Cycling around Africa to help street children
The riders have set a steep goal to bring the plight of street children to light. Even when it seems everyone knows about them, the way they are handled is often shabby. photo by Stephen Wandera
What you need to know:
Street children are a big problem not only in Uganda and the sooner the public and the authorities take measures to stop it, the less the chances of calamities wrought from the growing problem. One way to highlight the issue is to ride around the world, as the quartet in the story have chosen to do, is to do your part, small as it may seem.
Seated in the traffic jam around Steers Kampala, I see street children running from Aristoc Booklex towards Entebbe Road. It’s like they have seen their worst enemy. As I try to figure out what’s going on, I see a Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) Double Cabin vehicle loaded with children wailing at the top of their voices. The others were running away from KCCA, it is clear.
Scenes like this are usually looked upon with mixed feelings from the public; some think it is high time the children were put in their place but there are those who will go out of their way to help in making the conditions of street children, especially when they are taken off the streets and incarcerated, are made better.
According to Bilali Hakim a 14-year-old former street child, who is now under rehabilitation, when rounded up on the streets, these children are taken to Kampiringisa Rehabilitation Centre where the conditions are worse than on the street. “We are given very little food, the place is dirty and while there, you are treated like a prisoner,”
Mr Churchill Ongole the Country Director of Retrack Uganda, a charity organisation that works with street children, says the policy in Uganda on street children is blind. “They are considered to be hoodlums that deserve to be locked up. This explains why they are rounded up on streets when the country is expecting visitors and thrown in Kampiringisa.”
It’s for the sake of having the voices of street children heard and ensuring that they are not treated like a nuisance by people within their countries that four cyclists have decided to traverse 29 countries on bicycles.
According to Mr Craig Pollard one of the cyclists, what they have embarked on is an unsupported journey by bike. “It started from Russell Square in London on August 7, 2011. We went through England, the Middle East, Africa and it will be concluded in Cape Town in August. We aim at covering a distance of 18,000 miles but we have so far covered 10,000 miles.”
The trip, which Mr Pollard refers to as physically and mentally challenging, takes them through deserts, over mountains, thick forests and game parks at a pace that allows them to truly experience the countries and meet people along the way within the six to seven hours they cycle every day.
He says that through this cycling, they aim at raising 100,000 pounds (Shs400m) but have so far raised 30,000 pounds (Shs117m). “These funds are raised through the assistance we get from family and friends back home. When they send us the money, we do not use it. We put it on an account and when it reaches the amount we want to raise, we shall meet with our five partners and divide the money amongst them.”
Pollard and his other colleagues, Ms Loretta White, Mr Gareth Morris and Mr Scott Carroll are striving to raise funds for organisations like Retrack, Action for Children in Conflict, Railway Children and Street Child Africa. These are organisations with branches scattered all over Africa and the four friends decided to go to each country that has a branch of these five organisations.
Mr Pollard intimates that they chose street children because this is a group that has absolutely nothing. “They suffer a lot and have nothing and have been driven away from their families which has left them destitute. We want them to be understood better, for the whole community to know why street children run away from their homes and opt for the streets, why they steal. With the knowledge of these, people will be able to help them.”
He adds: “Street children are a worldwide issue and they need a second chance to get a family and a community that can give them emotional support to help them come up as important people in the world because they have full potential.”
A world-wide problem
Just like elsewhere in the world, according to Mr Pollard, the phenomenon in Uganda is mainly caused by poverty and broken marriages. Abraham Sozi a 14-year-old former street child under the care of Retrak Uganda is one of the many street children who run away from home because of broken marriages.
“I was staying at Mukono with my father and I had never seen my mother. My father used to beat me a lot because my step mother would tell him lies about me. So I run away from home when I was five years. I spent seven years on the streets.”
While most people think that the biggest number of street children in Kampala hail from the Northern part of Uganda, research by Retrak Uganda shows that most of these children come from Central Uganda.
While on the streets, they survive on hand outs from pedestrians, on days where they fail to get, they are forced to pick-pocket. However, Solomon Magumu a 14-year-old boy who claims to have been dumped by his mother at an orphanage in Mbale at birth but later hiked a lift to Kampala says, on the streets they are faced with challenges.
“The older boys force us to sniff petrol so as to keep warm in the night. The night security guards are also a threat to us. They attack us in the night, beat us and take the money we will have collected during the day. We can go days without a proper meal and days without bathing,” he continues.
Meanwhile, besides being an embarrassment to the state, these children are not widely considered to be a threat to the country. However, Mr Ongole discards this claim. “If not given attention, street children pose a problem to the country because since they need to survive, they end up committing crimes which start as trivial but escalate into real criminal cases.”
Mr Ongole believes that what the four colleagues from Cycle Africa are doing will help publicise the plight of street children and ensure that something about them is done. He also recommends that the government allocates part of its budget to street children and also comes up with policies that impact positively on street children.
