I work with street children in Kenya. And I started working with the children when I was twelve. I know its difficult for someone to visualize that, but I first began working with children when I first saw the first child sitting outside a store. And it was a little boy with big, glassy eyes, tears coming from the eyes, nose runny, very dirty, probably even lice on his hair. And I was going to walk into the store and his stretched his hand and said to me in Swahili, “Please give me a shilling.” And that just struck me. Being a twelve year old, we had just lost our father when I was eleven and looking at that little boy, I wondered does he have parents. If not, where are they? Are they dead, both of them? What would be wrong? Why would he be outside here? Looking at myself, I am clean. I am coming to the store to buy something to go home and cook. And give to mom and cook. And here is a little boy here who seems to have no hope. So it really struck me so much, I didn’t give him the shilling. I went in there and brought bread and came out and gave him the bread. I was still puzzled. Walked back home and my main mission on my way home was to figure out where I was going to say where the rest of the money went. And I had not seen anything like that before, but I knew that was the right thing to do. So on my way home, I figured it out. When I got home, I told mom you know, “I’ve lost the change. I bought everything, but when I was crossing the road, I couldn’t see the money anymore”. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to explain it. It was still puzzling to me and she let that go and she said, “Next time be very, very careful”. And so I got a lecture and that was gone.

My dad used to give us rides to places and he was not there anymore so we had to do things the hard way. Mom said, “You have to toughen up. Life is going to be very, very difficult with seven siblings to take care of”. So I was going to church and when coming back, we met two girls. At the time, I didn’t know they were girls. They were just two kids extremely dirtily covered with ash and they were just in a dumpsite. They were fighting for this bag and I didn’t know what they were fighting for so I said “Hello” and I caught their attention and they turned. I said, “Why are you fighting?” and the younger one said, “Oh, we are fighting because she won’t let me have part of this food that we found. And so as I walked closer, they were scared. I walked closer to them and this bag was full of orange peelings. And they were fighting for these orange peelings and the big sister didn’t want to share and so that’s what the fight was about. Again, that struck me hard and I thought wow. So I talked to them and I said to them, “If I go next time when I am around here and I bring you some food, will you share?” And they said, “Yeah” and so another idea came in, but I didn’t know how to handle it. So I went back home and thought about it and came up with an idea. We always have supper at the same time, that’s the African way. You always eat at the same time and you don’t leave food on your table. And when we were eating, I figured out that I would pretend to be sleeping on the table at dinner and my mom would say, “You are not going to sleep until you finish that food”. And I would say okay and I would try to pretend that I was dozing off and them everybody would get busy taking stuff to the kitchen and I would hide the food somehow and put it in a plastic bag and the next day I would dash and give it to the girls. And little by little, there started coming more children. And I started knowing more and more children and I started getting deeper into a relationship with them. I started to know them. I started to know them and eventually I started understanding who they are and why they were where they were.

Well, people in Kenya, as I learned, in these relationships with them on my trips back and forth to the streets, I would see people are not concerned about them. I knew that people would burn anybody that was found stealing or pick pocketing. People just get hold of you and they put tires around you and they start a fire and that’s how to get justice. They call it mob justice, but at Watoto Village, we call it mob injustice. So people didn’t have much to do with them so I would there is a big difference between people living on the streets and people not living on the streets. Because of this, I did not know how to go and talk about it to just anyone. And so I decided to do this secretly and so for many, many years and it was probably good because I got to understand so many things that I wouldn’t have if I had told someone, maybe I would have been discouraged to do it. I don’t know. But I just decided to do it secretly, personally. I continued taking stuff from home and taking it outside somehow. This was never realized until I gave all my clothing away and mom says, “Where is your clothing? You are wearing just one dress all the time”. And I didn’t know what to say so I started looking like someone who is not organized. She is dirty. Maybe the clothes, she has not washed them. Then my sister started taking care of me. She said, “Here, you can borrow this skirt”. I did not give away theirs, but it got me going to a point.

So initially it started as friendship. It grew and grew and grew and the passion became bigger and bigger. I knew at that point that I really wanted to become part of them. I wanted to help them. I wanted to be there for them and so I would go nurse their wounds. My mom is a nurse so she had a lot of stock at home in supplies that she would bring home and I would be the one taking them out there to go nurse and do stuff to these children. So it turned out to be something that I’ve done and continued and just wanting and wishing to do it for the rest of my life. So when I am talking about street children, what does that mean? Well, they are people who live, sleep, eat, do everything on the streets. That is a young lady. She is passed out on the streets. That is a bottle of glue that she was sniffing. That’s another boy. You usually see them around dumpsites and it’s easy to recognize them when you see them. Sniff a lot of glue; that’s a major, major problem among street people. That’s a girl. Usually they will tell you, I don’t want to look like a girl. That’s the last thing a girl would want to do if they are out there on the streets because rape is a big problem. People will come at night and not only street boys, people from this other community, the normal community that is not on the street, would come and rape them at night so they want to look like a boy as much as possible. The age ranges from a newborn to about say, twenty-four, twenty-five. They don’t live long because of the problems, the diseases and the mob injustice that we talked about. So that’s our group, we usually call them Colorless.

That is just a child. A little child about six years old. Usually you just see them by themselves, just sitting somewhere. And why are they on the streets? Usually poverty, that was the initial problem because Kenya is a poor country or has been a poor country. We have a lot of unemployment in the country. About seventy-five percent of our population is unemployed. So you can imagine, the parent is not able to pay for school fees, very much, even less, pay for food. So kids are left suffering and they end up in the streets. Broken families. Our society still doesn’t respect the issue of supporting the child, even after a marriage is broken. A man can still move on and go to another woman, start a new family, and if he gets bored or there is a problem, he can leave. No responsibility at all. And goes and gets a new family and this mom is left with nothing most of the time. With the unemployment, then you can see, if she wasn’t employed, if she wasn’t like my mother, fortunate as my mother, than the only other option would be either to go live in the slums, which I will talk to you about, or the streets.

HIV/AIDS came after poverty. It wasn’t the initial problem why we had children or people moving into the streets. HIV/AIDS has escalated the numbers and you’ve had this 1.3 million increase in Kenya alone. And for generations, most of them ending up on the street. She was born on the streets. The mom was born on the streets so it’s just a cycle that keeps going on and on. There are some that come to seek refuge from the broken families or when there is a problem in the family, they will take off because of maybe abuse. We have a lot of abuse. Women are being battered everyday, every hour at night. And so, many kids will just run away and they will end up in the streets to seek refuge. It’s also peer pressure. Sometimes people find it difficult to understand this, but for example, it’s a girl living in the rural areas and both parents have passed away and she has to take care of the other siblings, what does she do? Find ways of taking care of the family or just run away and go and have a new life. Mostly, you find, the way we are trained as women is that girls are the ones who takes over the family. We are the ones who take care of the family. So with that background, the girl would come to the city to try to find money any way that she can. And the easiest one is prostitution. And so they get into prostitution. They get the money and go back to the rural areas and when the other girls fall into the same situation, they say, “You know so and so is taking care of the family. Why don’t I join her?” So she comes in and she is introduced to the problem.

There’s also this group that we call Nomadic Independent Children who live in the slums, but come during the day to the streets to look for money for food and to go back and feed, usually their ill parents, or just go back and feed the children. So they go back and forth and you really can’t categorize them as on the streets. It is streets during the day and slums at night. Sixty percent of our population in Kenya, in the capital city itself, they live in the slums. And the slums are not a very healthy place to be. And it’s a house that’s probably nine by nine. Just one room where the family lives and there is no sewage, no bathrooms. This is an inside picture. As you can see, those are the dishes. They cook in there. That whole family, they all live in there, sleep in there, do everything in that little house. Where they are sitting there is a bed. We have a lot of children having families in these slums and it is devastating. It’s become a very common picture just to see young girls not going to school with children on their backs. So you find a lot of these children, they don’t experience childhood. After their parents pass away, they automatically take the roles of parents. So when you meet them, they talk to you as grownups. They act like grownups. They do not know how to cry. They forgot how to be able to ask for anything because they are now fending life for themselves and for the other siblings. We have a lot of children who do not have an identity. They stand before you and you ask their name and they start crying because how do I know this is who I am? They have street names and that’s all they sometimes can depend on. And so that has become a very, very big problem. And with this 1.3 million that we are hearing about, what is going to happen to them? Who are they? It’s a big question to answer.

So not much hope, lack of basic needs, no food, no shelter, suddenly no education, medical treatment is out of the picture. It’s nowhere to imagine. Poor health and hygiene causes a lot of typhoid. One of our children at the home had a very high, high content of typhoid. We didn’t know she was going to live, but luckily, we were able to get her treated and she is now doing well. Intestinal problems. Almost all of them have this problem because they eat food from the dumpster. It’s rotted food. Wounds and cuts and usually they just become big infections. Sometimes they would lose legs because they’re not taken care of. A small cut that would have just taken a little bit of washing and dressing is left untreated and big, big problems come from that. Ringworms. Lots of skin diseases. Skin infections. Respiratory problems. A lot of TB. A lot of pneumonia. Most of the children, especially when they are born on the streets, you give them around four months and that child will be gone. It’s very, very sad. If that child is not rescued from the streets, then don’t count on having that child alive. It will be out in the cold and it’s sad. Tuberculosis has also become a big problem. It’s one of those diseases associated with HIV/AIDS so you find a lot of people will suffer from TB and it spreads so much. It is one of those very, very much, infectious diseases. So you can imagine, one person in the slums suffering from it, it just moves and moves so everybody is coughing.

This is my friend Agnis. She started developing this swelling and it kept swelling and it kept swelling. Never got help. Went back home last year about in August and she was one of my very, very favorite friends. And I went to look for her. Usually I could find her at night; she would prostitute at night and be a street child during the day. I went to check on her and couldn’t find her. Looked for her for three weeks. Could never find her and eventually decided to go to the mortuaries and there she was. They were getting ready to dispose of her so never knew what was wrong. Never would know. Just lose a friend like that and it is very, very sad. Allow me to read you a story. I like to read a lot. The boy on the screen says, “My name is David Mutuku. I am in class four at St. Patrick’s School. I come from a big family of nine sisters and seven brothers. During schooldays, we wake up very early at 5:30 a.m. to prepare for school. After our preparations, we take our breakfast and then go out to the bus stop to wait for pickup by our school. We all go to school except our little brother Mulay. After school, we come home, brush our shoes, wash our socks, and then do our homework. Everybody concentrates on homework a lot. After homework, we have some time to play and get ready for dinner. When dinner is being prepared, I see my sisters setting the table. Some carrying out garbage and some are helping in the meal preparation. The aroma of argali fills the house. That’s a favorite meal in Kenya. And the smallest child comes to the kitchen doorway and asks, ‘Mom can I say a prayer at supper?’”

So you may very well ask, what family is this? This is a family of Watoto Village and this has been a very, very successful program that my husband and I founded five years ago. Watoto Village is a place where we have decided to enrich and strengthen the lives of the people living on the streets. We do a lot of street and slum work. In the streets and in the slums, we go out there. We have a program that runs for about six months and in these six months, we try to know with children. We try to build a relationship with them. We try to get their trust and we try to trust them and once this happens, that is the beginning of making a difference in the lives of these children. So once we have a relationship going, then we start understanding why, child by child, why they are on the streets. What can we do to help them out of the streets? We have a day to day program that runs those six months and in this, we do a lot of street seminars where we have a lot of the street girls come in and we will talk to them about sex education, health and hygiene, care when they are pregnant, how important it is to register children when they are born. We do visits on these children, mainly at night, Spend a lot of night on the streets. It is hard for anybody to imagine me sleeping on the streets, but it happens. I love to do that and that’s mainly because that is the time they have slowed down their activities and that’s when it is most effective to reach out to them and not worry about whether they are going to steal. For the girls, they are prostituting. For the boys, you can have some good interactive time with them. We do some informal education with these children to see how far they are. Whether they can to be able to go back to school. That is one thing that we really encourage is education. So at first, we begin with informal education and then it ends up with formal education. When this program begins in any colony, we have learned that it’s usually one hundred percent effort from us - the social workers – and almost zero percent from the child and then it moves and moves and it gets to eighty. Now you can get them at least to come and listen and they start getting involved. They will come, whether high or not, you appreciate having them there. And the way we learned how to do it, they will come and they are so high and they are just laughing and they cannot concentrate. So the next day, you try to tell them, okay, can you come at least when you are not so high and blue or something tomorrow? And sometimes they try and when they do that, we act like we are high ourselves and so they realize very quickly then, then there re is no progress. So everybody tries to come and wants to get this program going. So then we start introducing songs, singing, and dancing. Anything that will be therapeutic. Anything that will give us information about them. We just want to get through to them. Reach out and see what we can do with them.

We also arrange funeral arrangements. A lot of these children will just die on the streets and we also just do a lot of funeral arrangements and conduct burials. We have a lot of counseling to do because we want to understand why, how, and now, what can we do about this situation so a lot of counseling is involved and a lot of case study. This is probably just the backbone of the project of the children, of children’s lives in Watoto Village. We spend a lot of time with them on the streets. Even before you can think of getting them into the house, you go in there and see a very nice child, but you know you just can’t say come, let’s go home with you. You have to deal with the problems, with the child while they are still out there. We deal with their behaviors while they are still there. There is a lot of aggression, anger, pain in them and we want to see it come out and we see how we can help them manage this so that when they come transition into another environment, then it is easier for them to deal with these situations. So then after the six months, if you are lucky, you are able to know the true name of the child. They will tell you at least what they remember they were being called and not the street name that they gave you before. And then this time has also given you a chance to know which child is willing to change and how exactly you are going to stage a plan for this child’s life from that point henceforth. So after this, we transition them into the home and the home offers these children a lot. We decided not to put it as an institution. It’s about families. Bringing their lives back together and having a family for them. When they are on the streets, the colonies are so big, you know, ten, twelve. So we try to do it just as they would do it either in their homes or on the streets. And in the home we have a small setting where we have a family. Usually we have a mentor or two. Usually parents when it works out, a man and a wife. If it doesn’t, at least have a man that would play the father role and a mom that would do a lot of training with the staff. And so they come in and help out the children. When the children come in, the transition is also another big process because you are talking to a child who has never brushed their teeth. Never held a pen with their fingers. So you have to teach them a lot. It is a lot of learning and a lot of challenges with them so you have to be very encouraging, very reassuring. They really depend on you. Really, they are borrowing you hope. They are borrowing your love, borrowing your courage and you have to stand there with them and tell them it’s do-able. They play, they sing, they dance like other children would and the love one-on-one, it has done a lot of change in their lives.