Rescue or ruin in Manila?

Arts/Sciences student Cameron Sugden has been volunteering with the organization Bahay Tuluyan in Manila, The Philippines, which helps street children who would otherwise be locked up by authorities. He told ANU Reporter about the extent of the problem.

How did you did you find out about Bahay Tuluyan?

I volunteered with Australian Volunteers International in 2006. Along with three other Australian students, I conducted research into the situation of children in conflict with the law within Laguna Province [in the Philippines]. Children of all ages were being arrested - – mostly because of minor crimes such as sniffing solvent, pick-pocketing, or breaking the curfew – and placed into jail cells for indefinite periods of time.  Not being separated from adult offenders who have committed serious offences, these children were often subject to abuse, neglect and exploitation from the adult prisoners. The report we produced was used by Bahay Tuluyan to gain some insight into what services and facilities were available to children in conflict with the law

Why are street children treated so poorly in the Philippines?

Because both the very rich and the very poor often need to occupy the economic centres of the Philippines, poverty is very much in view of the more affluent residents of Manila. Like all the other mega-cities of Asia, it’s common to see luxury residential quarters, office towers, hotels, and shopping malls sitting beside and above squatter settlements.

Generally, street children have refused to remain in neglected, hidden away areas of the city. We found that the majority of street children had staked out the most beautified areas of the city – squares, major highways, outside shopping centres, markets, fountains, tourist attractions, and near restaurants. These are areas of the city that are rich in resources: people to beg from, tourists to sell small items to, restaurants that hand out free food, grass to sleep on, fountains to wash in, and plenty of areas to play. But they are also areas of the city that the wealthier residents of the city would prefer to claim as their own – and to keep ‘beautiful’.

This situation has given rise to many uncomfortable encounters between the rich and poor. While walking along the streets or sitting in a restaurant, you’re often approached by snotty-nosed, barefooted, half-naked street children asking for food. Others can be seen tapping on tinted car windows, asking for money. Walking down the steps to the train station, you see mothers holding out malnourished babies. And in the parks or outside the local 7/11, street children can be found sniffing rugby (a brand of glue). This seems to have incubated a lot of distrust, frustration, and hostility among the general public towards street children.  Street children are often called ‘yagit’ by the general public – which translates as ‘rubbish on the street’.  

The wealthier residents of Manila seem to have engaged in a number of methods to remove unsightly poverty from view. Retreating to gated communities or spending great amounts of their time in one of Manila’s mega-malls provides one means if you have the money. Those who can’t afford to go to these extreme lengths – and so continue to experience uncomfortable encounters with the poor on a daily basis – seem to be the ones that are placing pressure on the government to remove unsightly street children, along with the uncomfortable emotions they evoke, from the urban landscape.

Until more recent years, the removal of homeless children from the streets of Manila has been conducted under the guise of ‘arrest’. But over the past decade, the Philippine government has been the target of much international and domestic condemnation for its mistreatment of street children. So the arrest of street children has become less and less common. In 2006, the Juvenile Justice and Welfare Act was enacted, banning the arrest and detainment of children under the age of 15 for any reason.

In more recent years, there appears to have been a shift in discourse from ‘street children as dangerous and criminal’ to ‘street children in need of special protection’. Now, children are not so much ‘criminal’ and ‘dangerous’ as they are ‘neglected’, ‘abused’, and ‘malnourished’. Unfortunately, this major shift in discourse has only been accompanied by a minor shift in practice.

Street children are still being indiscriminately, violently and involuntarily taken from the streets and detained in prison-like centres. The only difference is that this practice is now called ‘rescue’, making it more resilient to criticism from those less concerned with details beyond summarized tables and colourful graphs (this includes people and organizations in the international community too of course).

In the end, our research quite clearly shows that the ‘rescue’ of street children in Manila seems to be motivated by a concern with urban hygiene and the protection of the more wealthy citizens of the city from the poor over and above any concern with the welfare of street children themselves. Of course, there are plenty of individuals and organisations who do prioritise the needs of street children above all other concerns, but these people are typically marginalised and starved of resources.

We are, of course, not against protecting street children. The risks that children face on the streets are profound and real. We were concerned with the indiscriminate ‘rescue’ of street children, the violent and involuntary methods by which they are removed from the streets, and the unnecessary harm inflicted upon them during their detention.

What are the conditions like on the street?

Terrible. Diseases such as pneumonia, cholera, hookworms, tuberculosis, gastroenteritis, bronchitis, typhoid, and tetanus are all common killers among street children. I can’t remember seeing one street child that didn’t have some skin infection – and they just don’t seem to heal. Inaccessibility to basic health facilities, which are now mostly privatised, ensures many of these children die of preventable and treatable illnesses.

What are the rescue centres like?

Often, street children reside in areas discarded by the more wealthy as disaster prone and dangerous. So injuries and accidents are common.

The welfare system in the Philippines is virtually non-existent. So in order to survive, Manila’s street children are often forced to beg and steal, making them especially vulnerable to being taken into custody. Addiction to glue (often used to quell hunger) along with anti-vagrancy and curfew laws also increases the risk of them being arrested by police or ‘rescued’ by welfare staff.

Along with brutality inflicted by government workers (mainly police or ‘rescuers’), street children are often at risk of being victims of exploitation, sexual assault, traffic accidents, and violence. Many street children are run over by cars and jeepnees while selling items or begging on highways. Pimps often roam the streets at night looking for young girls and boys they can prostitute.

One of their greatest fears is being rescued. When a rescue van would arrive, they would run away – often into heavy traffic. The rescue van can arrive at any time. The use of batons is common. The vast majority of children we interviewed were injured in some way during their ‘rescue’. Rescuers receive no training other than self-defence and are often former street children themselves (sometimes offered food to do the dirty work). Volunteers wear no uniform or ID. Sometimes they are drunk during the rescue operation. During one rescue we observed, a group of young men carrying batons roamed the streets like a pack of wolves finding street children they could ‘rescue’.

Children are literally being taken from their mother’s side. We met one homeless woman who had two of her three children taken from her three years ago. She hasn’t heard from them since.

Many children are rescued while sleeping (rescue teams admit that they do so because children often run away from them). One six year old girl said it was the last thing she thought about as she went to sleep each night in the park. So the majority of street children we talked to seemed to live in perpetual fear of being ‘rescued’, often because it meant being separated from their family. So there are long lasting psychological injuries being inflicted on children too – by the ‘welfare’ system!

The majority of children are taken to the Reception and Action Centre (RAC). The conditions in there are horrendous.

It looks very much like a prison. There are high walls and barbed fences. A security guard sits at the entrance, pistol, capsicum spray and handcuffs around his waist belt. Staff roam the courtyard, batons in hand.

During our visit, the rooms were very overcrowded, the boys had no toilet (and the girls only one), and there were no mattresses. Children were sleeping on the wooden floor.

So if street children are considered yagit, then RAC can certainly be considered Manila’s mass dumping ground for the poor. Obviously, the welfare of ‘rescued’ children is not the primary concern

What is required? How will your research help?

First, I think people need to know the obvious: indiscriminate ‘rescues’ are inflicting both immediate and long-lasting injuries upon Manila’s street children. This includes not only the general public who are placing pressure on the government to keep the city clean and to ensure they are protected from the so called criminal, contagious, and disorderly masses of Manila, but also those involved in the practice of rescue itself. I think that once people know what’s happening, the international and domestic communities will make a stand – just like they did with the arrest of street children.

As I said before, calling street-cleaning ‘rescue’ has proven a very effective away of making this practice more resilient to criticism. How can you argue against ‘rescuing’ children in need of special protection? So by demonstrating quite clearly that its harmful, you can challenge peoples taken-for-granted beliefs about the city’s treatment of street children. And part of this, I think, involves making people more aware of just how dangerous misleading discourses can be in shaping our moral stance on particular practices. It’s incredibly dishonest to call a practice which harms children ‘rescue’. So making people ‘honest’ is another major hurdle to jump.

The primary aim of our research was to provide evidence that indiscriminate ‘rescues’ are traumatic and ineffective for the children involved. We found plenty of evidence to demonstrate that rescues fail to take into account the unique needs, circumstances and experiences of street children. Our findings were based on interviews with over 160 street children, 140 people from the general public, numerous street families and former street children, and senior staff working for government agencies involved in the practice of rescue.

Currently, Bahay Tuluyan is holding meetings with senior staff from all the government agencies involved in rescue operations. Bahay Tuluyan, along with many other NGOs in Manila, are calling for an immediate suspension of all indiscriminate rescues in the city. There’s been more and more publicity about indiscriminate ‘rescues’, including a recent article in Manila Times.

A drama group from BT also performs a play about the harmful nature of indiscriminate rescues. Many of the children in the play have been rescued themselves in the past. They have been performing at various venues around the city and the target audience is the general public.

Street children need to be re-humanized too. By lowering street children to the status of garbage on the street, they are immediately placed outside society’s moral circle. Overcoming this may involve a combination of public education, challenging taken-for granted beliefs and stereotypes among those working with street children, and fostering more positive interactions between the general public, community workers, and street children. Some schools in Manila are starting to send students to squatter settlements to live with poor families for a week or so. I think that’s a great idea. It brings poverty back into the collective consciousness and allows people to weave their own life story into those of the poor.
There’s been way too much focus on short-term, quick fix solutions. The ‘rescue’ of street children takes months, years, even decades. NGOs around the world are producing some really practical and innovative programs that provide more durable solutions to the problems street children face.  We tried to include as many as these as possible in the recommendations section of our report.
The city’s concern with city beautification does not preclude the proper treatment of street children who inhabit public spaces in the city. If the government provides a shelter where street children feel protected, where they are provided with food, clean water, medical care, and education, where they can play and socialize, and where they are free to leave at any time, street children will be much more likely to voluntarily remove themselves from these beautified spaces and spend more time in shelters. And with a full tummy, street children will be less likely to ‘hassle’ the general public. So it seems obvious that city beautification and the protection of street children can be pursued simultaneously.

Actually, many NGOs like BT are providing the kind of shelters I described above. The government needs to provide centres like BT with more financial and technical support.

More: www.bahaytuluyan.org

New shelter in old city

Ishita Yadav
Posted online: Sunday , June 01, 2008 at 10:05:01

A health and day centre for children comes up near Jama Masjid

The street children of old Delhi now have a place to go to. Jamghat, a Delhi based organisation, in partnership with Max India Foundation, has set up a health and day care centre at Jama Masjid to provide street children with a clean and safe shelter and recreational activities.

Jamghat, which works for the welfare of street children, was co-founded by theatre artists Amit Sinha and Lokesh Jain in 2003. “Prince Charles was visiting Delhi and we had organised a play for him. Whatever money we made out of that performance, we spent on providing street children with recreational facilities, vocational training, food and education,” says Sinha.

The theme of the play was street children of India—14 actors in it were street children. The initial idea was to support these children for about six months and create awareness in the country about social issues. However, the boys were having so much fun that they told Sinha they didn’t want to leave. “We then realised that the only thing these children were lacking was opportunity. It was then that we decided to support them and provide them with vocational training so that they could get jobs in the real world,” says Sinha.

What followed was a number of other plays, in which college students performed. Jamghat also makes handicraft items, such as bags and photo frames, to help raise money for the children.

“After we made enough money, we set up a shelter in Lado Sarai in which we provided 15 street children with food, education and vocational training,” says Sinha. In 2004, some of the boys at Jamghat were selected under a Pakistan exchange programme to interact with children in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad. Finally, in 2006 the group decided to register themselves as an NGO. “Now, most of our children go to different government and public schools. One of our children is even studying at Mother’s International school,” he says proudly.

The Jama Masjid Centre provides shelter to 50 street children. The aim is to provide a healthy and learning environment to the children. “Once they grow older, we help them move out and get jobs in the real world,” Sinha says. About 35 children have managed to get jobs, some even in five-star hotels. While some are working in factories and city shops, others prefer to go back to their hometown and work there.

Sinha wants to open many more centres for such children but says that lack of funds are stopping him from doing so. “We are now looking for people or organisations that can help us make life better for these children,” he says.

Nepalese football academy rescues street children
    
31 May 2008 01:18
Three years ago, Mahendra BK was a 12-year-old boy living on the street in Pokhara, a middle-sized Nepalese town with a population of about 200 000. His mother died when he was still an infant and his alcoholic father died of tuberculosis when Mahendra was only eight.

Mahendra lived in extreme poverty with his sister and grandmother for about a year. At the age of nine, he left them and ended up in Kathmandu, the capital, where he was living a high-risk life on the street, collecting garbage and selling it for petty cash to recycling factories.

Mahendra’s story is all too common among children in Nepal where, according to the local NGO Child Workers in Nepal, an estimated 5 000 children live on the streets without a family.

But Mahendra BK (a two-letter family name is common in Nepal) was lucky. Today, he is one of just more than 20 boys in the Sahara Football Academy in Pokhara. Sahara (the Nepalese word for "support") is a social welfare organisation that provides street children with lodging, food, education and something to do — playing football.

Mahendra is the goalkeeper in the Sahara team, and he explains that joining the football academy has changed his life and given him hope for the future.

"When I was living on the street, I was sleeping under empty rice sacks in many different places. The police used to come around and chase me away. So I was really happy to come to Sahara. Here, we practise football every day and I hope that one day I will be good enough to become an international footballer … like Oliver Kahn, my favourite player," he says.

Of course, not all of the 20 boys will be able to make a living by playing football.

"I think that perhaps five of the boys we have here possess the talent to go on to play in the Nepalese A division and on the national team in the future," says Keshab Bahadur Thapa, Sahara general secretary. "Even if they go on to play professional football, they can’t expect to become rich that way. There isn’t very much money in Nepalese football right now, but it is slowly getting better."

That is why the club also tries to provide vocational training for the boys when they turn 16 years old. After that age, the club helps them establish their own life outside the academy.

"Firstly, we try to place them in other football clubs where they will receive a small salary, but we also give them training as mechanics, electricians, plumbers and carpenters," Thapa explains.

While the academy was established as a regular football club in 1998 by members of the local community, the idea for social work and the combined orphanage and football academy developed later. In 2004, the club was made a reality, largely through the inspiration and fund-raising of Nepali expatriates such as Navin Gurung who lives in the United Kingdom.

Gurung relates: "I was already involved in organising sports events in the UK. One day a friend told me about the activities of the Sahara club and I was really touched. From there the connection started. Now many of my personal friends, Nepalese acquaintances and business connections have all assisted me in organising various fund-raising programmes to support the valuable work that Sahara is doing."

In addition to funds raised abroad, the Sahara club also receives money from the local business community in Pokhara and through ticket sales at the tournaments it arranges every year.

The Sahara club isn’t the only home for orphans and street children in Nepal. Indeed, there are many such homes. But the quality of the Nepalese orphanages varies a lot and they often lack proper management.

The United Nations Children’s Fund spokesperson in Nepal, Rosanne Vega, says: "Since there is no proper monitoring of orphanages, the quality and conditions for the children vary a lot. Almost anybody can start an orphanage here, including people completely lacking experience in this field."

Indeed, it is common for street children to stay in an orphanage for a while but then run away and end up on the street again, as the conditions in some of the orphanages are even worse than living rough.

Rajesh Thakuri, aged 11, is one of the many street children in Kathmandu. He was staying in an orphanage but ran away because, as he says, "They didn’t like me. They hated me there!" He now sleeps on the street and begs for money outside a hospital.

Another street boy, 12-year-old Raivi, has lived on the streets for the past two years. He is a rag-picker, going through other people’s garbage and collecting glass, metal, paper and plastic that he can sell to recycling factories.

Raivi sleeps every night in relative safety in the no-man’s-land behind the airport perimeter fence. Every morning he goes around town and searches the garbage piles before the sun heats them up and makes them too smelly.

According to International Labour Organisation statistics, the thousands of rag-picking children in Nepal work an average of six hours a day, making about 87 rupees a day — just short of €1. But living on the street, there is always the risk of losing the day’s wage to gangs, junkies, bigger boys or even police officers.

At Sahara, staff say, with some pride, that in the three years since the academy started not one child has run away.

The children’s programme in the academy usually starts at 5am when they get up and have a snack before taking a five-minute walk to the local stadium, where they have two hours of football training. Then it’s back to the hostel for breakfast and school.

When school is out in the afternoon, they again practise football for an hour or two before doing their homework. The two assistant trainers in Sahara work as tutors and help the boys with their studies.

In the evening, after dinner, they sometimes watch English Premier League football on TV, wash their clothes or play in the garden across the street. They don’t really have toys, so they just play with whatever they can find, as is normal for Nepalese children. Once a month, they play friendly football matches against some of the local school teams.

Although the dormitory at Sahara is crowded and the facilities a bit rudimentary, there is little else that the boys really need here. They have good food and warm beds, form strong friendships and there is always an adult around to help them with their problems.

The goalkeeper, Mahendra, expresses a single wish: "I would like to have a pair of goalkeeper’s gloves for the winter football training."