Posts Tagged ‘poverty’

Posted on May 5, 2010 - by mira

Yemen’s children of the ashes

Youngsters eke out pittance amid rampant poverty
First appeared in The Daily Star

SANAA: When Mahmoud was brought to the Safe Childhood Center the first time, he hated it, he says with a hint of independence. It felt like a prison. So he ran away the same day.

Having escaped from an abusive foster family, he had been homeless for a month, and after his flight from the center, spent another two months on the street. He found an abandoned building to sleep in and work at a store that sells gas canisters. His job was to load canisters into customers’ trunks and fill up empty ones. For this work he was paid $2.50 per day, and the store owner gave him $1.50 for breakfast and lunch. He was 12.

Hamza, 11, lived with relatives who forced him to sell books and magazines on the street – or face severe punishment. A sympathetic customer would see him hanging out on a sidewalk late into the evenings for fear of going home with the publications he couldn’t sell that day.

For his part, Yahya can’t say for sure what the dangers could be for his two children standing on the median. “They might be kidnapped and killed?” He keeps an eye on them from the shade of a tree on a street corner, where he sits on a flattened cardboard box.

His son Najeeb says he is 14 but looks younger. His daughter can’t be more than 6 years old. They each carry four cold bottles of water that they try to sell at an intersection. She takes a bill from a passerby and won’t let her brother have it. “You’ll lose it,” he tells her. But she holds her own.

“What can we do?” their father asks. “I can’t work anymore. I can’t walk very well, and I’m ill.” His hand goes to his abdomen.“My older son got married and left us. I have five young children at home. God will look after us.”

His walking stick lies on the ground next to him.

In his village in Mahweet, northwest of Sanaa, Yahya used to be a farmhand, and brought home $2.50 to $3 every day. But then his health deteriorated, and he moved his family to the capital last summer. Now his children make about the same amount daily selling water to drivers, he says. The two children sit close together on the median when the traffic light is green. They tease and poke at each other while waiting. When traffic comes to a halt, they scurry to the cars.

What these children have in common is poverty, labor and street life.

Between 35 and 45 percent of Yemen’s population are estimated to be below the poverty line. 18 percent of the population lives on less than $1.25 per day, according to UNICEF.

In recent years, Sanaa’s streets have witnessed a noticeable increase in peddlers and beggars at major intersections. While some are men, women, elderly, or disabled, many are children. They sell everything from kitchen items to trinkets.

“Poverty is not the only factor that pushes children to the street,” says Naseem-Ur-Rehman, Communications Chief at UNICEF. “Despite a conspicuous lack of a safety net for the poor in Yemen, there are informal social structures
such as family and tribe that look after the families in distress. One has to look further than just poverty to understand
why children are pouring out on the street in large numbers.”

A common concern in diplomatic circles is that the social support structures are under threat and have been under a lot of pressure due to, among others, the food, fuel and financial crises that the country is facing. Child labor is widely practiced here. More than 20 percent of those aged between 5 and 14 are engaged in some form of labor, according to UNICEF. Traditionally, children have helped in the father’s business or doing domestic work. They are entrusted from an early age with responsibilities in the family division of labor. Often, young children can be seen walking home with a bag of bread, flour or other last-minute groceries from a nearby baqala.

The problem is compounded when children are employed and either supplement the household income or become a
main source of it for lack of other, better alternatives. For employers, children are exploited as a cheap labor force
and to do menial jobs. When children cannot find a job, they can be forced out to work on the streets by their families.

But even when poverty is not a contributing factor, broken homes and violence practiced against them are important reasons why children end up living or working on the streets, or both, head of the Safe Childhood Center Abdallah Al-
Ammari asserts.

Recent studies estimate there are 30,000 to 35,000 street children in Yemen’s big cities.

“It’s one of the major emerging problems of children in Yemen,” says Naseem-Ur-Rehman. “I have seen the phenomenon of street children going from bad to worse in the last five years. It needs urgent attention from the
government, NGOs and development agencies.”

Families and children are often not aware of the hazards of street life, says Salahaddin al-Gomaei, head of the Educational and Psychological Guidance Center at Sanaa University.

Children are preyed upon by organized crime gangs, who use them to sell drugs, for sexual exploitation or in child trafficking. They face threats to their health, physical danger and sexual abuse. They could also be arrested by police if they are found alone at night, and if they’re not lucky enough to be taken to the Safe Childhood Center, may wind up in prison or in juvenile centers and become in conflict with the law.

The Safe Childhood Center, which currently houses around 40 children, provides temporary shelter to boys between
the ages of 6 and 15 who are homeless or from broken homes, while it tries to locate their families. When it does, it
works with the family to ensure that the child will have a safe environment to return to. In the meantime, the children receive health care, educational services and psychotherapy to rehabilitate them when needed.

Mahmoud, who ran away from his abusive family, now greets visitors with a cheerful smile. He has been living at the
center for a year. When he was homeless, he developed a fever and was taken there a second time. This time he decided to stay.

“Life is like ashes,” explains Yahya, the father sitting on the street corner. “When the wind blows them in the air,” his hands go to invisible ashes in front of him, “you can’t grab them. Khalas. You can die any moment.”

His son Najeeb runs across the street to get change from him for a driver. “Hurry,” he urges his father, like a salesman who doesn’t want to keep his customers waiting. He rushes back to the waiting car. He doesn’t have the time or patience to contemplate things like ashes or the wind blowing them.

*The children’s names were changed to protect their identities.