Street children given new life

Jaclyn Cosgrove
Managing Editor

KENYA, Africa — Each day parents across the U.S. practically have to drag their children out of bed as the children beg to stay home from school.

Meanwhile, in Kenya, thousands of children wake up near trash piles, unaware of where their parents are.

No one is yelling that breakfast is ready. No one is reminding them to wash behind their ears or to brush their teeth.

In 2002, the East African Standard, a national newspaper in Kenya, reported a conservative estimate of 250,000 children living on the streets in urban areas of Kenya.

These children are often involved in theft, drug trafficking, assault, trespassing and property damage. Some face harassment, as well as physical and sexual abuse from police and within the juvenile justice system, according to the newspaper.

In Kikuyu, Kenya, some children are getting off the streets with help from a child rehabilitation center.

The center, which the Presbyterian Church of East Africa runs, started in 2001 with 19 children.

It began as a feeding program for children of single mothers but has stemmed into a center for underprivileged children.

Stephen Kabuba, a Presbyterian minister who helped start the center, says educating the street children creates a new future for the children.

“When they grow up, and they are strong, and they’re not taken care of, they become not now begging but demanding, ‘Give me your vehicle keys, or I shoot you,” Kabuba says. “Before, they were begging, ‘Give me a schilling or I smear you with human waste.’”

Oftentimes street children use one hand to beg and with the other hand hold human waste and threaten to smear it on someone who won’t give them money, Kabuba says.

Before the center, street children would not be able to attend school, but the Presbyterian church pays for all the costs the child or child’s family would have to pay.

“The church saw the need of not only feeding their stomachs but also their minds,” says David Wakogy, the administrator for the center.

Wakogy says church members hope to raise enough money to someday have boarding for the children.

The center doesn’t have any sponsors for children yet, Wakogy says.

The cost of sponsoring a child is $30, which includes food, medical supplies and administrative fees.

Wakogy says anyone who wants to sponsor a child can contact him at David Wakogy, P.O. Box 1644, 00902 Kikuyu, Kenya.

Those who can’t send money are welcome to volunteer at the center, Wakogy says.

Kabuba says the center gives the children who have so much potential an opportunity they would have never had.

“The only way to untap that potential is take them to school,” Kabuba says. “These children are not foolish. Because they are born in a poor family doesn’t mean they are poor mentally.”

Lingo Kid
Kid speaks many languages to sell Peacock Fans

Guatemalan Street Children
by Walenciak

Guatemalan Street Children

Project Love Covers - La Paz, Bolivia
12 Americans travel to La Paz, Bolivia in March 2007 to observe the street children population, and form a plan to bring them help.

Mean Streets

Does the mindset that dominates 80 or more family political dynasties also cause the big yawn that handcuffs street children to life sentences of grueling penury?

“People are so familiar with the omnipresence of (batang kalye)_ they’re rendered invisible within the chaotic picture of daily city routine.” writes Judith Pomm of Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. “Indifference appears the most common reaction.”

Her study is titled : “At The Margins: Street and Working Children in Cebu City.” But it’s implications ripple out to other Philippine cities where the problem “emerged in the economic recession of the 1980s.” The Marcos kleptocracy, by then, had bankrupted the country. The problem, however, persists up to today. Yet, other equally poor countries, like Chile , Paraguay , Cuba or Tanzania, have lower numbers of street “Mga anghel na walang langit” ( ‘Angels without a heaven’ ) is how a soap opera dubbed this issue. In Colombia, they call it ‘gamines’. Prickly scientists use the ponderous phrase: Children In Special Need of Protection.”

But no term has been “successfully coined to capture” this silent slow motion emergency, silent because nobody is surprised and cries out”, she notes. But the kids’ resilience and coping mechanisms do not outweigh vulnerability “Some children prove strong enough to find their way out, sometimes through institutional help. The majority do not.”

Firm figures on this mobile population are hard to pin down. Kids spend intermittent periods with their families. Some abscond from institutions. Others drift from one street to another, even to other provinces. Family crises, jobs, threats of police arrest or from rival gangs drive their meanderings.

The first surveys of 1988 “suggested the number of street children could range from two to three percent of the child and youth population of a city.” Metro Cebu had an estimated 15,200. “Flows” rather than “stock” would be a more relevant indicator.

The street offers skimpy income for the family’s short rations.. It’s the only alternative to a desolate crowded home, abuse or violence. They “leave home” to escape from their families and ply sidewalks, hang around malls, begging, selling cigarettes, “sometimes even their little bodies”. Less visible, street girls “are clearly an understudied reality. And they’re particularly stigmatized as they are perceived to be prostitutes”.

They craft survival strategies to meet daily needs, interviews reveal. They appropriate niches where they cadge a few pesos, feel safe and find enjoyment. “They create alternative communities which substitute for families they can not rely on,” the study notes. Their pride is “a defiant one born out of the lack of choice.” And all disappear from welfare agendas when they are not children anymore.

There’s no shortage of publications, laws and programs, resulting in a not always coherent matrix . Patchy data zaps assessment of institutional intervention and successes. An unofficial estimate pegs quality and implementation at a skimpy 20% to 40%.

Official programs respond to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. “Unfortunately, it has the weakest base in Practice. Law enforcement here is often a matter of contacts and money and thus the privilege of a minority.”

Reactive and protective approaches for programs, transport elements of the Catholic value system that dominates Filipino society. The quasi-nomadic life style of _bata sa kadalanan_ is “continuously measured against ubiquitous Catholic and domestic family ideals.” the study points out. “( But these ) ideals have little to do with the real life situation of poor families whose children roam the streets.”

Under these values, family is secure, a place of love and care. It excludes the_kalye_ as sites of danger, dirt and failed families. Structural injustices are ignored. Discourse is whittled down to either “normal children in homes or deviant children on the streets.” And grimy _bata sa kadalanan_ are stereotyped, by the better-off, as living “anti-social, immoral chaotic lives.”

This branding is done by a skewed society of a few very rich families, (who moonlight as political dynasties) , a sliver-thin middle class and a mass of indigents. . “Injustice is a given. Not everybody is born with the same chances.” These cash-flush families fret about their interests, little beyond. As the Filipino anthropologist Landa Jocano once warned: “The importance of the family in understanding Philippine social organization can not be over-emphasized”.

Among the poorest, the “distinction between home and street is increasingly obsolete,” the study notes. More use the street as a collectively shared space, for working, sleeping and living. “The way people treat street children offers a critical vision of (this) society. It accepts life on the street as an alternative for those who are deprived of a wholesome childhood but which actively rejects them and aggravates their situation.”

This mindset anchors the widespread indifference to street children “Very few consider this a problem that should trouble the public,” the study found. There’s little solidarity with the extremely poor. Only three, out of 30 respondents, would help out.

“Demonizing them supports the justification that one does not have to bother with them.”

Isn’t this a scientific retelling of what was that story again? The one about a Levite and priest who sidled to the other side of the road, so they’d not bother with a fallen victim. And both of them are us?

E-mail: juanlmercado@gmail.com

Delhi’s street children to get new home
Chetan Chauhan
New Delhi, April 28, 2007

The abuse that children begging on Delhi roads face during night may be over, to some extent, as soon they would have a home of their own.

Delhi would be one of the first states in the country to be covered under Integrated Child Protection Scheme of the Central government, initiated from the current financial year. The Women and Child Development Ministry has selected Delhi along with three other states to launch the scheme from mid-this year.

Finance Minister P Chidambaran allocated Rs 95 crore for the scheme in is first year and WCD officials expected the allocation to rise to Rs 2,000 crore by 2012, the end of the 11th five-year plan. “One state from northeast and one each from north and south India and Delhi would be covered,” a ministry official told Hindustan Times.

The ministry expects the allocation to be made to Delhi by middle of 2007 once the Expenditure Finance Committee approves its proposal. Once that happens, the government estimates that Delhi would get a sizeable share from Rs 95 crore because of its 5 lakh street children, highest for any city in India.

Although not all the children would be covered the government intends to bring street children in central Delhi under the ambit of the scheme, that provides both financial and institutional protection to children. “There would be child protection officers in each district to look and investigate into complaints of violation of child rights,” a ministry official said.

These officers would have powers to investigate the allegations of child right abuse by government agencies like police and social welfare departments. The mandate of these officers cover children, whose parents cannot take care of them, child prostitutes, destitute or abandoned children, children suffering with HIV/AIDS and children who are victims of crime.

The government will also allocate funds for construction of the “child shelter homes” having facilities for education and games for children. Explaining the idea behind these homes, a senior ministry official said, children would be welcome in these homes around the clock but no one would be forced to come here. The homes would be run by the NGOs with the help of WCD department of the Delhi government.

The first scheme of its kind in the country has been built with an idea to provide children a family environment for better future, the official said.

Street Working Children in Indonesia 1 Singers & Newsboys
This documentary (the first of 7 parts) is a fundraising project for Sanggar Alang Alang, dedicated to promoting the well-being of street children and their families in Makassar, Sulawesi, Indonesia, so that children will grow up free of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse and all forms of neglect.

To understand what these children are earning, one American dollar is currently worth about 9,000 rupiahs (the Indonesian Currency), so Rp 5,000 is worth about 55 cents.

Find out more about Sanggar Alang Alang at http://sanggaralangalang.blogspot.com/

Arushi – The First Ray of Hope
Arushi – the first ray of hope, is a short documentary film capturing the lives of five female street children, who are now living in the … all » shelter home of the Salaam Baalak Trust. These girls, from different parts of India, talk about the difficult circumstances faced by them that forced them to land up in the streets of Delhi. They narrate their own stories of rejection, alienation, anguish and hardships. Despite their distressed situation, they have hope and dream and aspire. They are uniquely talented and have tremendous potential; they desire for opportunity.

This film has been developed by Praveen Choudhary, who is a former resident of Salaam Baalak Trust’s shelter home. Praveen has received training in multi media, film editing and direction. He advanced his skill working with “Teamwork Films”. Now, Praveen is a freelancer for making films and documentaries.

For information about how to get a copy of this documentary film, please contact: India HIV/AIDS Alliance info@allianceindia.org or salaambt@bol.net.in

NGO lights up future of streetkids

Dutch artists to teach street children

Thursday, April 26, 2007

IZMIR – Turkish Daily News

  A group of Dutch artists came to provide activities and lessons for street children including theatre, pantomime, and dance to be performed at squatters’ housing districts for the week of April 23.

  Theater player Sihali Yalincer, who came with the Dutch group, told Anatolia News Agency that they came to Izmir to teach dance, pantomime and theatre to the children who sell tissues and shine shoes in the streets. Stating that they would perform a show in the squatters’ housing district, Yalciner said with vehicles donated by different art foundations, they would take the street children to Amsterdam to perform their show together there as well.

  The project called �From 7 to 70� is open to all who want to stay young at heart. �With the children from these districts, we will bring out the inner child within us. Our colleagues all came wholeheartedly. Just like doctors who answer the call of anyone in need, we too go to these districts to answer the call for more cultural activities,� said Yalincer.

  A famous Dutch artist group’s director Rene Kres, 63, also said that with Yalciner they support each other’s project. Stating that he came to Turkey before for the 23rd of April’s National Sovereignty and Children Holiday to provide the children with pantomime lessons, Kress said, �It is great to accept Atatürk’s idea of a children’s holiday on the 23rd of April, because children are our future, which is significant for world peace.� Working as a professional dancer in Holland, Nancy Dorette, 28, said she came to Turkey to provide the children with the gift of dance.