1 - STREET CHILDREN

VATICAN - Meninos: their home is the street

Vatican City (Fides Service) – They are the children of poverty. A cruel mother, stingy with food and love pushed them out on to the streets when they were still tiny, at the mercy of a future without prospects and the dangers of a crude life of homelessness. The world has between 100 million (Amnesty International) and 150 million (World Labour Organisation) street children. Some help support the family with little jobs on the street, vending or picking through refuse. Other rarely go home, some never do. Many are alone in the world without parents or any family at all.
They should be sitting at school desks but are lost in the wanderings of marginalisation in the great cities of the 21st century. Begging at street corners or running away with a wallet robbed from a passerby, they are forced tackle problems much greater than themselves. A the age of 13 many girls are already pregnant and boys of the same age have already been in trouble with the police.
For all of them the main problem is to survive hunger pains by sniffing solvents or doing anything to live through the day. As long as the street is their home there can be no life project for them. Many simply disappear, killed by some disease, a in a fist fight or road accident. Or by violence as in the case of Nahaman Carmona Lopez shot dead in 1990 at the age of 13 with four shots fired by Guatemala’s national police.
For street children AIDS is also a snare. The rising number of HIV positive cases is also due to girls and boys caught up in prostitution as a desperate means of surviving.

Convention betrayed
Respect for human rights begins with the rights of children. Or it should do so. According to the United Nations Convention on Children Rights “boys and girls must be protected from cruelty and violence” and they must be given adequate opportunities to occupy a place in society ”.
But who respects these principles? Why is the number of street children still so high and is doomed to rise? Are these “unclaimed little ones” only one of many categories of marginalisation, inevitable corollary of conflicts and uncontrolled urbanization? How can we rescue this betrayed childhood and restore its hope?

In Africa
Africa has more than 10 million "homeless", often children whose parents were killed in a war or died of some disease most likely AIDS. Street children in Africa are a relatively new phenomenon: in the past the traditional understanding of the extended family was a guarantee of a protected childhood. Even if they had lost their parents children were looked after by the village elders, some distant relation, or a women who had no children of her own. This rule still valid in rural areas, has been shaken by new emergencies afflicting Africa, the explosion of the AIDS pandemic, ethnic conflicts, even the consequences of migration to cities.
In Rwanda, where there are 100.000 civil war orphans, the streets of Kigali are filled with children struggling to survive.
In Zambia 300.000 AIDS wander from rural areas to cities with no one to care for them. In Kenya, in a Nairobi alone there are more than 130.000 street children, “chokora” in Swahili which means refuse eaters. Most of them come from slum districts which surround the capital - Kibera, Kawangware, Korogocho, Mattare and Ruaraka- and they meet in the garbage dump where they find something to eat and a place to stay for the night wrapped in plastic bags.

In Asia
In the world’s most populated continent economic crises and social degrade been a major cause in the increase in numbers of abandoned children on the streets, today as many as 40 million. In India alone there are 18 million, 200.000 of them in densely populated Calcutta. Vietnam has about 16.000, mostly in and around Hanoi and one of the greatest dangers is the risk of being caught and abused in sex tourism in neighbouring countries.

In Latin America
On this continent there are more than 45 million About 30 million minors help support the family with their meagre earnings and 15 million are street children “meninos da rua” are 15 million, most of them, 9 million, in Brazil. This phenomenon which has been present for years, is due to growing poverty among about 40% of the people in Latin America where the quality of life has dropped progressively especially in the great cities. Migration within the continent of emigration to other parts of the planet has broken many families with heavy consequences for the children separated from one or both parents. Life in the shanty towns, favelas, is the image of one of Dante’s circles where the law of poverty weighs above all on the weaker ones: the children.

In Eastern Europe
The phenomenon practically non existent before 1989 , has shown itself with increasing intensity parallel to wars, like those which bloodied the Balkan region for years and a serious economic and social crisis in many Eastern European countries. In the Russian Federation there are about one million homeless 60,000 of them in Moscow. In Budapest there are over 10.000, 5,000 in Bucharest, 10,000 in Latvia.
In many former Soviet territories children’s institutes are so crowded that many orphans have to be abandoned. In other cases when state orphanages were closed in Bulgaria and Romania children and adolescents were turned onto the streets. And there are those who exploit these “street children” in the racket of prostitution: 30% of prostitutes in Estonia are underage. (M.F.D’A.) (Agenzia Fides 28/2/2004; Righe 88; Parole 1009).
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PHOTOGRAPHS to down load free of charge

Africa/Rwanda: Children whose home is the UN camp at Kiziva :

Africa/Etiopia : Zway :

Asia/Korea : Little inmates at Holy Infant Adoption Center

Asia /Mongolia : Abandoned children find a family at the CICM House

Spagna/Mostra: "I volti della schiavitù: Non sono bambini lavoratori, sono schiavi"

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