Writer: Roberts Sanyu. PHOTO/FILE/COURTESY
On the dry, dusty and hard ground we stood, a small figure lay still. Another child gone. This time, it was a boy, about 16 years, found lifeless beside a fuel station, his story ending in the shadows. He finally gave up his breath in a world that never yielded to him. For those of us who work with street children, death is a constant, unwelcome visitor.
It never gets easier. The weight of each lost life, the "what ifs," the haunting images – they accumulate, a burden borne in silence. Five boys crushed beneath a collapsing wall as they sought shelter; a young thief’s charred remains, the victim of a mob’s fury; a life extinguished by a runaway truck. These are not isolated incidents; they are the stark realities of life on Kampala’s unforgiving streets.
Street children, often fleeing poverty, abuse, or neglect, find a precarious existence in the city's underbelly. They are vulnerable, exposed to exploitation, and violence. Their lives, already fragile, are further threatened by the inherent dangers of their environment. When death comes, it is often sudden, brutal, and devoid of the dignity most take for granted. Statistics paint a grim picture, but they cannot capture the individual tragedies, the lost potential, the silent grief. These children, though living on the margins, are not invisible. Their deaths demand answers, and their stories deserve to be told.
The true horror begins after death. The search for family. It’s a desperate, uphill battle against anonymity. Starting with nothing, we scour the streets, asking other children, searching for fragments of a past, a name, a village. Sometimes, a faint trail emerges – a distant relative, a former neighbor.
But more often than not, there is nothing. No one to claim the body, no one to mourn. This is the cruelest irony: in death, as in life, these children are often alone. The question then becomes, what do we do? Do we bury them in unmarked graves in public cemeteries, their bodies numbered among the unknown? This is the current reality, a silent indictment of our society. But it doesn’t have to be. We need a more humane approach. A system that prioritizes finding families, no matter how distant. A network of social workers dedicated to tracing origins.
We need shelters, not just for the living, but for the dead – temporary places of dignity where these children can be remembered, their stories preserved. We need to invest in preventative measures, address the root causes of child homelessness, and create pathways to reintegration. The death of a street child should be a call to action.
We cannot ignore the silent cries of these lost souls. We must demand accountability, not just for their deaths, but for the systemic failures that allowed them to live and die on the streets. We must challenge our perceptions, our biases, and our indifference. We must remember that these children, though nameless to many, were human beings, worthy of life, and in death, worthy of remembrance. Let their stories ignite a spark of change, a commitment to building a society where no child is left to die alone, unclaimed, and forgotten.
Sanyu Roberts is a Street Children rights
advocate. [email protected]
