Plight of street children: Winter nights a nightmare for the destitute
KATHMANDU, JAN 10 - Thirteen-year-old Ashiq Shrestha struggles every night to sleep. He cannot; the freezing winter of Kathmandu won’t let him. A tattered blanket and a thin mattress are not enough to ward off the chill, because he shacks up on a Thamel footpath.
There are approximately 5,000 street children in the country for whom winter nights are a nightmare, the 2008 factsheet of Child Workers in Nepal Concerned Centre (CWIN) states. They suffer from scarcity of clothes to wear and mattresses and blankets to sleep.
Ashiq and two other boys share two mattresses and a blanket provided by a foreigner, Steffrie Leo last month. “It’s already worn out and is not long enough to cover the three of us,” he shared. The children face several health problems such as sore throat, headache, common cold and chest pain during winter. They somehow manage to get medicines but the drugs do not work most often. “Unless we can keep ourselves warm, no medicine works,” sniffled the cold-stricken boy.
It is not only the chill the children must beat. One night, when Ashiq and his friends were trying to sleep, forgetting their sorrows, a group of policemen started thrashing them. They call the policeman that they regularly encounter ‘Kaaleh Cop’. He cannot say his name but knows he bears two stars on his shoulders.
They often face the wrath of the police for ‘littering the street’. “Every night, we clear the rubbish thrown by others to spare ourselves their kicks and punches. But they never stop troubling us,” Ashiq lamented. He and his 17-year-old friend Ramesh Thapa were provided shelter by an organisation. However, they returned to the street since they were not allowed to sniff glue. Ramesh said organisations visit them regularly but once they are told of the boys’ ill health, they never turn up again.
According to the National Alliance of Organisations Working with Street Children (NAOSC), five organisations have been working for the children for the last five years, excluding organisations that are mushrooming and those short-lived. The latter kind are unable to address the actual needs of these children.
NAOSC Treasurer Krishna Thapa said since organisations cannot work for the children in a sustained way, this causes the victims to feel that they do not need the NGOs but the NGOs need them. The issue of street children has received government attention since last year, he added. “However, there is still a lack of vision and an effective policy. The budget allocated has not benefitted the target group much.”
Thapa believes hunger and shelter are not the only needs of the children. Their psychological needs should also be addressed. “The children’s actual needs should be identified and an action plan chalked out. For this, the government should join hands with non-government organisations concerned.”
Posted on: 2011-01-11 09:00
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Abin
Shit! The note is lost. I had better avoid extemporising. ...have been told not to blab.
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