a day in the life of a street child essay

A day in the life of a “street-child”

12 March 2013

The nights are often penetratingly cold in Nairobi and without blankets or any form of shelter, the cold rain and damp ground can make a night seem excruciatingly long. The three young boys huddle up on a piece of cardboard and cover themselves with a sack and a piece of plastic on top of their frail thin bodies. Any unfamiliar noise awakens them; the constant fear of attack, robbery or what might be worse: a threat of Sodomy alarmingly lurks at every night-fall!

The boys live a semi-nomadic life, constantly haunted by thugs, watchmen and even the police; their entire existence consists of surviving through the starkest poverty, relentlessly forced to move from one place to the next, seeking shelter in abandoned buildings or empty half-roof shops in the market place during the cold Nairobi nights. The street is all they have to call “home”.

This particular night is spent under the covering of a bridge and for once they are left alone from any unwanted intrusion. The noise of the city slowly dies down and except for the occasional moaning uttered during a bad dream, all you hear is dogs barking in a distance. The three ten – eleven year old boys lay close together keeping each other warm and comforted throughout the night.

Before long, dawn breaks and their day begin. Their clothes are damp and dirty, smothered with mud, ash and feces; the stench from each of them is enough to make your stomach churn!

Bath-day today! One of them suggests as if he read my mind and they start on a 3 km hike to find a secluded outlet of the Nairobi River where they can bathe. The River is their only source of water yet after bathing in it; they often come away smelling even worse than before! Occasionally the water is so contaminated by toxic waste, acid and sewage it causes outbreaks of hives or even third- degree burns on their entire bodies.

Once the have bathed and washed their clothes they let the morning sun dry them off and lay in the tall grass waiting for the wind to dry their clothes. The bath made them giddy and they laugh and tell jokes, like any other boy their age would do – A bath can make you feel “brand new” and for a moment they forget their horrific existence, with conditions that more resemble ones of animals, than of human beings….

Finally hunger sets in and get’s the best of them; they hurry to a nearby junction where the traffic-jams consistently bring the cars to a slow stop. The boys spread out and wander from car to car begging for money. Hardly anyone gives them any; most people despise them and call them names or hurriedly close their windows and lock their doors at the mere sight of them. “It was so much easier to earn money this way a few years ago” Abdi tells me, ”Now we are often forced to steal or starve or find scraps of food in the garbage dumps…”

Noon approaches and the boys have only managed to get thirty measly Shillings between them. As they head back towards Eastlands they decide to hide the money in the soles of  Joel’s shoes (neither of the other two boys own a pair of shoes to use as a hiding spot anyway! ) out of fear of being robbed by older “street-boys” who, every day demand money in exchange for protection. “A few Shillings is enough to loose your life over, if you put up a fight” the young boys tell me!

In Eastlans they find the woman who provides them with glue. She has made a career on selling home- made glue to the street-children; a potent, thick toxic substance that helps numb their heartache and disguises their hunger. And it is cheaper than buying food, David informs me! Their cruel unlikely existence often forces these children to disguise their hunger by sniffing glue or petrol; “cause it makes you forget …”!

The signs of starvation are inherent; the boys’ bodies are frail, sickly and malnourished. Their eyes blank and distant and after a few drags on the glue-bottle their minds utterly intoxicated. They throw themselves down on the grass and fall asleep in the shade of a tree. My heart feels the burden of their sorrow as I watch them drown the memories of their traumatic pasts… Most of them have stories so dark they delivered them to the hands of the streets. Stories they never want to revisit but which they forever are unable to forget…

The early evening is spent rummaging the large garbage piles on the nearby dump; relentlessly searching for something to fill their aching bellies with, before they surrender to yet another drunken stupor caused by glue.

As the darkness of night approaches and the Nairobi traffic slowly dies down, the boys light a fire to stay warm by. Sitting there they voice their unheard dreams; dreams of a good life, of going to school, getting a job and a home – and in their hearts, the silent untold dream of being loved….

But for now their biggest worry is to find a safe place to sleep through yet another dangerous night!

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Children — Street Children in Our World

Street Children in Our World

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Published: Jun 5, 2019

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Case Studies and Success Stories, Reports

Street children stories. Nobody’s children are everyone’s children. Voices from the street and for the street

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European Federation for Street Children

Each street child has its own destiny and its own story. The following stories sent by Member Organizations of the European Federation for Street Children (EFSC), illustrate such destinies giving a voice to these children who are often invisible. They also show the great humanitarian support work that these organizations are carrying out to help those children living on the streets, the majority of them in very precarious conditions. Beyond the specific differences of each case, most of the stories have a common theme that shows the families situation, the experiences of poverty and social exclusion, as well as the initial difficulties experienced in the first contact with the NGOs and their ability to accept help. They often speak a simple but authentic language describing the reasons for their situation in an honest way and therefore strongly accusing a cold and ignorant society that ´produces` them.

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American Street Kid: A Conversation About Life on and After the Streets

• Jennifer Brouillard
• 20 April 2021

“Two years ago, my mom kicked me out because she couldn’t afford me and a dog.”

David “Greenz” Johnson stated the above as a homeless teen in the trailer for the documentary “ American Street Kid .” This blunt and raw emotion continued in JWU’s Media & Politics Café’s Zoom event “American Street Kid: A Conversation About Life on and After the Streets.” The Media & Politics Café is a biannual virtual series in which students from all disciplines hear directly from people affected by and impacting a myriad of complex topics. The event has become a hallmark of a JWU education.

Cohosted this spring by Associate Professor Carla White Ellis, Ph.D. and JWU Policy Lab student coordinator Tyler Piekarski '21, the panel included Johnson; Marquesha “Kiki” Babers, a homeless youth also featured in the documentary; and producer Michelle Kaufer as they relayed their experiences with the film that took 10 years to make.

Kaufer began the discussion with the initial vision she and director Michael Leoni had planned: a two-minute public service announcement about homeless youth in Los Angeles. “We were going out for a weekend, meet some kids, do some interviews, get some actors to spout statistics, and that was it,” she says. They soon realized the severity of the abuse and neglect these kids endured and decided that the world needed to hear these stories.

“Education is the beginning of any kind of change,” Kaufer attests. “If you don’t know, you can’t be part of the solution. Now I’ve seen and I can’t unsee.” Her goal? To encourage people to act in any way that they can — from donating clothes to a homeless youth shelter to advocating for policy changes (for instance, the law hasn’t always considered couchsurfing as homelessness).

“You are not your circumstances. The things you go through do not define you.”

The initial PSA grew to a short film and then ballooned to feature length with entire hard drives full of footage. They had the film cut before they met Johnson, Babers and others — and that’s when a more definitive and emotional tale emerged. They scrapped the old footage and started from scratch. As director, Leoni wasn’t supposed to be part of the narrative. But he connected so well with the kids, Kaufer realized they couldn’t proceed without including Leoni’s efforts to help them.

Vicious Cycle

According to the National Homelessness Law Center, the number of homeless Americans has increased 43% in the past year. The National Center on Family Homelessness reports that a staggering 2.5 million children are now homeless each year in America, representing one in every 30 children in the United States. Panhandling, a common practice despite being banned in several states, has become even more prevalent. Kids living on the streets soon realize that the kindness of passersby is not enough on which to rely, and many resort to childhood prostitution and drug use. The film features an entrepreneurial group of homeless youth holding a sign that advertises their learned abilities while highlighting their sense of self-worth: “Kick My Ass — $1.”

You may be wondering, “Why aren’t these kids in foster care or getting jobs to support themselves?” Several of the teens in the film reported just as much, if not more, abuse and neglect in foster care than with their parents. The vast majority cannot get jobs because they do not have an ID or a work permit. To get these items, they need a birth certificate. To get a birth certificate, they need a social security card. To get a social security card, they need an ID. But they can’t get an ID without a birth certificate. Parents unable or unwilling to feed, clothe or house their children do not have the capacity to help find this information. These kids who fall through the cracks of society literally have no identity.

Kaufer was able to find a website that mails birth certificates for a fee if the recipient is able to report the hospital in which they were born. Many of these youth can’t even do that — although some have been able to retrieve hospital information from parents. Then these youth need the money to pay the fee — and an address. Since they are homeless, where should the ID be sent? Those who successfully navigate this process and receive their ID then face a new threat: Their belongings are constantly stolen. And the vicious cycle repeats.

“You’re Crazy”

Babers laughs when asked what her thought process was as she ran away from home at age 15. “I was so naïve. I was already homeless with my mom [and two brothers]. We were staying in a beat-up shelter with water damage on floor, and I figured I was one less person for my mom to feed. I can go get a job and go to school, make money and share what I made, and provide a better life for my family.” She didn’t realize how wrong she was — without identification, there was no way she could work.

After surviving an attempted rape while sleeping in an abandoned house, Babers returned to her still-homeless mother. Babers had been raped at age nine by her stepfather and the memories of both traumas overwhelmed her. On the verge of ending her life, she was placed in a psychiatric hospital.

“I still don’t trust people,” she confides. “I’m over the initial fear I used to have of getting on the bus or walking down the street, always on my guard, but I believe that I still have work to go; I still do keep up a wall when I first meet someone. It’s making it hard for me to evolve — not a fear of safety, but a fear of being let down. Trust is really hard to just give when you’ve been through so much. A mental hospital staff member would mess with the girls, and any time [the girls] would tell, [staff] would think ‘you’re crazy’ and [the girls] would get drugs that knocked them out. I’m even scared now that I said something here! Being told that you’re lying about something that you know is true, being made to seem crazy when someone is hurting you instead of getting help from people who are supposed to help, it makes it harder in the future.”

But Babers soon found her voice. Get Lit , a youth poetry organization that has sent poets from Compton, Watts, and all over California to the Hollywood Bowl, the Kennedy Center in DC, and even the White House, came to her school when she was 15 and began offering a boys-only program. She convinced them to create a program for girls; within she it found the power of her words — and her calling. After four years studying poetry with the organization, today she is one of its teaching artist and mentors. She has launched a successful career as a poet and spoken word artist, performing for global icons like HRH Princess Reema Al Saud of Saudi Arabia, Angelina Jolie, Hillary Clinton, Freida Pinto, and countless others. She also serves as an ambassador for Girl Rising , a global movement working to ensure that girls around the world are educated and empowered.

During the Zoom, Babers recited her poem “That Girl,” chronicling her despair while homeless and the discovery of her self-respect. The poem brought many in the audience to tears. Even though she has achieved success as a poet, she someday hopes to achieve the dream she held as a child: to cook and run her own restaurant, a desire that was further solidified after working in a food truck for a day.

Good Kids in Bad Situations

In Los Angeles, Babers reports, half are homeless because of the high cost of living. Working full-time at minimum wage only pays for a one-bedroom apartment’s rent — and nothing else. The numbers will only get worse as the gap between cost of living and minimum wage continues to grow.

Babers is reminded of the insurance commercial that teaches people how not to become their parents. “The way we are as adults is directly correlated to what we went through as children. There’s no separation from that. If you do not get proper assistance mentally and physically you will always be dragged back into old habits. Even if we give everyone houses, it’s not going to work.”

Homeless youth need more than food, shelter and employment that current programs provide. They need purpose. They need to feel valued, part of a family, and deserving of love.

Baber continues, “I teach that you should wake up in the morning and write the poem you thought about last night, so you have something to strive for and help you make it to tomorrow. If you are abused by significant people in your life, you really have to work through that before you can move on to anything else.”

Kaufer hopes that the film helps people realize that homeless youth “are good kids in bad situations.” Growing up in New York City, she didn’t know homeless youth existed and thought that the kids who were sitting outside the 7-11 were juvenile delinquents. The truth is that the majority are actually products of abuse and neglect. “Things that were out of their control contributed to where they are now,” she states.

From Burden to Bettering

David Johnson was only available for the last 10 minutes of the event due to his work as a construction supervisor in Vancouver, Washington. But he made the most of his time as he recalled his teen years and answered questions. He first became homeless at age 14, when his mother left his belongings outside because he “wouldn’t stop hanging out with the Hispanic kids at school,” he says. Nicknamed “Greenz” for his love of marijuana, he went to live with his dad, a drug dealer. When Johnson let his brother in the house against his father’s wishes, his brother stole a pound of marijuana, so his father beat Johnson in retaliation. Johnson left his dad in Arkansas to move back with his mom in Arizona, until she chose to feed the dog over him. Feeling like a worthless burden, he developed a meth addition. This led him to the streets of Venice Beach, California — and the documentary.

“I would not be where I am today if not for Michael [Leoni, director], Erica [Katzin, producer] and Michelle [Kaufer]. Having just one person believe in you is one thing. But having three people who just met you and have your back no matter what and are always there for you — that’s another.”

When asked what he would tell another homeless child who ended up in his situation, Johnson says, “Depending on the predicament, if there was anything at all I could do for them, I would give them my number and try to be there. No matter how hard it seems right now, everything will work out as long as you believe in yourself and work toward bettering yourself every single day. Don’t become comfortable where you are.”

“You are not your circumstances,” Babers adds. “The things you go through do not define you. Strive for doing what you want, no matter what anyone tells you. Once you find something you love to do, you’ll never work again.”

Johnson grins and nods emphatically, repeating Babers last sentence. Beyond their occupations, they have learned there is something else they love: themselves.

Interested in affecting change for millions of homeless youth? Visit the American Street Kid Take Action page and see how you can help. Watch “American Street Kid” on your choice of streaming services (fee applies).

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A typical day in the life of a street child

A typical day in a life of a street child

With a fast-paced lifestyle becoming normal, everyone seeks the comforts of their house at the end of the day. Many of us take things for granted. The truth is that we should thank God for making us fortunate enough to live and relish the successes of life.

The day breaks and we get into motion. Either trying to meet some chores or just pretending to, everyone seems busy. Even then everything seems so usual and complete, in a way.

Life moves at its regular pace for most of us. But, deserts do exist beyond our green pastures. It's just that they are overlooked by our money-blinded eyes.

For me it was yet another fine day when something bizarre caught my sight. A child, maybe a couple of years old, was wandering at the robot. Walking bare feet and in rags, he was mopping cars with a filthy piece of cloth.

One knows what Pretoria is like in the month of January. When the temperature reaches 32 ' C, we think of resting in our air-conditioned rooms, relaxing in our double beds, and sipping a cold drink or lemonade. But that young boy was cleaning rich peoples cars.

Sitting in my car, I could clearly see those countless  brewing in his hopeful eyes, that innocent smile complemented by an easy-going expression on his face. He literally captured my mind for a while.

This is a preview of the whole essay

As he moved closer, I saw that twinkle brighten in search of a few coins which meant the world to him.

But then I witnessed the brutal death of his delight, the cruelty of the well-offs hurried their windows up on him. He protested unnecessarily to slide down the window, his little fingers got stuck in the gaps, gasping to be released, but nobody bothered.

I wondered at the irony of life. A single coin, which holds no value for us, meant a meal to him. His starving eyes got stuck at a fortunate kid, almost his age, gulping coke and munching chips in his air-conditioned car. Probably, he wants a taste of the same. But then who is going to buy him all this??? That's the fate he was born with!

He died every moment!!! Caught in the vicious circle of poverty and misfortunes, his chance at a normal life was snatched away mercilessly. Hardship killed his every little desire.

It was quite obvious that life was a struggle for him. Fighting every moment for his survival, he begged for money or food. Disregarded as a lifeless rascal by the fortunate ones, he was born in a ruined shack and nurtured by poverty. His only sources of entertainment were the used or discarded toys.

My heart overflowed with a strange feeling of sympathy for him. I could actually feel his pain.

Deeply captivated in my own thoughts, I was startled by a hooting car that caught my attention towards the green signal. The rat race was on again. Once more, people began to rush towards their respective ways, paying no attention to the little boy on the street.

Standing unfriendly under the shade of a tree, he waited for the green light to turn red again. His condition had such a deep effect on me that I was barely able to hold my feelings. As I was heading towards him, he looked at me with a big question in his eyes.....Why me?

I had no answers. I went to him and slipped a few coins in his hand. He said nothing and left with a cold blank stare.

Document Details

• Author Type Student
• Word Count 598
• Page Count 1
• Level AS and A Level
• Subject English
• Type of work Controlled assessment

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Filthy and violent it may be, but life is still precious for the world’s street children. Can you look them in the eye?

by Ben Faccini   + BIO

Years ago, along the cacophonous roads leading from Ramses Train Station in Cairo, I came across a small girl with a bright red headscarf weaving her way in and out of the slow-moving traffic, her bare feet shrouded in a haze of exhaust fumes. I watched as she banged on the windows of vehicles, the red of her headscarf a lurching traffic light forcing buses and trucks to a sudden halt. When drivers opened their windows to shoo her away, the girl pleaded for a chance to say something, running alongside the traffic to keep up. Uncowed by dismissive hand gestures or hastily resealed windows, she visited car after car, like a bee in a field of giant flowers, looking for a chance to speak to someone. She accepted the dregs of a water bottle and the tossed remains of snacks, but it wasn’t until she made one driver laugh, then another, that she finally received two precious coins.

Intrigued by the scene, I asked some Egyptian colleagues to help me talk to the girl. We found her sitting in the shade, against the pillar of a flyover, with a tiny boy, of three or four, huddled beside her. As we approached, the children stood up, ready to bolt, but we assured them we weren’t officials; we just wanted to talk. The girl was called Nadra. She was nine. As she spoke, her little brother nudged his head into the grimy folds of her dress and hid. Nadra explained that their widowed and bedridden mother spent her days in a lightless one-room shack on the outskirts of the city waiting for them to return with whatever they could find — some food, a bit of money, an item of clothing, a blanket for their shared bed mat.

Each day Nadra walked to central Cairo, dragging her little brother with her, to earn what she could by telling jokes to drivers. The jokes were based on improbable scenarios involving an Italian, a Frenchman and an Egyptian, or they were tales about hapless farmers from Upper Egypt getting lost in the maze of Cairo’s streets. Sometimes they were simply puns, a play on words. Nadra made them up from snippets of conversation she’d overheard or memorised from the television screens she paused to gaze at on her way back to her mother.

It seemed miraculous to me that a hungry, unschooled nine-year-old, who cared for a straggling younger sibling and a sick mother, could find it in herself to invent jokes and one-liners. But with her jokes, Nadra had found a unique way of wresting life-saving money from drivers who occasionally relented and dropped a small coin in her filthy palms, no doubt making sure not to touch her. Jokes were a weapon to shatter the indifference around her.

Ever since that defining meeting in Cairo, the resilience and ingenuity of street children has interested me, and despite numerous new encounters with street children across the world, Nadra has continued to haunt me; thanks to her, I began to wonder what society might really look like from the point of view of a street child, and to think about what it took to withstand the ordeals of homelessness. I yearned to know how Nadra managed to keep her imagination undefiled by the horrors of her life. Such questions deeply affected my work with excluded children and their education.

At the time I met Nadra, I was part of a project studying the conditions of children eking out a living on the streets of the Egyptian capital. Along with other colleagues from United Nations agencies, we interviewed a whole range of children. There were garbage-pickers and shoe-polishers, children who hawked their wares in market places, who led drivers towards spare parking places, cleaned windscreens or ran errands, chased tourists for loose change, or simply scrabbled through bins. Like street children in many countries, they described how the street was an unforgiving provider of life; how it could easily, and quickly, become the agent of death. They revealed how their waking hours were one long quest to subsist: scavenging, begging, bartering, scratching around for any means to pull through. Their eyes permanently scoured the pavements and roads for anything that might turn their lives around — a cigarette butt, a dropped banknote, a discarded piece of food, an abandoned scrap of clothing. Every breath they took had to be filled with resourcefulness.

T he phrase ‘street children’ is a much-used catch-all term for heterogeneous groups of children. Some live solely on the street, sleeping rough, finding shelter where best they can. Some spend their days in public spaces before returning to a family or a similar support structure in the evening. Others still live with their families on the streets. Overall figures don’t necessarily allow for these distinctions. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates there are currently more than 100 million street children worldwide — an estimate that is often quoted, with all categories of street child included. But it is those children who live solely on the street, away from a consistent adult presence of any kind, who are perhaps the most emblematic of the phenomenon. Research shows that these children leave, or are forced to flee, their homes for many reasons. Family breakdown and the death or illness of a parent are prime factors but, equally, natural disaster, conflict and abuse play their part.

While escaping to the streets is often a child’s only solution, the street provides an ephemeral freedom. It becomes mother, father, school and home. Survival rates are unsurprisingly low. Once on the street, a child can quickly get sucked into a life of violence and sexual exploitation, trafficking and substance abuse. Their existence is overshadowed by the urgent need to find a safe place to sleep and shelter. Those who do survive become forever alienated from mainstream society — and all the more menacing to it as they grow older.

There are cardboard boxes for beds, a few clothes hung over cracked rusting pipes, water collected in plastic bottles

Beyond the perpetual consternation of seeing young faces aged before their time, there is usually one detail that remains engraved in the mind after meeting a street child. That detail is often more potent than the generic attributes shared by many homeless children — premature deep wrinkles, raw eczema and psoriasis on the hands, rotting teeth, bodies stunted by malnutrition, patchy hair, lips cut with scabs, eyes dulled by substance abuse. One street boy in Mali, I remember, wore a pair of broken headphones round his neck. The end of the flex hung down to his bloated belly where his navel was buzzing with flies, a mass of wings, simmering and infected.

I recall a bleeding boy of only three or four in a doorway in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. He’d been beaten by a group of older children and was hunched over in the fetal position. His clenched fist clutched a hunk of bread that he had valiantly refused to surrender to his assailants: dry bread saturated with blood. Then a girl in Morocco, on the edge of Zagora and with the desert behind her, who put down the tray of food she was selling and showed me how she could write her name. A billowy sleeve concealed her hand as she traced into the dirt the letters of the only word she could spell. It was as if she’d conjured it from some hidden compartment. And in Bucharest, Romania, I watched a boy in a sagging, buttonless overcoat upturn the bins outside McDonald’s. With expert skill, he flicked through the rubbish, prising open boxes, rooting out unfinished food. He chucked the remains of burgers over a wall to some waiting friends. Then — like a champion smoker attempting to accommodate 50 cigarettes at once — he rammed as many chips as he could into his mouth and sucked on them.

In Mongolia, subterranean societies, free from adults, have been created by street children seeking refuge from hostile strangers, and the biting cold. Many of the buildings in the central part of the capital, Ulaanbaatar, are heated, thanks to a labyrinth of pipes built in the Soviet era to carry scalding water from power stations on the edge of the city. Manholes dotted around the pavements lead to grubby cavities where makeshift platforms can be set up above the water pipes. Vagrant minors live in groups, the oldest of them often taking charge in an unstructured way. Disease is rife, but a semblance of a home is created amid the dark and fetid heat. There are cardboard boxes for beds, a few clothes hung over cracked rusting pipes, water collected in plastic bottles. Once children retreat into this world it is hard to persuade them to resurface. The purposes of mainstream society soon wither away, as does trust in fellow humans. A woman who ran an education project for deprived youths in Ulaanbaatar told me that the greatest issue she faced was persuading the street children of the city to take advantage of the washrooms she provided. The children understood that it would benefit them to have a warm and disinfecting shower, but the inconvenience of removing and then replacing the newspaper they wrapped themselves in to keep warm was too great a challenge. One child took so long to rebind himself in new layers of newspaper that he missed his only literacy lesson. Others preferred to take any food they were offered and disappear back underground, unwashed, only to be further shunned by society as a result.

The police of Ulaanbaatar regularly do the rounds of the city to pick up stray children. Any they find are taken to a holding centre on the outskirts of the capital and kept there until they can be filtered off to various state institutions. Some then escape back to the street, only to be rounded up again later. In 2008, I was talking to the well-disposed policeman in charge of the holding centre when a van with the latest batch of children arrived. The back doors opened and a jumble of spindly legs, ragged clothes and knotted hair spilt out. The children were herded into the building and lined up in single file. There was a queue of up to 30, some already in their teens. Their hacking coughs and scratching spread in a ripple down the line. A toddler with bare legs and thin hair was passed from one teenager to another to hold. Once on the floor she walked up and down the queue of children looking for familiar faces, tugging on legs she knew. At no point did she look towards the adults present: we were unfamiliar and ghostly presences with no relevance to her life. In the neon-lit centre, the children breathed and acted as one, acutely aware of the divide between them and everyone else.

The police centre, its naked lighting, lino flooring and ringing phones: this was the hostile world they had fled by heading down the manholes into the dark and diseased warmth. One by one, the children were asked to register their details with an official. Some, inevitably, had been to the centre before. Others were new to the police. Some had no idea of their birthdays, original addresses, or the names of their parents. After being washed and having their hair cut, the children reappeared in assortments of ill-fitting second-hand clothes that had been donated to the centre; Mickey Mouse T-shirts with tracksuit bottoms, shorts with wool jumpers, hoods and gloves. Some had found no tops their size and had covered themselves as best they could, their ribs sticking out from under scarves or shrunken vests. The toddler girl wandered aimlessly in purple pyjamas with fluffy slippers. In a heap in one corner lay the rags that the children had arrived in — putrid jumpers and trousers, chafed shoes with split soles.

I once attended a workshop where we were asked to note down those characteristics of street children that could be built on in education programmes. Entrepreneurship, combativeness, perseverance and a critical eye were listed by several participants. Indeed, the entrepreneurship of street children is often put forward in education schemes. Many display impressive dexterity with numbers, having had experience counting small change, and bargaining with people they suspect will cheat them out of their meagre earnings. Their ability to talk and persuade can be exploited, too. Yet systems of schooling for which children require certificates, addresses and all the paraphernalia of formal education are not best suited to children of the street. More flexible and innovative approaches to learning, weaving in counselling, health care, life skills, technical and vocational training, have more chance of having an impact.

The Lotus Children’s Centre in Mongolia, for example, has a constant eye on breaking the cycle of poverty while children are in its care, training them for future employment. Contact with vulnerable families is maintained and nurtured where possible. The Moroccan NGO Bayti follows a similar approach, putting an emphasis on socialising skills for re-entry into mainstream society. The Fundación Renacimiento in Mexico City offers bakery, carpentry and computing, as well as electrical engineering programmes to former street children.

To qualify for these courses, the children have to pass through a staged programme that requires them to renounce drugs and violence of any kind, and to build a specific life project with counsellors and educators. Rebuilding a life is no easy undertaking for children who carry layers of pain, and many NGOs, on all continents, have come up with innovative concepts and support structures for the process. They provide essential care to those with nowhere else to turn. At a wider level, UNICEF, UNESCO and other organisations use the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child as a guiding framework, attempting to influence policies and governmental attitudes. Central to all of this, though, is the need to recognise what street children have been through, to work with their stories and listen to their past.

Listening was part of the rationale behind the campaign that I helped to establish in 2008 with fellow author Lauren Child, under the auspices of UNESCO. Called ‘My Life Is a Story’, it was designed to help street and excluded children to relate their personal histories by providing a platform for voices that had never been heard. The campaign is now over, but some powerful accounts were garnered. They revealed the almost unimaginable tortures that many street children go through and how vulnerable young lives can quickly tip into abomination.

One boy from Alexandria in Egypt described how he ran away from home when his new stepfather regularly chained him up in a cemetery overnight as a punishment. Another boy in Latvia described how he would occasionally visit his addict mother in a squat where she picked the fleas off herself and placed them in a see-through plastic bag. In Mexico, Jesús was sent to live with relatives, but got on the wrong bus aged 10 and ended up at the other end of the country, penniless and homeless. Girls in Senegal and Namibia, who had been employed as underage maids with wealthier families, told how they had been ruthlessly abused and worked to the bone before they’d run away to the streets.

These objects can become almost talismanic: a found bracelet, a lucky plastic spoon, or a crinkled photograph are all possible proof of a continued shared humanity

Beyond the intricacies of life’s calamities, what emerged through these stories was how vital is a sense of personal narrative to feeling human, all the more so when that narrative is acknowledged by others. The street children who contributed to the ‘My Life Is a Story’ campaign found it hard to believe that anyone could be interested in their lives, their voices or their opinions. More often than not, street children have been stripped of any sense of themselves, of their own uniqueness and significance. Like the boy with the battered headphones in Mali, they cling to any object that might yet give them a modicum of dignity or meaning in the eyes of others.

These objects can become almost talismanic: a found bracelet, a lucky plastic spoon, or a crinkled photograph are all possible proof of a continued shared humanity. When the connection to others is irredeemably lost, there is little for street children to hold onto. The common narrative they might have once shared with society simply splinters, and remembering the past becomes pointless. Substance abuse is just one way to obliterate the story they once inhabited.

A s part of the ‘My Life Is a Story’ campaign I would try to raise awareness in British schools by disseminating the real-life stories of street children. I would begin my talks with a series of flashed-up images: a rough shelter on a station platform, a rubbish dump with foraging children, a boy cleaning a windscreen. It was interesting to see how children accustomed to comfort reacted. Many understood the notion of running away. Nor was it uncommon for pupils to say that they’d often thought about what it might be like to survive on the streets, to have to pull through alone, unaided. Most children were able to imagine losing everything and it terrified them — their fears having been triggered by seeing homeless people on the streets of their own cities.

When we touched on the specific challenges of survival, several pupils spontaneously announced that they would prefer to steal than to do menial or degrading jobs. Others said they would hang out at the backs of restaurants and plead for food. Many more said they would want, above all, to find a safe place in a park or shopping centre to sleep in. All quickly realised that being on the street would, at some point, put them in conflict with the police in one way or another.

Such discussions generally veered towards a kind of empathy with those who were dispossessed but, undeniably, huge gaps remained. We were still in the realm of theory. When all was said and done, street children were a different type of human for most British school kids. Their physical pains, their mental anguish, their diseases, their joys too, belonged to a universe that British children, as a rule, couldn’t really grasp.

Schoolchildren are not alone in that perception. To view street children as different, and separate, is perhaps an obvious way to live with the insupportable reality of their plight. Of course, it goes without saying that street children are no different from our children, from ourselves (how we once were), but to accept this truly, and to live with it, is hard. It undermines one of the most fundamental and commonly shared foundations of all human societies: that we care for, and protect, our children. Instead, the most vulnerable and youngest are often forced into the role of outcasts. The child becomes untouchable, a pariah — alone, assailable and exposed to the abjectness of the world.

On my return from Mongolia, I remember repeatedly feeling bewildered by my own young children. As I got them ready for bed, I found myself struggling to chase away insistent images of the Mongolian children in the heating vents. Yet I had to banish those very fresh memories in order just to be with my children. I became quickly frustrated by their complaints about life: ‘I don’t like my peas and mash touching’; ‘I’m not watching Robin Hood again’. These were the capricious banalities of children used to comfort, and I wanted to yell at them that they didn’t realise how lucky they were.

He began to construct a picture of her life; did she sleep in a station, he asked, or in an empty, derelict house with a sister, or a father?

However, my frustration hid many layers of unresolved emotion. I had hoped that my recent experiences would anaesthetise me to the pettiness of family life. Instead, I felt a real bleakness, and its slow bitterness released itself into my parenting. Mongolia had made me doubly aware how precious childhood was but, equally, I was repulsed by my own children’s innocence. Their cleanliness, abundant food and clothing felt like an obscenity. On more than one occasion, I had to pull the car over, the engine running, and stare into space for a few seconds while the children bickered behind about their car seats touching each other, their feet kicking me in the back. A silent rage had overcome me and I didn’t know how to deal with it.

On a recent trip to Istanbul, alone with my 10-year-old son, we watched a street girl, no older than eight braving the bitter winds coming in off the Bosphorus in a threadbare T-shirt as she desperately tried to repair her broken accordion. Each time she mended it, it would play for a few minutes before breaking again. My son was entranced by the oversized men’s shoes she wore and by her matted, feral hair. I could see him looking around at the few tourists in a bid to identify her neglectful parents. Their absence was totally unnatural and foreign to him. He wanted to be reassured that she wasn’t alone in the city, without a safety net.

The girl’s shoes and accordion provided an opening onto her world, an aperture through which we could discuss her predicament. We talked about how she might have acquired her accordion and how she might have learnt to play. Who did her shoes belong to? I’m not sure I got the conversation right and, when my son didn’t understand, I found myself getting blunt (and guilty, too, aware, at the back of my mind, that a parent’s role is also to protect a child from the asperities of life).

An expatriate friend in Eastern Europe told me she was once bold enough to buy hamburgers for three street boys in order to show her own offspring how charmed their life was. She’d just handed over the hamburgers when another band of vagrant children appeared out of nowhere, each demanding a burger of their own. My friend ended up buying at least 10 burgers with a string of children’s dirty faces squashed up against the window of the fast-food outlet, watching her every move. Things had been brought to a violent halt when a customer prevented her from reaching the counter again. A row ensued in which the customer told her he couldn’t bear to be put off his food by the sight of vermin any longer. It was an episode my friend’s children were unlikely to forget.

In Istanbul, it was only when we were accosted by a Syrian family begging for money that my son became fully engaged with the subject of homelessness and precarious living. Here was a family who had fled the violence of civil war. He had heard about the Syrian conflict on television, and war was a feature of books he had read and films he had seen. He referred back to the girl with the accordion. Maybe, he thought, she had come from Syria? He began to construct a picture of her life, imagining her trudging through the mountains and the cold to reach Istanbul. Did she sleep in a station, he asked, or in an empty, derelict house with a sister, or a father? What did she think about as she played the accordion?

I could see my son battling with concepts that were far from his life and that directly challenged many of his beliefs. The next day, we looked for the girl with the accordion. She had disappeared. But the orange cloth she had used to collect money was still on the pavement, and people were walking round it. Perhaps they were trying to work out where it had come from? An absence and a puzzling presence. And no resolution for my son.

Street children are the product of many compounded flaws: our continued failure to halt endemic violence against women and children, our incapacity to stem extreme poverty, our inability to resolve conflicts, or even to deal equitably with natural disasters. Locking them up, or repressing them, won’t resolve any of these global issues. It won’t remove the fear and guilt abandoned children inspire in us either.

It is easy to say that the young lives of untamed children and adolescents have nothing to do with us, or that they live in a dimension we cannot understand. And yet each street child I have met has had a unique story, and a richness of experience that holds lessons for all. Maybe that is why it pains me all the more that street children are ignored, barely acknowledged. They’re forced to exist in a world parallel to ours, and, out there, in their other world, in their bus stations and gutters, in the filth and vileness of their refuse dumps, they survive as best they can, with the same emotions we all share. Our greatest insult to them is to remove their humanity even further by not recognising a part of ourselves in them. We diminish ourselves by refusing to look them in the eye.

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Social Help of the Street Children Argumentative Essay

The street children are literally crying out for help as hopelessness fills the air.

What can a person say to children when you see them in the street, The children sleep under benches and sell flowers. The children are wet by the rain because they have no home to return to. The children beg for food; they eat glue to remove the pain of hunger.

The children suffer from rape, molestation, and exploitation. The children’s dreams of a better future have been dashed away. They need a hand. The Philippines’ street children have grown in numbers. They live in cemeteries and street corners, buildings and other available crevices. The children’s clothes are in tatters. They smell and they look destitute.

The counter argument, street children brought it on themselves through laziness, is unsustainable. A child’s need for food, clothing, and a cozy home environment, is the responsibility of the parents. The child is not tasked to work before one reaches the ripe adult age of 18 years. Another argument stating the street children should find work to feed their hungry stomach is wrong. Children below the legal age are not allowed to work, under the law. The children’s bodies are not mature enough to do heavy manual work.

Based on the above discussion, the street children are the ill fated victims of society. The life of the street children is filled with difficulty. There are many factors contributing to the street children’s helpless situation. Indeed, society should come to the help of the street children.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2019, August 20). Social Help of the Street Children. https://ivypanda.com/essays/street-children/

"Social Help of the Street Children." IvyPanda , 20 Aug. 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/street-children/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'Social Help of the Street Children'. 20 August.

IvyPanda . 2019. "Social Help of the Street Children." August 20, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/street-children/.

1. IvyPanda . "Social Help of the Street Children." August 20, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/street-children/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Social Help of the Street Children." August 20, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/street-children/.

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A Day in My Life

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