Teodros Kiros - Street Children Have Rights Also

Street Children Have Rights Also

13 October, 2009 | Teodros Kiros, PhD

The streetlights are all red. Hundreds of cars are lined up to move. Nothing is
moving, and the rains are coming down. Old and new cars are wet to the
brink. The deafening crowd reluctantly welcomes hundreds of street children
roaming the traffic, desperately looking for something to do. The youngest
cross the streets in-between cars lined up like sardines. The younger ones
finger the drivers, and a few hurl insults. The mature ones, whose faces carry
lines of early aging, simply stare.

They have nothing to

say. Nothing. Their eyes

seem to say, we are

here. We will always be

here.

As the commotion goes

on and at far way end, is

a beautiful middle-aged

woman, surrounded by

as many as twenty street

children pushing their

hands in to her Honda, and she is giving away coins to them, one by one. She
smiles at them as she is dispensing with her coins. She knows their names and
converses with every one of them.

No body seems to notice.

As soon as the traffic clears, she drives away. The children disperse and
disappear in the streets.

According to a local paper, this woman’s, name was Arsema. She died about
five years ago, but attended to these street children for twenty years, every
day, and at that particular spot, to where the children came at noon.

As the writer put it.“ This was Arsema’s way of serving the Ethiopian street
children. She did her part, how about the rest of us?

After all, street children also have rights”