Not scorned, street kids get new life in imitation family
Not scorned, street kids get new life in imitation family
2006-06-02HOME meant anything but warmth to Wang Qi when he, then 12 years old, was rejected by his divorced parents four years ago.
But an imitation family program is reshaping the boy’s idea, if more, perhaps, his life.
The boy left his parents in Xi’an, capital of northwest China’s Shaanxi Province in 2002.
When he was picked up three years later by a street children’s center in Zhengzhou, a city 500 kilometers away in central China’s Henan Province, the poor waif was ’somber, sensitive and extremely defensive,’ according to Lu Jinwei, his ‘father’ in his new family.
‘He stared blankly at the corner of the wall, seldom talked to anybody and never did his share of the housework,’ said Lu, a former high school teacher who joined the experimental program launched by the United Nations Children’s Fund and China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs in 2003.
Wang Qi is one of 84 children who have been taken in by five imitation families in Zhengzhou, where social workers function as parents of street children in households. These children are given room and board, as well as education and training.
However, they would have faced discrimination three years ago as they were often considered ‘children to be moralized.’
They were treated in the same way as adult vagrants: gathered and sent back to possibly broken families by relief and administration stations.
Thanks to the UN-China program, the situation has begun to change in Zhengzhou.
The boy, once controlled by a gang and trained to steal, now works at a beauty salon as an apprentice.
Under the arrangement with the center, Wang Qi received a few months’ vocational training after he told his ‘father’ the wish to become a barber last year.
The teenager, who remained silent almost for a month to his "parents" and his four "sisters" and "brothers" after he joined the family, now likes to initiate conversation with his customers, most of whom are stylish youngsters, the boy said.
His customers do not know about the dark past of the energetic, handsome boy.
"We are helping them with a renewed ideology on street children," said Wang Wanmin, director of the Zhengzhou Street Children’s Center.
