There is no bold proclamation announcing its
existence. The press carries no adverts announcing its aptitude test yet,
silently, the school exists and producing graduates day in and day out with
varying qualifications. For The Big Issue Magazine (Malawi), I wrote this article and I
hereby publish it.
The streets are near deserted. It is a Sunday
and this is not least expected. The sun, almost as if it intends not to do what
it is doing, is gently sliding into oblivion for the day to pave way for
darkness and some stars.
In the opposite direction are coming some
little boys. Their ages hover around seven and ten – nobody is even entering
the teens, at least roughly judging by the looks on their faces. Their clothes
are dirty, their feet naked and their faces unbathed. It is not strange. The
boys have dressed according to their trade: begging.
The woman walking towards them has a MK 5
coin ready to disperse it to these boys and then proceed with her journey to
the bus terminal. She always helps such children and, of course, with a heart
that wishes she had a lot to give out or even just some magical powers to get
the children out of the street.
The streets are no safer place, at least for
children.
To her amazement, none of the children asks
for anything. They just silently pass by each other. Have they gotten a lot for
the day? Maybe yes, maybe no. They might even be just tired of being at the
receiving end of insults from people who do not know their story and who think
begging for them is a hobby. Those of the general populace who do not know that
for some of these children being in the streets is as a result of death of their
parents and the hypocrisy of their relatives, others it is even because of the
failing of the institution of marriage.
The woman walks on, hurrying to the bus
terminal, trying to push the image of the children out of her mind.
However, she does not walk for long. From
behind her, somebody tugs at her handbag that was hanging loosely on her
shoulder. It is tugged with a force and, in succumbing to pain, the handbag is
let loose from her safety.
Turning around, she sees the children – they
are three in number – running away with her handbag. There is her everything in
that handbag: a purse that has a passport, an ATM card, the only cash she was
left with, an Identity card and every other valuable.
The children take a turn, their dirty heels
still mocking her as they run in a goodbye waving fashion, and they run into
some incomplete building. Gone for good.
Seems like a scene taken out of a movie –
maybe a Hollywood blockbuster aimed at negatively portraying Africa and her
children but it is real.
For that woman, Marianne Chikakuda, it is
something she saw with her eyes.
“I could not believe it that it was those
children who had done that to me, leaving me stranded in Limbe for even my
phone was there,” she says in taking back the steps down memory lane when in
daylight she was robbed.
“And, there were people coming just behind
me. I just wonder where such children, as young as they were, plucked such
courage and never were afraid of being caught. What if they had been caught?”
It is a good question she asks, a question
the majority can ask yet research says such children can never ask themselves
such a question.
According to a study conducted in Cairo,
Egypt, in 2010, many children that live in the streets are exposed to various
ills and dangers among them sexual violence. To escape this, most of the
children resort to drug abuse with the end result that their personality is
altered. Thus, they live with few ounces of humanity and compassion exists in
little drops in their blood, if it does at all.
The research might have been conducted in a
place miles and miles away from Malawi yet the findings resonate well in the
local setting. Street kids, the sight of them in daylight and a better place,
might not be unnerving but the moment one meets them in an awkward place,
everything changes: their outstretched hands that endlessly clamor for some
cash suddenly tighten into fists and the ‘God
bless yous’ their lips pour out when you drop a little something into their
open palms are replaced by curses when they tighten the grip on your neck in
demand of money and your personal effects – cell phones being chief of them.
It is a sad reality, somehow fictitious yet
when one encounters it all the fiction associated with it shrinks to pave way
for a real, naked and uncensored shock.
And, it is in the streets that the children
are robbed of their conscience and humanity or rather it is there where the
collision of their conscience and humanity happens; and, in that collision the
two things that make us develop sympathy – conscience and humanity – are
victimized; they die at the spot.
Possibly well meaning, the government of
Malawi started removing the children from the streets. They, however, never
went any further. It is an exercise that starts as if it is a dream and, like
most other dreams, ends midway before anyone makes sense of it.
The children themselves, some of them in
their postgraduate classes of crime in the city, declare blatantly that they
will never leave the streets. They claim it is their source of money. One can
easily buy their argument but not when that one is, or met a similar experience
to, Chikakuda.
“Government must remove those kids and even
by force, I say,” Chikakuda says as a solution to the problem. “Otherwise, our
cities will remain jungles in which we will be afraid to venture in.”
For now, it appears the cities are already
the jungles where the marauding beasts are not men with muscular arms or trotting
with guns but young kids whom, time and again, have been said to be the
tomorrow of not only this nation but this world.
One wonders then what kind of tomorrow we
will have with such as its guardians: little boys who instead of being in class
learning how to develop the nation are in some nameless and faceless college
learning survival which, to them, is losing control of all humanity and
relegating the conscience to some dustbin of inexistence.
The government, on the other hand, operates
on the dream, perhaps a hallucination, where they wake up one day to remove all
the street children and then, midway to that, stop it. And, when they are busy
shutting down some substandard education institutions, they forget closing down
this school that trains our youths in unexpected and strange programmes.
But, who can blame them?
If they only knew where this school is;
perhaps, they could have done something. How can they but when in passing
through the city their cars fly at a strange speed while being guarded by gun-trotting
officers in military regalia.
They do not even know of the existence of
this school, you can bet.
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