Street Education

Today our group had the chance to participate in street education activities conducted by a local NGO, whose main purpose is to reach out to the street children in the area, most of whom are unable to attend any sort of formal school. There are a few different kinds of street children here (and all over the place)—those that live in the streets with their families, those that work on the streets (but have a home to go to at night or every now and then), and those of the streets (who grew up there, not knowing necessarily who their parents are). There are many things these children do to sustain themselves and make a living, including selling newspapers, shining shoes, selling peanuts or other snacks, or carrying packages for people, for example. Most of the time, though, money is not enough and the children spend their money on rugby—a glue used for sniffing, which causes a high and also delays any sort of hunger pains. Kids can sniff rugby and ideally they won’t be hungry until the next day because of the damage it does to their body. It’s not uncommon, especially in the city, to see the kids with small plastic bags of rugby held to their noses—and when you look around, these bags may be surrounding your feet as well. Contrary to what I learned in D.A.R.E., these are definitely not bad kids. They are learning survival through their real lives, and rugby takes care of their immediate needs. As you can imagine, it’s extremely addictive and just like any other drug on the market, it keeps people in poverty. The money that these children can use for food that may be nutritious or will at least fill up their tummies, usually goes towards the longer-term satisfaction.

Anyways, the children that we did street education with were between the ages of four and six, and they were from different areas of the city. The program has two large buses that circulate to pick up the children and bring them to a central location. What was cool was that some of the mothers were even there waiting with their children for the bus—usually it is the children that are much more excited to learn than their mothers are to send them to school (because they could be earning money for the family instead). Basically, most of the education consisted of play, which is definitely a great way to teach. How much are these children actually learning? Honestly, it’s pretty hard to tell. Their attention spans, as you can imagine, are not great. What I was surprised about, though, was their conflict management techniques. When one of these children became angry or annoyed or simply wanted to get someone’s attention, they would hit another child, push them over, or even pull their hair. I’ve never seen so much kid-on-kid violence from children so young. I even saw one kid push another over—the kid hit the ground and smacked his forehead on the pavement, leaving an immediate red mark and a giant goose egg about five minutes later. The child sat up and smiled. These children definitely know survival, and if that’s how they survive in the streets, that’s how they survive in the “school” setting as well. It was definitely interesting!