Girls, Grasshoppers and the "slums" in Nyendo.... (Adriana)

Girls, Grasshoppers and the “slums” in Nyendo…

For those that don’t know, I am completing my work experience at Child Restoration Outreach (CRO) in Masaka. CRO is a Christian NGO that helps support the lives of street children and their families here in Masaka. CRO also operates 3 other drop in centers in Mbale, Jinja and Lira. (if you wish to find more information regarding this organization please visit www.croug.org).

So this drop in center allows children to come there in the morning and stay for the whole day while being fed, cleaned and educated. The children will walk as long as 1 hour (sometimes longer) to come to the center. In the morning they are able to shower and wash their clothes. Through out the day they attend class, clean the center, eat lunch, study the bible and have fun. Having fun and playing together is an important part of their day here at CRO because it gives them an opportunity to release their stresses of day to day life on the streets and also gives them an opportunity for positive interactions and engagements with other children and youth. I have been told that all of the staff at CRO has some form of counseling skills so that all staff are accessible for help if the child wishes to engage at any moment.

The main goal of CRO is to make connections with the children and youth, over an extended period of time, and then try to facilitate a move back home to an appropriate and willing caretaker. The children and youth leave home for a variety of reasons. Most reasons relating back to poverty, poor health, neglect and abuse. A lot of the youth have experienced the death or abandonment of their main caretaker – death from AIDS or malaria for an example. The staff at CRO make connections with the youth and try to discover their individual reasons for being on the streets. Then they work towards finding out if there are any parents or relatives that may be able to take them in. Once a connection has been made and a lead towards a relative has been established, the social worker will visit the home and make a connection with the family member. The social worker will talk with the family and try to have them take the child back into the home – or into the home for the first time if it is a relative. Sometimes this also needs to happen over an extended period of time. I was told that often the family does not want the child for numerous reasons and it is challenging at times to assist them in changing their minds.

Another part of what CRO does involves visiting the “slums” to find the children and make connections where they are at. CRO really seems to have the concept of meeting the children where they are at and allowing the children to make connections at times that are good and most comfortable for them. So the social worker will do daily trips into a neighboring village called Nyendo – where the majority of the street children sleep – and try to find new children while connecting with the ones they already know. The social worker will then encourage the kids to come to CRO and visit. My understanding through observation so far is that the majority of the children want to go to school, so the idea of receiving an education at CRO motivates these children to come – along with the idea of eating food and showering. I was told that on most days the social worker will escort children back to the center with her.

In Nyendo, where most of the children migrate to, there are markets where the children can make some money. It often happens that adults will hire the children at a very cheap, exploitive rate (as I have been told). The children do things like sell food (walk around the streets with baskets of food on their heads), scavenge for scrap metal and do any needed labor. CRO calls this child labor as the exchange is very exploitive. Children will also be hired as house maids as well as engage in sexual acts for the exchange of food, shelter or money. I am under the understanding that the children go to and stay in Nyendo because of the work at the markets and the adults who live in the slums who wish to have cheap child laborers. The children here are incredibly resilient – and so beautiful. They are very hard workers and do what they need to do to survive. They seem to be very adaptable, which seems to be important in order to stay alive.

In the past CRO used to conduct monthly night walks into the slums, but due to lack of funding (sounds all too familiar) they had to cut the night walks down to once every three months. I will be present and attend the next one. The night walks create an expense because they involve police and probation officer escorts. CRO works closely with the police here in Masaka because of the child labor and exploitation that exists. (It’s a tough realization when I am reminded that child poverty & exploitation is a global problem with many faces – it is this thought that creates a deep hurt and brings tears to my eyes – our world has created rights for children, but the rights seem to go neglected on a large scale). So CRO uses the help of the local police to talk to the adults that hire the children and to enforce the fact that this is illegal and they can and will go to jail. Prior to any police involvement, the social worker will make a connection with the “boss” and try to talk the boss into letting the child attend CRO. If, after a couple attempts, the boss still does not cooperate than police involvement is brought in. During the night walks in particular, police escorts are needed for safety reasons. Along with the issue that most “bosses” do not like CRO staff for taking the children, it is also has been described as a very unsafe place to be at night (in the slums in Nyendo). So police escorts come with a cost, along with safe transportation. I will find out more later about the differences of the day walks to the night walks – what kinds of things are seen, how they find the children, what the children are doing.

So what have I been up to so far at CRO? Last week the staff at CRO took the kids for a week long camping trip. After discussions with my supervisors, I had decided that I would stay home from that trip and visit my peers at their placements instead. So I have just gotten back to CRO this week after one week of not being there.

The week prior to their camping trip I had facilitated a girls group. I brought in some paper, crayons and markers with an idea to try and boost their self esteem, while connecting and building a relationship with the girls. Since I have been at CRO I have noticed that the girls seem to have a lesser presence than the boys – part of this is because the boys out number the girls. I was told that this is due in part to the fact that most of the street girls are scooped up to be house maids and the like. I have been told that the street girls are less visible than the boys. The girls that do attend CRO work very hard. I notice that they help prepare and serve lunch and then clean up after lunch. Not to paint the picture that the boys do not help as they do. It is usually the younger boys that seem to be the helpers. So I felt that it would be nice to have a bit of time dedicated to the girls that are present at CRO and acknowledge their hard work and beauty. (I have also been told by a couple of locals that this is a “mans world” and that the men have the upper hand and control). So after lunch clean up I had all the girls come into one room to participate in my little group – along with the school teacher to interpret for me. I had the chairs set up in a circle and distributed the paper and coloring materials out. The girls appeared very happy to have the paper and felt pens – their faces seemed to light up. I had the girls draw something they thought was beautiful on one side of the paper along with their name. The teacher and I also participated. The girls were having great fun with the colors. After a bit of time I had the girls pass their paper on to the person beside them had them write something nice about the girl whose paper she had (something learned back in CYC class at Douglas). At first this idea was deeply lost in translation, and I felt myself worrying for a split second that it was not going to turn out. But in the end it did. There were approx 12 girls ranging from around 8 years to 17 years. The circle idea worked for a short time, but after the girls got the concept they just got up and walked around to who ever hadn’t written on their sheet yet. The older girls helped the younger girls and they all seemed to be really enjoying it. During the action I had noticed that the girls started using the felt pens to draw on their lips to look like lipstick – it was a reminder that girls will be girls everywhere, and they like to grow up fast.

By the end of our time together I was able to watch as the girls read what their peers had written about each other and again, their beautiful faces lit up – even the teacher that participated had a big smile on her face as she read what her students had written. I was amazed to see how well they wrote – everything was in English. Before the group dispersed, I had the teacher interpret a message for me. I told the girls that I have noticed how hard they work and how they amaze me. I told them how beautiful I think they all are (as I looked around the circle at all their smiling faces). I told them that I hope they see their own beauty. I mentioned that I really enjoyed this group and that I would like to have more groups with just the girls. My small appreciation speech was followed by cheers and clapping hands. They got up and hugged me and each other; it was a very rewarding experience for me.

On my first day back to CRO after their camping trip, I was able to re connect with the kids. I was told that they had over 60 children at camp. I noticed that there were not too many kids at CRO that day and it was explained to me that they are resting from the trip along with catching grasshoppers and preparing for the big weekly market that happens in Nyendo every Tuesday. As it is currently grasshopper season and the skies are filled with grasshoppers, they kids had buckets of them at CRO that day. So, what better way to bond with the kids than to be taught how to pull apart live grasshoppers to prepare them to be cooked. It was actually a bit challenging at first because I kept pulling the head off, which is a part that gets eaten. So the boys laughed with me as they taught me the correct way to hold the grasshopper along with the systematic way to pluck them apart. You first start by pulling off the legs; which are seemingly stronger than I thought. Then you pluck off the wings followed by the antenna and the small tail like thing on the back. Then you are left with just the body, including the head (and eyes) that get thrown into another bucket and then friend with oil. It actually looks a little funny; the pile of grasshopper bodies are still moving around with life in them; and the ground is covered with the left over legs and wings. I wished I had my camera! Later that afternoon I was offered some grasshoppers as a delicate snack. To really fit in with the kids, I tried one! The boys all laughed at me as I put it in my mouth with a slight look of fear and apprehension on my face. I then bite down a couple times and felt my face turn a bit sour. I could only take a couple bites before I thought about the fact that I have half a grasshopper in my mouth between my teeth. I quickly reached for and drank my water to wash it down. The boys had a good time with that – I on the other hand was rather proud of myself, and also had a good time! Later that afternoon a staff had given me a small amount of grasshoppers to eat. I could only eat one and then passed them on to someone else. Again, I needed to wash it down with water. I just couldn’t get past the idea that I was eating grasshopper. Perhaps I will give it a try again.

Yesterday I participated in a walk through Nyendo slums looking for street children. Our first encounter was an older man, with youth sitting around him preparing grasshoppers, talking very loudly, using the word muzungo and looking rather harshly at us. There were other people all around and I noticed that they were also looking at us and laughing. The social worker was talking with a couple kids who looked like they were working. Actually, all the kids I noticed during our walk looked like they were engaged in some form of work. After we walked away from that spot I had found out that that man was in fact speaking rudely about us. He was a “boss” who didn’t like the social worker interfering with his workers – the kids. So, like I thought, he was making comments about her and me as well. Good thing I didn’t understand what he was saying.

We continued our walk through the slums. I was asked to explain later that night what they look like, but to be honest it is indescribable. I wouldn’t even know where to start. I did not bring my camera for a number of reasons, but if I can, I will take pictures another time. It could be accurate to say that it probably looks like what ever you are imagining right now. Mud huts, cramped spaces, tattered clothes, people sitting on the ground working, garbage on the ground…. The social worker was speaking with a lot of different kids. She pointed out how some of the youth were avoiding her as they didn’t want to come to the center because of the work that they could do instead. But she connected with them anyways; at the least to say hi and that she notices them. While I cannot understand what she was saying, and I am new to this culture, to me she seems like a very natural worker who innately knows how to connect, from her body language, to her town of voice to her presence as a whole. It was lovely to see how she connected with these kids – and the bosses. We had reached one place where she had visited numerous times before trying to connect and recruit a new child. It was a young girl who looked no older than 12. (It is hard to tell the ages of the children / youth around here, and often they do not even know how old they are). This young girl was working for a man, who did not look much older than me (26) and his wife (?). When we arrived she was washing their dishes and doing their laundry. The social worker sat and talked with the man attempting to have him allow the child to come with us to the center. I was able to watch her talk to the man while at the same time watch the child as she vigorously cleaned what was around her. I knew she was listening to what was being discussed and at some point I was able to see a shift in her. The gift of being advocated for; she was able to listen to the social worker talk about the center and what would be offered and that she should be coming. The child did not lift her head from her duties or even show any sign that she was paying attention, but I new she was. I could feel her attention. It was not long until the social worker told me that she was allowed to come. We just needed to wait for her to finish her duties and then she would come with us; it would be the first time for her to come to CRO. So we waited. We sat for about 30 minutes as she was finishing her work. I think I knew that she was granted permission before the social worker told me because at one point I noticed the girl hurry up with her dishes – that coincided with the shift I felt, even though she did not bat an eye at the discussion around her. So she finished her dishes and washed herself, got changed and we left. I noticed before we left that she was paid 100 Ush – which would relate to fewer than 10 cents for us in Canada. She collected her money and we collected her and we were on our way.

We continued to walk through Nyendo to visit a couple more areas before we headed back to the center. It was market day in Nyendo (Tuesday) so the area was very VERY packed with lots of people, botta botta’s, cars and vendors. I was shown a couple more places where children slept – on the streets, in ditches, between mud houses; pretty much everywhere and anywhere. I was shown the different alleys that the youth may exchange sex for goods. During our walk we saw a couple children that attend the center. It was a real pleasure when I heard my name being called out by a child that I had already met. The other children in the slums all came up to me and would touch me to see if I was real. A couple of the really small ones grabbed my hands and walked with me, their faces brighter than the sun, big big smiles. When I sat down they would try to cuddle up to my lap and just be close to me.

I felt glorified almost to bring back this child to CRO with the social worker. It was a real gift for me to be a part of that process. I was even able to sit in with the first meeting that the social worker had with the child when we arrived at the center. While I was unable to understand the verbal language, I gained deeper insight into observing the body and emotional language being presented. I learned more about the lives of the street children here in Masaka. Like mentioned before I observed how hard they work, how resilient they are and how incredibly beautiful they are. It was an amazing treat for me. Again, bitter sweet – the silver lining is always present.

So the seemingly little time I have spent at CRO I am now working on seeing how I can participate in creating special ideas for CRO to try out with the children and youth. Like the girls group. I would like to see if I can create an atmosphere of importance around spending a little bit of time each week with only the girls and working towards building their self esteem and feelings of self worth. I am also open to finding an appropriate idea for something for the boys, especially the older boys. The older boys have been described as a bit harder to reach, and I will take on the challenge of creating something special to engage in with them.

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Sincerely,
Adriana