Between 20 and 30 street children wait patiently for me each morning. I wake up early, take a bicycle taxi into town, stop by the supermarket to buy bread, butter, milk, sugar, and tea, then walk to the Ex-Street Children Community Based Organization where we serve breakfast and interview each street child as part of my research study to learn first-hand about their backgrounds, survival mechanisms, drug use patterns, and perceived barriers to leaving the streets. Many come to the office day after day, know me by name, some even meeting me half way to help carry the grocery bags. Others are new faces, recruited by their street peers to come receive a free breakfast, play checkers, do puzzles, draw pictures, and share their life stories with the hope that someone, finally, will do something to help them and their families. We conducted 70 interviews, without a single refusal, and as a result came up with a fairly comprehensive picture of the causes and consequences of street life in Eldoret, Kenya.
By partnering with this community based organization to conduct the research, we created a safe place for street children to come off the streets each day. This in and of itself may have been the most important conclusion of our study–the very simple realization that street children NEED a safe, physical space OFF the streets, where they can eat, play, share their stories, interact in a positive social environment, escape stigmatization, discrimination, and abuse, access services… even just have a place to sleep.
Coming back to the office from a meeting in town one afternoon and witnessing these children laying underneath the table, sleeping peacefully on top of each other, I was overtaken by the importance they placed on having a safe place off the streets where they could come to escape the harsh realities of their daily existence. The near unanimous answer to the question, “What is the hardest part of living on the street?” was, harassment and abuse by police, and beatings and theft from the older street boys. Street children are quite possibly one of the most marginalized and vulnerable populations in the world, and although they are absolute masters of survival, they are still children who need protection and support. There are 150 million street children worldwide, a couple thousand in Eldoret, and nothing has proven to me more that they need our help than this picture, taken long after breakfast was served and our interviews were completed. Walking away from this non-verbal scream for help, can no longer be an option.
