Thursday, April 16th, 2009 04:05:00
Here the journalist Nate Thayer would have regaled many about his interview with the infamous Pol Pot, one of the principle authors of his tiny nation’s genocide.
Sharing this road are also some of the city’s poorer citizens who eke a living from the tourist trade. The promise of more rain was pushing all street life back into cafes, some huddling in any available shelter.
But the street kids who saw me rushing past on the opposite and rain-drenched side of the boulevard were unstoppable.
They headed straight for me. Pestering me for money, I decided instead to buy some fruits from a nearby vendor.
With my plastic bag of fruits held out before me, I suggested, in the universal language of hand gestures, that each kid take a fruit each.
The children did well at first. Each in turn, one little hand at a time, popped into the bag and pulled of a single fruit.
Then one kid decided that having two hands, he’d use both of them.
His cleverness was amply rewarded; first with smile at having two fruits, then with horror, as the other kids went wild with envy or desperation.
It was a feeding frenzy that broke the bag and sent fruits scattering across the walkway.
I could not keep track of all that was happening but I was soon confronted by the luckless many who begged me for more.
Not wanting a repeat performance, I resigned myself to the fact that I was in no position to impose any order on the situation.
I was too much of an outsider. I did not share their language and I certainly did not inspire fear, respect or love in anybody.
So I went back to the street vendor, bought more fruits but this time, I promptly handed the bag back to him and asked him, again in my less than fluent hand gestures, to distribute the fruits to the kids.
Ignored, I quick stepped peacefully back to the hotel. I thought to myself; how fragile my elegant system of redistribution was.
If only that kid did not put both his hands in the bag, the system would have worked until at least the fruits ran out.
At which point I could have bought more. My approach might have been. in my mind at least, elegant, but it is far from sustainable.
Moreover, I don’t generally expect much from street kids. If they are insistent and pester, it’s only because their lives are so hard.
Their lives seem so radically different from the security and comfort of my own childhood. When living in Quezon City in the Philippines for more than half a year, I was able to learn the names of the kids on my street.
And learned something of their personalities too. I still remember five-year-old Angelica, who was nothing like her name suggested. And Salvadore, who repeated the phrase “I am hungry” out of habit, so much so that he’d say it even while stuffing his face. And the boy I called “Fatty”, who lived on the highly sugared dregs from unfinished drinks at the local Coffee Bean.
As far as I was concerned, he was pulling the rug from under his own trade. I recall all this for a purpose. Some years ago, two friends of mine adopted children from Cambodia, effectively rescuing them from a life on the streets.
Their love for the children, four siblings in all, has expanded into a project to help many more children back in Cambodia. They started a project to help the community from which their children came from.
If you have access to the Net, you can see something of their good work on www.riverkidsproject.org. This is what I would call a sustainable approach to helping street kids.
As well as others in poverty or at risk. Their effort, while quiet, have benefited from media attention. It stands in stark contrast to the media-driven celebrity adoptions which occupy far too much of our attention.
● Sharaad Kuttan has no children of his own but has tremendous respect for those who lavish care on all kids, including those brought into the world by others.
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