Drugs are, simply, a way to alleviate the pain of daily life.
And street children do suffer. I worked with them for three months and there were a lot of aspects of their lives I never found out. But Kilbride et. al. discovered that street children work an average of 10 hours a day (collecting paper, begging, survival sex for the girls); violence is common-whether two street children end up fighting for a scrap of food or adult beggars treat one poorly or a street child is picked up by the police and treated brutally; disease is a real hazard-disease caused by malnutrition, dirty water, and lack of hygiene, or transmitted through sex. Nobody is glad to see a street child. Rejection is constant. While I was in Kenya, the newspaper (The Nation) ran an editorial from a writer who argued that street children should "disappear" the way they "disappeared" in Brazil-that is, the police should systematically hunt down and kill them.
I'm not going to pretend that I have a solution to the problem of street kids. It is far more complex than I can treat in this short article. But it does seem to be a phenomenon of modernity-something that started to happen in Great Britain during the industrial revolution, and something that has spread to other parts of the globe as urban life becomes more common. In Africa, as in South America and India and Central America, it is an enormous problem.
It was hard leaving those kids behind. My time in Kenya was several years ago, and some of those children-if they survived-would be in their mid-teens or early twenties now. I wonder if they've transitioned out of the street life into society? I wonder if they're dead? I wonder if someone kind paid for their schooling, which could make all the difference in the world? The program I was involved in-which provided two full meals a day-disintegrated within six months after we had left. It didn't have the financial resources or leadership it needed to keep on going. But there are other programs like it in Nairobi. It is not enough, however. Those programs are like a small band-aid on a severed limb. There has to be a revolution in society to figure out a way to fix these problems.
Works Cited
Street Children in Kenya: Voices of Children in Search of a Childhood by Phillip Kilbride, Collette Suda, and Enos Njeru. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 2000.
