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Zambia: CB Police Chief Condemns Lufwanyama Shooting        
The Times of Zambia (Ndola)

November 14, 2006
Posted to the web November 14, 2006

COPPERBELT Province acting police chief, Dobson Siame, has condemned the conduct by police officers that allegedly shot and wounded three former street kids at Katembula Youth Training Centre in Lufwanyama district at the weekend.

Mr Siame described the conduct by police officers as unprofessional and that police had started investigations. He warned that officers found wanting would be disciplined.

"It is unprofessional for police officers to have handled the matter in the manner they did," he said.

Mr Siame, however, said police had received reports on streets kids terrorising residents in Lufwanyama.

He said police officers had on several occasions complained of being attacked by former street kids while on duty.

He said on November 7, around 20:00 hours, a police officer was attacked by three street kids who were accompanied by a woman.

Mr Siame said the youths beat up the police officer and tore his uniform-shirt at the checkpoint in Lufwanyama.

Mr Siame said on November 11, when police followed up the matter, they spotted two of the boys who had attacked the officer and apprehended them and later, word went round that police had picked up the boys.

Mr Siame said it was at this point that the boys mobilised themselves and started throwing stones and sticks at police officers to prevent the law enforcers from arresting their colleagues.

In the process, police officers tried to threaten the boys by shooting in the air and on the ground.

Mr Siame said the bullets that hit a stone bounced and hit one of the street kids on the chin, while missiles fired in the air hit the other two.

Meanwhile, Lufwanyama member of Parliament (MP), Lwipa Puma, has warned that the former street kids who are terrorising the area risk being flashed out if they continued with their attacks on the residents.

Dr Puma, who is Health Deputy Minister, also appealed to the ministry of Sport, Youth and Child Development to scrutinise the youths enrolled at the centre saying others were criminals.

Dr Puma said in an interview yesterday that the rights and freedoms of others in the area should not be compromised just because they were being reformed.

He had received numerous complaints of assault and harassment by the youths from the residents in Lufwanyama.

"These boys are causing a lot of confusion, if they don’t change they will be evicted from the area," he said.

Dr Puma said there was need for the ministry to re-assess the kids before being enrolled, as most of them could be hard-core criminals.

ZAMBIA: Getting street kids to stay on the straight and narrow
01 Nov 2006 15:17:36 GMT
Source: IRIN

LUSAKA, 1 November (IRIN) - Dressed in baggy trousers, caps and colourful T-shirts, the toughened teens of the "Back to School Project" were scared.

The boys, all between the ages of 14 and 18, live on the streets of Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, where they play, fight, gamble and do what they can to earn a little money for food and drink, sometimes raking in enough to help support their families. Each of the boys was to be tested for HIV that day.

"I am not going!" yelled one of the younger boys. "I am going to hide and then I won’t have to go", he said, pouting and folding his arms over his thin chest. But with a little cajoling and backslapping from some of the braver boys, they all eventually piled into a sweltering van for a 20-minute, cross-town ride to the clinic.

The boys have a right to be scared. Despite a growing economy, political stability and the best efforts of foreign donors and non-governmental organisations, Zambia’s rates of HIV have remained stubbornly high. About one in five sexually active Zambian adults are infected.

About two-thirds of the country’s 11.7 million population lives on less than US$1 a day, while about half the population is undernourished, according to a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report published in 2005. Odds are that about five of the 27 boys who attend the Back to School Project, a privately-funded initiative aimed at getting kids off the street and into a classroom, will test positive for HIV.

Catherine Sozi, the head of UNAIDS in Zambia, describes the task of fighting the scourge of HIV/AIDS in this land-locked, southern African country as close to overwhelming: "The rollout of ARVs began in July, 2004 and they were made free last year, but only about 75,000 people in the country are currently receiving the drugs", she said. "The waiting lists are incredibly long and there is a lack of warm bodies to administer the drugs and to care for the sick…It is a growing but still weak economy dependent on foreign aid with a real shortage of human resources".

But help is arriving from disparate quarters, both from big business and grassroots activists. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and western donors recently axed about US$6.5 billion from Zambia’s foreign debt, leaving the country with a relatively trifling US$500 million to pay back to lenders.

The massive debt forgiveness should – in theory – free up newly re-elected president Levy Mwanawasa to boost spending on health and education across the country, especially in Zambia’s out-lying, poorer regions.

Zambians themselves are also deciding enough is enough. Zambian Monica Eisenberg studied business at a prestigious school in London, but eschewed a high-flying career in Britain to found the Back to School Project in Lusaka last year.

"When I returned home from my time in the UK, I was absolutely shocked and sickened to see how many more children were living on the streets from even a few years ago", she said. "The increase, was, of course, due in large part to the toll of HIV/AIDS, with parents dying wholesale and leaving behind orphans…Often a new spouse of a widowed parent doesn’t want to look after someone else’s children, so they stay on the streets".

Eisenberg estimated that perhaps 20,000 children live on Lusaka’s streets – skipping school, spending their days on the dusty boulevards, begging or eking out a living by washing cars or carrying groceries. Unicef, the UN Children’s agency, estimates there are 75,000 street children in the country.

But with the help of volunteers, a teacher and a nurse, Eisenberg founded the Back to School Project, which currently cares for 27 teenagers, offering them education, food, counselling and alternatives to their aimless and sometimes violent lives on the streets.

"Right now we gather outside for study, but we’re building a classroom and in a couple of years we hope to have a full education centre built on 300 acres of land, where the students will live, study and even work on a farm", Eisenberg said. "Nobody forces the boys to come, most come voluntarily almost every day for three hours of schooling, so it shows they want to change their lives and all they need is a way to do it", she added.

Hammering home the dangers of HIV/AIDS and delivering the gospel of safe sex to the boys – all who claim to be sexually active, some even boasting of several partners - are fundamental to the project.

One way of diverting them from begging or fighting is to engage their creative side. The boys were recently given disposable cameras and asked to fan out across Lusaka and take pictures of what HIV/AIDS means to them.

One boy snapped photographs of two men shaking hands. He also took pictures of a toilet seat from several angles. "You can’t get HIV by shaking or by sitting on the toilet", he explained.

When asked what inspired his collection of pictures, 17-year-old Charles Mwansa bows his head and turns reflective: "I took pictures of a very ill woman I know and now she’s been having medicine and it makes me happy to look at the picture and think she’s healthy again. It might make other people happy too and show you can get better", he said.

The boys are especially proud of their work, knowing their best photographs will feature at an exhibition in Lusaka beginning in mid-November. Some pictures will also be used by the UNDP in an upcoming publication.

"With this project, we have tried to hook them into spending their time differently and they’ve really taken to it", Eisenberg said. "A lot of them want to be rappers and I tell them they have to broaden their vocabulary and not bore us to death with the same 10 words over and over, so you have to appeal to their dreams to keep them coming back to the school".

Back at the clinic, a minor miracle. A couple of tense hours after the boys had been tested for HIV, the results are back – all are negative. One boy joked that he is going to sleep with someone tonight to celebrate, but the message of safe sex seems to be getting through.

"Winning the fight against HIV/AIDS will ultimately come down to what individuals can do, what religious leaders can do to help remove the stigma, and about what the private sector can do to help its workers", said Sozi. "Most important is the task of changing people’s behaviour and that is not a job any one group or the government can do alone, it’s up to everybody to help, the whole society".

jh/tm/jk

IRIN news

allAfrica.com: Zambia: Efforts to Rehabilitate Street Children Welcome

The Times of Zambia (Ndola)

EDITORIAL
September 15, 2006
Posted to the web September 15, 2006

IT is encouraging to see efforts being made either to rehabilitate runaway children, also called street kids. Gestures to help them with requisites such as food and clothing are also good. But what is really needed is to find a solution to what is causing this explosive problem of street kids. The situation is, admittedly, getting out of hand.

In the past, the numbers were higher in cities and towns with large populations. That is not the case any more. These loitering and often begging children are all over. When times are hard they cannot extract anything from the alms, they are forced to pillage dumpsites scavenging for discarded food.

That exposes them to further danger. A lot of theories have been advanced in attempts to establish or explain the cause of street kids. Most of them have been abstract.

Those in social work believe that it has more to do with the homes these children come from. Others have argued that not all the street kids ought to be on the street. Some of them may genuinely be orphans but others have run away from home out of truancy seeking solace along side roads.

The advent of HIV/AIDS cannot be discounted completely as a contributing factor to the country’s growing social problem.

But whatever the case, there is need to tackle this problem head on. Sadly the myriad of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) formed under the guise of resolving the issue have not done much.

They have made the money out of the plight of the children while the problem continues to ravage. There is a school of thought which argues that there is need for people to begin respecting family values.

If there is a place that should not be grappling with the problem of street kids, it is Africa. The family system is so closely knit here that there is simply no room for any one member of the family to be discarded.

The extended family system has cemented the blood line relationship to an extent that children born of brothers are not called cousins but brothers or sisters.

When any of the fathers die, the surviving brother would look after the children. It appears that the bond brought about by the extended family system has been broken and many people believe that it has something to do with turning backs against family values which recognised the extended family system.

But there is also need to look at other factors. Children whose parents are still alive should have no business on the streets. Their parents ought to take up their responsibilities of raising their offspring.

Some have suggested that one of the ways to solve the problem is to punish negligent parents. Another way to tackle the problem would be to improve social amenities in the country where most children could spend their pass time.

It is more practical to invest in structures which syphon children from the streets than simply donating clothing and foodstuffs for them."

 (Blog excerpt)

Our trip to Zambia 2006

Hi all, we’re back from our trip to Zambia. We returned on Monday 14th August after a 10 day stay in the country (2.8.06 – 14.8.06).

We went with 8 other members of our church (Vineyard) from Loughton, Essex, to a project called ‘Beautiful Gate’. This project takes the form of a school based in Ndeke village, Kitwe. The school is free for 200 children, many of whom are orphaned because of the HIV/AIDS virus. The project also runs an outreach scheme for Street kids in Kitwe city.

Whilst there we worked at a new school site, carrying bricks that had been made with a brick machine that had been funded by the church and baked in the sun, and planted grass in furrows ready to become a new playing field. We ran holiday activities for the school children, visited Street children giving out new clothes and visited Robert Compound, a place populated by 8000 Zambians, where most of the school children come from. We also provided a ‘clinic’ where it was able to provide simple First Aid and care.

Sarah:

“It was amazing to see the children run to greet us every morning. There was of course a language barrier but it was not hard to see the love and appreciation on their faces. We were made to feel very welcome and were told to consider Robert Compound as our second home. It is for me my second home now. I definitely want to return now that I know what peoples needs are. I want to make a difference to these peoples lives. They have so little but are always happy and welcoming.”

(Blog excerpt)

Ugandan Diary: A Kilo of Caterpillars, A Three Legged Monkey and The World’s Crappest Neil Diamond Impersonator

"One thing that you can’t help noticing in Lusaka is the number of street kids who swarm all over at traffic lights and everywhere else begging for money. This is something that I don’t think I will ever manage to get used to no matter how long I live in Africa for. Not all does it make you feel like an absolute bastard for not giving them money (Rich had told me that it was much better to make a donation to a charity or project for these kids than give to them on the street) but it really brings it home to you how fucked up things have become when there are kids of seven and eight with nothing more than the rags they’re dressed in begging for 500 Kwacha (about 13 pence!)."

Zambian street children a time bomb - warns church leader, brought to you by African News Dimension

July 15, 2006
By ANDnetwork .com

The problem of street children requires economic solutions, Restoration Ministries Reverend Cyril Phiri has observed.

Reverend Phiri who runs a number of christian orphanages in Lusaka, said although the problem of street children seemed partially solved with government’s introduction of Zambia National Service (ZNS) camps, it still remains a time bomb.

“The street kids problem is an economic problem. We need more people in employment and general improvement of people’s lives if we are to remove these children from the streets and prevent more from appearing there the following day,” he said.

Phiri said creating homes for street children was not a solution to the problem.

“Making a few transitory homes for them and putting them in camps won’t solve anything and this is where our politicians come in because as much as this problem is economic it is also connected to governance,” Phiri said.

He said with correct governance systems, the problem of street children would be adequately tackled.

“Correct governance is all about empowering people, getting the nation and the population to a better position for them to survive,” Phiri said. “To those aspiring for political leadership they must have a plan on what they will do about this problem.

The country does not need aspirants who are plan-less on issues of street kids. Just because it’s silent doesn’t mean it’s gone but that it has continued to be a bomb in the background waiting to explode while everyone ignores it.”

Phiri said having a high population of children on the streets was equivalent to having more children involved in war.

“What we have is not very different from what is happening in Siberia. In both cases the children have been exposed to unconducive environments and vices such as stealing and mutilating others.

This not only requires psychological input but a lot of political will, economic solutions and the correct governance,” said Phiri.

The Post - Zambia AM//JB