Street kids don’t come from Mars

All this while, her peers carry on with their studies. They even pass by her home on their way from school to tell her the latest classroom gossip. After a year of no hope, she follows her elder sister to Kampala to work as a househelp. 

The Shs100,000 is supposed to be her monthly salary from which she will save to maybe go back to school or pay up for a tailoring course. She’s now 17 years. But now that she is working, black tax comes calling. Her mother, brother, uncle, and mother’s witch doctor expect some on that money.

And yet, her new boss, a young corporate couple in Najeera with a shiny new Subaru and two toddlers are shocked when, even if they treat her well, she sometimes takes out her frustration on their innocent children by slapping them, eating their special baby food or even hurting them physically.

No, it’s not that couple’s fault that she dropped out of school to change stinky diapers, but it is what it is. That’s who is available as the child care service provider. 

A broken, trauma-laden young adult who has every reason to be angry at the world and all its privileged few.

Then there’s the young man in Katwe, a street child by all standards who is rounded up during security sweeps and is thrown in jail for a crime someone else committed. He vows that when he gets out of jail, he will commit the crime for which he has been held. After all, what does he have to lose? 

I listened to  Mr Sanyu Roberts, founder of Rescue Foundation for Children at Risk speak on the radio about how the sidelining of street kids has led to increased criminality. Apart from your wallet, what these kids really want, according to Mr Roberts is love, to belong, and to be seen.

We’ve all seen the videos or God forbid been in them, of young adults from street gangs delivering fatal kicks to unsuspecting members of the public just to rob them of a few shillings and maybe a phone or more.

Those young men didn’t pop out of their mother’s wombs throwing Cobra Kai kicks. We made them. Society made them.  Street children don’t fall from a UFO somewhere.

Mr Roberts on that talk show spoke of how many he had spoken to had run away from home because of domestic violence, poverty, sexual abuse, and all manner of trauma. The streets however harsh were kinder than the places and people they called home. Some just wanted to see Kampala, they came, saw, and then stayed. Many of these are from broken homes.

So you see, it doesn’t matter how many programmes are set up to remove street children and gangs from the streets, if we never deal with the source of this, it will never get better. Of course, the problem of street children is bigger than broken homes and relationships but that’s one good place to work at.  

Skilling street children is great, but how about also nipping it in the bud at one of the sources? Unless of course there are those among us who need them on the streets for their sinister ecosystems to survive.

To all of those like Mr Roberts who are working to help these kids, by way of reuniting them with their families, helping them out of addictions, skilling and equipping some to become useful members of society, sensitising communities on parenting and dealing with ‘problematic children’ and other interventions, I salute you. Some will say it’s an impossible task but I say, keep going.  It’s either we save one child at a time or suffer one round kick at a time.  

You know that proverb, “The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth”?

Janet Napio
[email protected]