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Street
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Anecdotes
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CAUTION: There is
always a risk in posting links to external websites. Some of the following links may possibly
lead to websites that present information that is unsubstantiated or even
false. Their authenticity has not been
verified and their content has not been validated. Marie
Paule's story: Surviving life on the streets of Kinshasa The girls were saved from being
burnt alive when a vigilant neighbour alerted police. That night, however,
they were thrown out of the uncle's house – and that's when their life on the
streets began. Bolivia: Abandoned Street
Children Turn To Drugs Enrique, a typical 11-year-old
Bolivian boy, was one of these street children. "I slept on the streets, but I was
always hungry and needed to feed my addictions," Enrique says. "Two things happened when I
turned 12, my Father who used to beat the hell out of us left home and the
other thing that happened is I started using drugs... One of my friends said
'Here try this it will make you feel better', and it did. When I turned 13, my Mum found a new
partner who lived at home with us. He raped me regularly and abused my
younger sisters as well. I was only 13. Homeless People -
Jazmin's Story Jazmin was raised by her alcoholic
father for the first eight years of her life and foster parents until she was
12 years old. She ran away from foster
care to escape a foster father who was violent. Living on the streets using whatever drugs
or alcohol she could get her hands on to escape her pain, Jazmin was using
heavily when she became pregnant at 15. SOKHOM’S STORY - As a young teenager, Sokhom thought he could help his
parents escape poverty by finding work in the city. He left their small farm in rural Cambodia
and found a job as a construction working in the capital, Phnom Penh. But the heavy labor was too difficult for
him. "Social
Cleansing" Of Children Frankie has been on the street
since he was eight years old and has survived three "social
cleansing" attempts on his life.
Now a convicted murderer at twenty-three, he says that his mother died
of an illegal abortion and his father was killed in the service of a drug
trafficker. This is T., a three-year-boy whose
mother was a streetwalker who died recently leaving him on a street corner.
No one knew her, except that she had wandered to Hue from another province
somewhere in the South. This is H... What's New at Amani
Children’s Home Chachu
is 13 and hunger forced him to leave home to look for food. Selemani is a 16-year-old boy, who lives at
an orphanage and doesn't even
know the alphabet, whose mother was murdered and whose father is a dying
paralytic, claps and smiles when he finds out he can bring his dad a mattress
to die on Honduran president addresses
child murders After two weeks of intense
international attention to the issue, as well as a U.N. report demonstrating
the killing of homeless children by the police, the President promised to
reduce "in the shortest time possible" the assassination of children
in this Central American nation. Collins had been living
on the street for over a year Collins
Kipkoech is 12 years old. He never knew his father. He ran away from his home
because he was continuously abused. His mother would come to find him and
bring him home where he would be severely abused again. My heart tried to ignore
him. But there he was standing in front of me The ragged dirty boy held out his
hand. My heart tried to ignore him. But there he was standing in front of me.
I shake my head and move on, a bundle of mixed emotions. I didn't have any change but that wasn't
the real reason. We were told not to give them money. They would only go buy
glue to sniff. Meet
Fernando, Just One Street Kid in Mexico City He is a con-man, a beggar, an
entrepreneur and perhaps the mayor of his "little town." His town
is Plaza Francisco Zarco, a square in Mexico City, dedicated to a famous
19th-century Mexican journalist.
Fernando, a bright-eyed 13-year-old who looks much younger than his
age, is one of countless children who make their home on the streets of
Mexico City. Fernando’s life story is
simple. He left his home in Oaxaca at age 7, and made the five-hour ride to
Mexico City with his brother in a pick-up truck, leaving behind the rest of
his 20-member family. Help For
Ukraine's Street Kids, From Two Us Women In the narrow space around the
pipes in a Kiev sewer, 15 ragged children sleep huddled together for warmth.
They range from 9-year-old Artyom Selivanov, the tough ringleader, to
16-year-old Natasha Dzuley, who crouches in a corner, clutching a small cloth
doll. From the Field - Stories from
Street Children in Peru1 We all slept in a garden. They started smoking and told me to try it,
but I had heard that smoking glue is bad and told them no. They insisted and called me a sissy for not
trying it, but I didn't pay attention and kep sleeping. Then they started smoking marijuana with
coca base paste. They wanted me to try
that, too. I wanted to, but I had a
friend named Posheco who liked me, and he told them not to give my any, so
they stopped insisting. I had other
friends who stole things, and their girlfriends were or are prostitutes. I started hanging out with them and learned
to steal things. I'm 26 years old and have lived on
the streets since I was 6 years old. A year ago I moved into Rebecca’s
Community 'Hospitality House.' This website chronicles my life journey
through foster care, homelessness, drug addiction, prison and my new life off
drugs and off the streets. Melissa has been treated like a
toilet all her life, as a child, as a teenage girl and now as a woman she has
been raped sometimes daily by whatever male wants to use her. Adolphine is a 13 year old girl
who set out on foot with her parents to escape the brutal fighting in the east
of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
During her journey both her parents died. She was left alone and homeless in one of
the largest primary rainforests in the world.
Attacked and abused along the way, she endured with courage until she
finally reached Kinshasa - a walk of 2,500km. Thirteen year-old Zahid spends his
nights at Cantt railway station in Karachi. He makes his living selling
whatever waste paper and bottles he can collect and is desperate to find
shelter, not to mention someone who would care for him. Zahid has been on the streets for three
years. "I have nobody. I came to Karachi with an uncle who promised me a
job, but I was left here to fend for myself." An APPERT
Story - Fixing Francis' Future "My parents divorced and, after
that, my father was hardly ever at home. That all affected me badly. But I
also mixed with the wrong crowd, and that's how I ended up on the
streets." For a while, this
became a way of life for Francis. Once or twice - he doesn't remember how
many times exactly - he tried to go back to his father but he wasn't welcome
there any more. True
Stories - Street children in Malawi Emmanuel problems with stealing /
Maloyano stole food / Doreen, an orphan accused of witchcraft./ Nakiline, an
adolescent mother, raped / Real Lives -
Azerbaijan Diary: A Sting In The Tale “We have regular customers who
park their cars and we wash them. When they leave work, they pay us."
The police don’t hassle them on the proviso that they take 60% of the boys’
earnings. So net profit usually ends up as approximately a dollar per boy per
day. The boys drop in and out of
school. Ridicule appears to be a feature of the alienation process.
"They jeer at me for not having a change of clothes. Even the principal
told me not to come to school if I didn’t wear the right clothes" Visit To
Kyrgyzstan - October 2003 His father was drunk, had beaten
up the mother, destroyed the home. Andrey had run away and was living the
wild migrant gypsy existence on the streets. Eventually, the young people
from the center took Andrey back to his mother. And this woman, confronted with
her son, was clearly wounded and bereft, and at a loss as to how to take care
of him. She let him go to an orphanage rather than taking him back. Now he’s
back on the street. His parents, he said, had tried to
put him into an orphanage in his home village, complaining that they couldn't
afford to look after him. When he had been refused, they tried to palm him
off at the local police station but were turned away again. At this point, Slava says, his mother and
father just abandoned him before leaving for Russia with his youngest sister. No study or statistics can capture
the horror of trafficking and modern-day slavery like the words of its
survivors. HumanTrafficking.com has brought together one of the largest
collections of testimonies of survivors to help the world hear their voices. And there's Christin. Her mom, who
often left her three children alone in a house with no food, died of a heroin
overdose at 27. As a teen, Christin begged jail staff to keep her there, but
she was released to the street over and over again. She is now studying to
graduate high school and raising her toddler-aged son. Indian
street kids offer glimpse into their lives Javed Khan left his village home
at the age of nine to see monuments in the Indian capital New Delhi where the
bustling railway station was to be home for the next seven years. During that time, Khan lived in an
empty sewer, went without food for five days, was stabbed, reported to a gang
leader of street children and saw his friends lose their lives to alcohol and
drug addiction. 1. The linked article has been
taken down, moved or restricted |