When people talk of street children in Rwanda, it is easy to assume that the children are Genocide orphans, or that they became separated from their parents in the exodus of 1994. This is not usually the case. Many children were orphaned, some before, or during the Genocide period. However, the children who are now on the street would have been at the most five or six at this time. The majority of those who were then separated from their families were reunited with the help of International Aid Organisations.
Many of those who were old enough at the time to survive on their own and were not reunited with their families, are now in their early to mid twenties. These provide a core of unemployed youth in many towns, who have grown up without any guidance. Without employable skills or hope for the future, this group spends its time hanging around markets, stealing, sleeping in banana plantations, getting drunk at night and, if male, raping girls, if female, in prostitution, and looking after increasing numbers of children.
These "bandits" are often the only role models that street children have, as much of the rest of society treat the children as animals or sub-human, suspecting the worst of them and driving them to fulfil all stereotypes. These are children who are on the street either because they couldn’t bear life at home, or because there is no home in which they feel secure and cared for. They are "secondary victims" of the Genocide: it is due to the effects of the Genocide on society that they have come onto the street.
Many of the children lost one parent either during or after the Genocide. The remaining parent then remarried, and life with the stepparent, who often, according to the culture, cannot accept the child of a previous marriage, makes life unbearable for them. Eventually they came onto the street. MUNYONI’S STORY
Some children have lost both parents, usually due to illnesses such as malaria and cholera (rife in the refugee camps), plain separation and abandonment, and increasingly, HIV. These children have lived with other members of the family, but as pressure for land increases due to the population growing and more people returning from exile, family have taken their land, kept them out of school to work, and treated them as slaves. These children often decide life will be better if they try to make it on their own. DAVID’S STORY
Some children have an abusive and often drunken father or stepfather who has driven them onto the street. For others, the upheaval and separation from their family when they were young have made the routine of home unbearable. Despite often good homes and caring parents, they are more interested in wandering around the country, making a living however they can. OSIEL’S STORY. Most children in Rwanda have a family background of upheaval and violence. Separation, murder and abuse are commonplace as individuals struggle to survive. DANIEL’S STORY.
Ten years after the Genocide it is poverty that is bringing the latest arrivals onto the street. Life at home is a monotonous drudge of digging, fetching water and looking for wood. It is not surprising that the freedom of the street is more appealing. The old bonds that tied families together and knitted communities into a cohesive network have frequently broken down, causing thousands of children to come onto the street in Rwanda. As the new generation grows up without much of the care that children need, and starts to produce its own offspring, as HIV takes an increasing toll, as more children find it harder to endure the poverty at home as the rich grow richer, the problem is pressing and a workable solution needed.
