THEIR PROBLEMS

You may well find it hard to imagine how much street children suffer. Generally around 8 to 12-years-old and too young to work, street children are hungry, beaten, and imprisoned for petty offenses, such as stealing food or even just loitering. Sometimes these small children are placed in cells with adult prisoners.
They are vulnerable to infectious diseases and drug addiction.

But above all, a street child is lonely. A testimony to this tragic fact is a case when four 12-years-old boys buried a child of 10 without any adult assistance.
To save these children, we are going to have to begin by adressing their most desperate and urgent problems, but that’s not enough. We cannot stop working on solving their core problems at the same time.

* Immediate problems requiring urgent actions
* The core problems

• Hunger.

Finding things to eat is not the main problem fort street children, as their strong sense of solidarity means that they often share foods.

However, many children die of malnutrition, scurvy or beriberi, as result of poor eating habits.

• Filth.

All street children complain constantly about filth. They have a hard time finding a place to wash clothes. This is the reason that the children are invariably infested with lice and scabies.

Just a tap and a safe place where their clothes would not be stolen, would already be of great importance for them.

• Disease.

When street children get sick, who takes care of them? Where can they go for treatment? And that’s without even taking into account the need for treatment of the child’s psychological scars.

• Loneliness.

This is the greatest of the street children’s problems. They no longer have their parents, nor any other adult to talk to, no adult is available to talk with, and every effort to reach out to other people is rejected with scorn or indifference. We all need love, especially children. Just a smile can be enough. Delinquency. The absence of love often makes the street child vulnerable to all sorts of deviant behavior, such as theft, drug addiction and prostitution. As a result, they are dealt with as delinquents, instead of being recognized as the victims that they really are.

• Violence of all kind.

Street children are on the front line when it comes to disturbed adults looking for victims. These unbalanced people, of whom they are far more than we might imagine, might be nymphomaniacs, child murders, angry shopkeepers, bad policemen and death squadrons.

• Rackeetering and prostitution.

Street children are constantly victimized by rackets, because they don't want to give up money that they've worked so hard to earn. But then where can the money be kept safe?

This source of danger frightens children, especially at night. Then, over time, the children no longer feel fear, but become numbed to all the surrounding violence, even the most evil, and eventually become indifferent to the thought of death. At this point, they may become violent themselves or die from an accident resulting from apathy in the face of danger.

A street child needs a refuge from the many dangers of life in the street.

A shelter, listening center or foster home, howewer, still doesn't solve the core problems of street children, which are:

• Illiteracy.

Almost always, street children’s FIRST priority is to learn how to read. Street children are very aware that education is the key to everything else...

• Bleak prospects.

Later street children will have to find a stable job and start a family, but they know that if no one helps them now, their chances in succeding at this are zero.

• Lack of professional training.

A street child sincerely wants to have real vocational training. Until such training is obtained, however, all the child knows how to do is steal.

• Social ostracism.

A street child is ostracized and wants to return to the mainstream. In order to be able to learn how to live like other people, the child has to be taught to recognize basic rules of good and bad conduct.

• Absence of love.

Though it is seldom mentioned by the street children themselves, this is their fundamental problem. Street children will do almost anything to find someone to love them.

Why are they in the street? ...

... How to save them?

Updated on 15 november, 2007