The conversations with various members of the GNPDR team today, were as inspiring as was the conversation yesterday with Ketia and Justine. Here are my reflections from one of them.
A key focus was around the Outreach programme for children living on the streets that two of the team run. Angelique and Jeremiah have been running this programme for about 6 months now, and already are starting to see some fab results, and have helped a couple of children return home.
They visit the same two sites each week, so as to be a regular presence, and build trust with the children who use those sites as their base. Some of the children are 'full-time' street kids, whilst others are 'part-time' ie they go home at night, but spend the days on the streets, scrounging for food, begging for money, unable to afford to go to school. Their ages range from 7 - 17 years, and they are mainly boys.
We chatted about the challenges that they come up against. For example, when they go down to one of the sites and discover that the police have done a random rounding up of all the children they can find and thrown them all into a detention centre, where the children just have to wait for someone to come and 'claim' them. This might be a parent, or it might be a community leader who has been contacted to say that some of his juvenile residents are in the centre. Others have no-one come for them, and eventually just get released, but that could be after 5 months of confinement.
One of the other challenges related to the aim of helping children return home, and return to school. Such an admirable aim, but so complicated to achieve. A lot of time was spent discussing possible strategies and steps to be taken for repatriating a child, and how to increase the chance of success through better planning, preparation, and management of expectations, of the child, and of the receiving family.
A key aspect to the outreach work is the conversations that Jeremiah and Angelique have with the children. Mostly these are one-on-one, but often it is hard to have a really decent conversation as they are always on the street, with people walking past, traffic blaring, and lots of other distractions. What they would love to have is a drop-in centre, and so thought was given to this. We chatted through their vision for this development of the work, and the next steps is to cost it all out. It will only be a simple one or two room building, but it can provide a safe, quiet space for the children to come to, and that in itself is a luxury none of them have access to at the moment.
The work that Jeremiah and Angelique are doing is making such a difference to the children that they are reaching. Admittedly they aren't reaching all of the children who are on the streets, but their thinking is that it is better to be a regular, trustworthy presence in a few places, rather than an occasional presence in a lot of places. And I'm inclined to agree!
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