May 2017
fromthestreets No place to call home Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, is home to at least 60,000 children who are living on the streets. Here they sleep on landfills, rubbish dumps and dirty floors. Life for these kids is hard. Passers-by don’t look at them like human beings. And these children have no one to depend on but themselves. Many children are leaving rural areas for cities, where they have more chance of surviving by begging, scavenging, taking on odd jobs or falling into prostitution. Children are often pushed out of their family homes because their parents are too poor to look after them, and sometimes, in the worst cases, they are running from violence, or accusations of witchcraft.
Little Rocks No official figure on the number of homeless children in Kenya exists, a fact that demonstrates how little is being done by the authorities to support and help the young people that find themselves in these desperate situations. “These children are traumatised … they’ve been abandoned,” explains Jane, a Pavement Project worker
Pavement Project
from Little Rocks, SGM Lifewords’ Pavement Project partner in Kibera. Founded in 2003 for children aged 1–8, Little Rocks school was started to help reach young people who are orphaned, HIV/Aids infected and affected, living below the poverty line, and who have special needs. Currently there are over 1,000 children in attendance. Students are taught, trained and catered for by 30 qualified early childhood and primary school teachers and caregivers. ➤
Pavement Project is a unique Bible-based counselling process that equips children-at-risk workers all over the world to raise children’s self-worth and restore a sense of hope for the future.