THE HOMELESS CHILDREN:

 THE PARENTLESS CHILDREN IN STREETS

By Maritim Kipngetich

PHOTO: Street children.

The issue of street children is a problem across the world and many street children especially those who had to take to streets because they lost their parents are in the rise today. These children have had to put up with poor living standards in the streets. A life they never experienced when they were with their parents.

“I lost my parents in 2011 and since then I have been living in the streets. I lived with my uncle for two months after I lost my parents, but he beat me up till I decided to run away and that is how I ended up living in the streets of Gikomba with no assurance of daily meal,” Evans Gathike, 14, who is a street child in Nairobi, says.

Evans says he lived with his parents in Shauri Moyo estate before his parents were killed by unknown assailants.

“I was then in standard four when my parents were killed. I remember it was around mid-night when two people who had machetes in their hands entered our house and slaughtered my parents. My father tried to defend himself while my mother was screaming for help, but no one came to help us. I got an opportunity to run away when they were fighting with my parents and that is how I survived,” Evans, who narrated the mayhem in Swahili, said.

Evans says he has to survive with waste food in the streets and begging people to give him foodstuffs.

“The life is hard here in the streets. Having clean food is rare unless a good person decides to give you what he/he is eating. I sometime stay for three consecutive days without food since we are many and when we go to a wastebin we scramble for anything edible there and in many instances many of us miss,” he says.

There are two categories of street children. Those who live IN the streets (the street is their permanent home). They are no longer street children. They are street families since they were born in the streets by street parents. They are born as infants in the streets, mature to their teenage age in the streets then became parents in the streets. That is the vicious circle of life of the people in streets today. Initially, people would conceive and deliver then dump their children on the streets but that is no longer the case. The children and matured homeless people in towns live with their street grandmothers and grandfathers.

Another category is those who live ON the streets (they return home at night). The second category is the children who work on the streets by day and then join their families later at night. This group of street children is what constitutes Athe highest number of street children in the country.

The study commissioned by Consortium of Street Children (CSC) shows the number of street children in Kenya since 1999. The varying figures it normally presents to the public are not reliable. For instance it announced in 1999 that there were 50, 000 street children in Nairobi and in 2001 it reported that there were 40, 000 street children in Kenya with 50% in Nairobi. In 2007 it estimated that there were 250, 000-300, 000 street children living and working on the streets across Kenya with 60, 000 of them in Nairobi. The staggering figures may not give a clear number of street children in Kenya.