Windhoek
It is estimated that there are about 500 people living on the streets of Windhoek. They find shelter in abandoned buildings and sleep under bridges and in riverbeds.
Mary (not her real name) started living on the street at the age of eight. She did this for a year until the Ministry of Gender Equality and Child Welfare found her and put her on their school integration programme.
“I lived with my mom, but there was no food at home,” said Mary, adding that her mother was sickly and unemployed. The young girl left home and lived with other young girls in a shack at an informal settlement.
Mary says it was not easy living there, as they were perpetual targets and victims of abuse. They had to beg for food too, she explained. “Our stay was not pleasant. We didn’t eat properly, but now at least I get toiletries … there is a difference now.”
Today, Mary is 17 years old and is in Grade 9 at a secondary school in the Omaheke Region. However, she had to put her studies on hold, because she recently gave birth to a baby boy. “We will have the child fostered and she will go back to school next year,” said head of the after-school centre in Grysblok in Katutura, Maggy Katimba.
Mary is one of the many children, who turned up at the after-school centre in Grysblock last week Friday for a day with children living or working on the streets, organised by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Child Welfare.
The objectives of the event were to explore strategies to help get children off the street and to create awareness of the centre, in order to reduce the number of children ending up on the streets, among others.
Katimba said they have 105 children between the ages of nine and 21 in their school integration programme. “We have produced police officers. We have some people studying in Cuba and even in our own ministry,” Katimba said, regarding the effectiveness of the programme.
She added that they place children from the street in boarding schools to prevent them from returning to the street: “They don’t stay with us. Only those who don’t have families are put in childcare facilities.”
The ministry’s spokesperson Charlie Matengu said: “Some of the children are abandoned by their parents. Some are abused and run away from home. They end up on the street, where they belong to a group and feel loved. That is why you hardly see street children walking alone, as they become family,” Matengu explained.
Pastor Franciskus Basson from Friends of the Homeless said in Windhoek there are about 500 people living on the streets. “That is a huge number,” he remarked. He told the street children that there is more to life than material things, and that is the spiritual life they need to attend to. Activities organised for the day by the ministry included doing the children’s laundry, offering them a place to bath, giving them food, a toiletry pack and there was a clothing stand, where they picked up clothes.
The ministry also had a salon stand for the young ladies, as well as a barber, sports activities and intervention sessions with social workers for possible family or school re-integration.
No one should feel left out … In the image, young men, who live on the streets of Windhoek are pictured choosing clothes for themselves after taking a bath during a day-long event organised by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Child Welfare for the benefit of street children.