Hope for Slum Communities: Children
by Scott BesseneckerExcerpted from forthcoming The Quest for Hope in Slum Communities,
Reprinted with permission ISBN 1932805-192 World Vision Press in partnership with Authentic Media
expected publication date Summer 2005
Part 1: Prostitution
Part 2: Children
Part 3: Justice
I remember rushing from one end of Mexico City to another, which is quite a challenge even with an efficient metro. Appointments with several development agencies on this particular day meant speeding through the labyrinth of multi-level subway tunnels and squeezing through what I call the Hildago Press. One million people a day pass through this junction of several metro lines. You don’t step onto the metro in Hildago, you are carried along, sometimes against your will, by a moving mass of humanity. We needed to get to the north bus terminal in order to catch a bus to a remote area of Mexico City where Compassion International had a children’s program. As we ran down one metro passage, my attention was drawn to a boy about ten years old. He was squatting with his back against a wall and his arms wrapped around his legs. His face was buried in his knees and he was sobbing uncontrollably. Mexico City is home to more than four hundred thousand street children. I had a split second to make a decision: was I going to stop or pass by? I pass many desperate people in my travels. But my heart and my spirit told me to stop and sit down next to the boy. Even with broken Spanish, I could sit with him for a moment and ask to help. I had money and connections with a ministry for street children. Perhaps I could do something. At least I could offer an arm around the shoulder and a smile. The two people I was following to the appointment were already quite a bit in front of me. A moment’s delay and I could lose them. I made my choice as I rushed past the boy, without even pausing. The image of him huddled and crying in the metro has haunted me to this day.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that there are between ten million and one hundred million street children worldwide, which is a number so large as to be meaningless to most of us.1 The fact remains that there are way too many ten-year-olds crying in metro stations. In every large city in the world, a person can see them: children under fifteen years of age on the streets after 10:00 PM with a five-year-old brother or sister in tow. The problems are difficult to unravel and the solutions even more complex. Add to that the horrific statistic that about two hundred and fifty million children between five and fourteen years of age are working for a living.2 Many of them work with hazardous materials, fight wars, or live in bonded slavery.
Anyone attempting to affect urban transformation cannot ignore the plight of children. We may eradicate slums, create jobs, and open affordable housing for the current generation and be immediately inundated by the unfathomable army of children who live in an earthly hell waiting to take their place. They will bring with them into adulthood all the abuse which has been heaped on them. How will they know what it is to devote themselves to a spouse and to children, or to extend trust and acceptance to others, or to live in a way that does not take advantage of those who are weaker, if they themselves have never experienced such things? If you think one hundred million street kids or two hundred and fifty million working children create an intimidating problem, just wait. From the time I write these words until they are published, another great throng of street children will graduate into adulthood and begin having children, filling in the ranks that they left vacant.
United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has published a report that looks at three factors that affect urban poor children (NOTE: 348 kb PDF file): physical infrastructure, housing, and the social environment. Looking at the plight of children from these three angles helps to build a more comprehensive understanding of all that might go into delivering children from the harsh realities of urban poverty. The second reading was produced by Jeff Anderson, who works with children on the streets of Manila with Action International. His voice is one of a practitioner who has invested his heart with children on the streets and grants us a profile of the kind of children he works with everyday (NOTE: 3.7 mb PDF file; see pp.12-18). Improving the lot of one urban poor child has a disproportionate effect on dozens of lives that child will impact in the future. Ignoring the plight of even one urban poor child can have the opposite disproportionate effect.
Notes
1. WHO, “Working with Street Children,” WHO/MSD/MDP 00.14 (Geneva: WHO, 2000), iii.
2. UNICEF, “Worst Forms of Child Labor Data,” The Progress of Nations (New York: UNICEF, 2000), http://www.globalmarch.org/worstformsreport/global.html.
Part 1: Prostitution
Part 2: Children
Part 3: Justice
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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