sweep is imminent, inspired by President Vladimir V. Putin’s declaration last week that Russia’s efforts to solve the problem of "the neglected" have failed. Putin said in a letter to his prime minister, "Homeless children and the criminalization of teen-agers has reached threatening proportions."

His aides have promised a series of reforms to be introduced in coming weeks.

Advocates for the homeless say that at least 10,000 children live on the capital’s streets and that at least 90 percent are from outside Moscow. Only three shelters, with a total capacity of several hundred, are willing to accept them. One of the shelters is reserved for minors charged with committing serious crimes; the others are officially limited to use by legal residents of Moscow.

Dzera Oxana, a lawyer who works with homeless children, says a police lieutenant tried to find places for some of the children rounded up in the sweep last month. "She took the list of orphanages and called all of them," Oxana said. "All of them told her to go to hell."

Lawmakers have passed many measures to protect homeless and runaway children, but critics say that responsibility for the children is divided among agencies lacking the expertise, money and desire to act.

"I worked in a district administrative office whose task it was to deal with homeless children," said Lelit Karagyan, who now runs a group home. "Speaking honestly, the only thing they do is to fill in a lot of forms."

Moscow officials have promised to open seven new orphanages within two years. But activists caution that the orphanages will be little help without better rehabilitation programs and more trained social workers. And authorities, they say, should change their regulations to make it easier to open group homes and place children in foster care.

"Why do they run away from orphanages? Because of the way they are treated," Novikov said. "There are very few orphanages where they express love for the children."

Twice a week, Novikov loads chicken soup, bread and tea into the back of an old Land Rover and drives to the station parking lot. Authorities do not welcome him there. Police have twice detained him and told him to stop feeding the children. Novikov, who receives financial support from a network of Christian churches, has refused. He can’t forget the shock of his first night at the station last fall.

He had come determined to preach. He quickly realized that more than words were needed. "The children were intoxicated, and they were hungry," he said. "And after that moment, I decided that I had to feed them, to give them a place to stay and to eat. Just to express God’s care for them."

At 2:30 a.m. Friday, the Land Rover rolled into the parking lot. Children raced out of the station. Novikov and two friends prayed in the front seat, then climbed out and served food to the growing crowd.

Novikov noticed that one of the regulars - Ivan Chernov, 16 - was missing. Friends said he had been so badly beaten by police that he couldn’t get up out of bed.

Novikov carried a bag of food through the rail yards, across a garbage dump and over a concrete wall to Chernov’s home - a hut built of cardboard and old bedsheets in the roofless ruins of a building. The teen-ager lay under a pile of filthy blankets; the temperature was 26 degrees.

Inside the railway station, none of the children seems to think much about what might happen tomorrow. That would be too painful. "They are not killing us outright," said Vasiliyev, the longtime station resident. "They are killing us gradually."

Yelena Ilingina of The Sun’s Moscow bureau contributed to this article.

Focus On the Plight of Street Children

Frehiwot Eshetu appears like any ordinary daughter. As a 13-year-old she helps her mother clean around their small, mud-walled home and looks after her youngest brother Tariq. Yet a year ago she was living on the streets with prostitutes, her friends were using drugs, sniffing benzene and begging. Surviving on scraps from garbage she soon became sick, her stomach infested with worms and her skin and hair riddled with lice. But Frehiwot is lucky. She is described as a success story – plucked from the streets of Addis Ababa and re-united with her family.

“I feel as though I lost my childhood with the horrible things I saw while I was living on the streets,” said Frehiwot. “I was always sick and cold. My life was miserable. I sometimes see street children I know and it makes me very sad that they still have to live like that. Some of them do not have any family. No child should have to live like that.”

Currently there are around 60,000 street kids living a desperate existence in the Ethiopian capital. Some say there could be twice that number. Yet all agree that the number of street children, too often seen begging at the sides of expensive cars, is set to soar as the number of AIDS orphans in Ethiopia tops one million, according to the health ministry.

Frehiwot’s mother Tewres, 38, clings to her daughter as she tells of the hardship faced by their family which eventually forced Frehiwot to run away. Each day they would go out begging as Frehiwot’s father Eshetu is unable to work after losing his eyesight at the age of 16. If they were lucky they scraped together around four Ethiopian birr a day – around US $0.50. The family would get food scraps from hotels in the city.

The poverty and the shame of leading her blind father to tourist spots to help beg eventually drove Frehiwot away. “I used to be ashamed by this,” she says. “We would live on leftovers. I would miss school because I would have to take my father out to beg.” She weeps as she explains why she ran away to the streets. But Frehiwot is quick to add: “I love my family despite them being poor.”

Frehiwot is not the only victim from her life on the streets. The traumatic effects are deeply ingrained on the entire family. “I feel very sorry,” says her mother Tewres, who has five children, speaking through an interpreter. “At this age, to see the catastrophic things she has seen. It has taken away her childhood just because we are poor.

“I was forced to give my young girl to the streets. Now when I look into her eyes all I feel is guilt. She is our only daughter and we almost lost her.”

Frehiwot’s plight is certainly not unusual and is seen in developing countries across the world. The Irish non-governmental organisation, GOAL, is one of the leading agencies in Addis Ababa working with street children – and who rescued Frehiwot. Their programmes are increasingly designed to re-integrate children into the community. They are currently looking after the needs of over 500 street children, through two drop-in centres and seven night shelters, located in some of the poorest parts of the capital.

GOAL psychologist Asafach Haileselassie says that all too often street children are very bright and excel at school. “They are very aware of their environment,” said Asafach, who has worked with street children for over 10 years. “They can see the squalor and poverty, and think that they can make a better life somewhere else. “In some cases their decision to leave home is completely selfless – to reduce the burden on the family, but often they are forced to leave purely because the family cannot cope.”

Asafach, who specialises in child psychology, said the effects of living on the streets can be extremely harmful and long lasting. But GOAL not only focuses on the child. Counsellors work both with the children and their families.

“A street child will suffer very negative affects,” she said. “These children have serious health problems, more often than not they will have serious psychological problems and these can take a long time to sort out. “The children you find on the streets are extremely distrustful. They can be aggressive and are wary of adults who they believe have let them down in the past. The key to helping these children is to make them realise that they are members of the community and have a role to play. However, at the same time it is important to work with the children’s families and communities so that they also realise street children’s predicament. That is why our programmes focus on awareness raising, re-unification and re-integration with all members of the community. Often these children will have very low self esteem. We have to build that back up.”

The children also receive non-formal education – a strategy designed so that children can come in for reading and writing lessons at times that suit them. Under the re-unification project, street children’s families also receive a small loan to try and help them escape from their poverty – which is often the root cause of their break-up. “But we don’t just leave them with their family after that,” said Asafach. “Sometimes it is hard for these children to re-integrate. We will visit every month to see how the family are getting along and to help smooth out difficulties they have.”

So far GOAL has re-united 43 children with their families. Not one has returned to the streets. But it is a long, drawn-out process, often taking up to a year of counselling and education to help the children fully re-integrate.

Fantu Hawaz, a nurse who works the two drop-in centres for street children run by GOAL, said many of the children have contracted serious diseases by the time they arrive. “We have seen very young girls with sexually transmitted diseases,” she said. “But most of the children will usually have parasites in their stomachs because of the food they have been eating. Skin diseases are common, as are bronchial problems and eye infections.”

Frehiwot, like many other children eking out an existence on the streets, fled from poverty. She was picked up by GOAL after just a few months and before more serious damage was done. A bright-eyed girl, she was seduced by the idea of making a better life for herself. The small loan her family received has helped them buy some sheep so they can sell them for a profit when they have been fattened up.

“Now I know it was impossible to make a better life by living on the streets,” Frehiwot says. “I am now back at school studying and want to become an English teacher. It is hard to come back and I think I learnt a lot on the streets, but you cannot live life like that. You become an animal, all you have is hate.”