There were
11,000 children living on the streets of Addis Ababa at the last count.
Retrak’s mission is to offer these children an alternative; a bed, an education
and eventually to reunite them with their families or foster parents.
We are
here with 14 colleagues from GMP and GMFRS to witness their work first hand,
offer respite to the few staff here in Addis and try to help restore these
children’s faith in adults.
We arrived at 1am by our watches, although here it’s 2006, which makes Joe a
teenager and Sam slightly closer to 30. We
were greeted at the airport by.. er... nobody - our bus and our driver having
never existed.
After a
lengthy telephone struggle we sat tight until Kathleen from Retrak UK came to
rescue us. We had to rearrange taxis for the group, which meant a fraught
semi-argument with about 20 taxis and several men with AK47s. Gary (of GMFRS)
helpfully pointed out that these guns had at least two bullets for each of us.
We got in
the last taxi and unclenched our sphincters only to discover 20 minutes later
that our taxi driver had no clue where the hotel might be, and was himself very
lost. Our thoughts of kidnap disappeared by the time the driver resorted to
screaming the name of our hotel out of the window at anyone who would listen.
An hour later and several off-road detours through rubble we staggered into our
4am beds in the wonderful Ebenezer Guest House (advertised for its ‘safe and
quality stairs’ – which it does indeed have).
A 7am
start did not feel good. The strongest coffee known to man went some way to
help.
Firdaku,
our driver for the week, skilfully and seemingly impossibly avoided all
collisions on the way across the construction site that is Addis Ababa,
bringing us alive to Retrak’s drop-in centre, located right by the bus station,
where most children arrive in the city for the first time.
We were
greeted by noise, chaos, handshakes, grinning faces, shouts of ‘Salam’
(hello!), friendly shoulder bashes and an almost immediate spontaneous game of
football. Football here means everyone chasing a ball, often with one or no
shoes, laughing, shouting and kicking until it goes over a wall.
At the
moment here, the doors of the centre are open to around 60 young boys, each
around 14-16 years old. Usually it’s a
much wider range of ages but the charity has recently been funded by an
international research grant which obliges them to focus on this age range for
the next three months. The staff here explain that girls are cared for by a
sister charity, but they have different needs and there are not many on the
streets as they are quickly swept up into prostitution or domestic slavery.
We were
taken into the classroom for a briefing from Lynn, Retrak Country Director, about
the do’s, don’ts, cultural expectations and generally how to properly interact
and safeguard the kids, then spent much of the rest of the afternoon playing
every ball game at once and getting to know the lads. Three hours of
tennis-badminton-basket-football later we headed back to the hotel elated.
After
dinner we were picked up for the night bus tour, which was easily the single
most harrowing thing either of us have ever experienced.
It’s hard
to really do it justice with words. We drove through the roads which are
usually used by street children, many of whom don’t ever sleep at night for
fear of abuse or violence. It was like a scene from a post-apocalyptic movie;
piles of tiny sleeping bodies, piles of rubble and young girls outside
brothels.
The sheer
number of kids we saw on the street was staggering. The disparity between those
scenes and the happy children we spent the afternoon with was a shock, and
really drove home the importance of the work that Retrak do.
Joe Hulme
and Sam Pickles
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