Its December now ...time for an update !

I haven't  written anything for several months, but I've not been idle !    Since the late summer, I've been volunteering in the Hands Around the World offices, which are about six miles from where I live.   Mostly office work, but interesting.  I'm getting familiar with incoming emails, banking, CRB's,  where the UK embassies are in the countries we work in, how to mend and dip mozzie nets, etc etc., ... and I make the office teas !    We are a group of about four volunteers, who are trying to cover the work done by two paid staff, to whom the recession has sadly brought redundancy.

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Meanwhile, I'm still doing a lot of reading linked to Kenya, street children, HIV...

A few sentences from Bill Bryson's recent book  'At Home'  could be describing African street children  (as well as the Victorian poor in the UK).   "By the time they were seven or eight, many children were sent out on to the streets to fend for themselves.  By the 1860's, London alone had an estimated one hundred thousand 'street Arabs' who had no education, no skills, no purpose and no future. 'Their very number  makes one stand aghast,' one contemporary recorded."

I managed to find in an American secondhand book shop (isn't the internet wonderful !) a copy of this book:- 

It is the result of studies done twelve years ago in Nairobi, but it applies equally to all cities in Africa ... and indeed in India, South America ...

Some of it is heart-rending:-

"A street child in Kenya is labelled 'chokora' a derogatory term that denotes a rubbish scavenger.  This name-tag has demeaned and stigmatized street children, cutting them off from the rest of the human race."

and ...


"The street child is 'chokora'.   This means that he is one with the very rubbish on which he depends for survival, and which is the material context of his daily life. Like rubbish, he is to be thrown away.  Society has no further use for him. He is a non-person, someone who is not thought to have any rights, or even to be recognized by the law.  Adults can therefore treat him as a literal 'outlaw', one to whom the law does not apply. He is rubbish."

I wept ...