Changing Lives through Friendship
- Jun 28, 2017
- 2 min read
Nakuru, Kenya- The Community of Sant’egidio, in the town of Nakuru, come together every Saturday in a
small bungalow house to meet up with street children from all corners of town.The main aim of these
meetings is to empower the street children by giving them a sense of belonging, C.K (a volunteer) explains.
When they attend the meetings, the children first take a shower, clean their clothes or sometimes get new ones from
donations and then share a meal together.During their ‘clean up’the volunteers take time to know what has been going
on in their lives in the past week. This enables the children to open up about critical issues they may be facing in their day to day life.In doing this, the volunteers find ways to assist them in overcoming their problems.
Michael, one of the volunteer states that the street children are the most pushed aside community in the world today as
they ''do not have a voice''.One of the challenges they have encountered in empowering these young people is being
marginalized by the society around them. This is because street children carry of being the labels of being ‘thieves’, ‘dirty’,
‘rebellious’ and so on.
Michael explains that on one account, while planning a Christmas gathering (lunch) with the children, they faced a
''major problem''. The security team and the people around the area where the event was to be held, were not comfortable with
the idea of ‘A gang of street children gathered together in one place’.This is because they were worried of being robbed.
They were later assigned another area where they were allowed to host their Christmas lunch.
The stigmatization does not stop there. On another account while conducting the interviews, one of the children reach out to me
and claimed that the shopkeeper refused to sell to him fruit juice because he is a ‘STREET KID’.
However, despite these challenges, Michael mentions that
through this community, they have been able to help more than
5000 street children across the country to “live a dignified life”.
Apart from giving them food and clothing, they also assist the children to find their way back home, to acquire essential life skills,
providing them with guidance and counseling , assisting
those with drug addictions and also help the older demographic
to find employment.
“The key in doing these things is by first developing a friendship
with them” Michael says. He states that “It is so much easier to
correct a friend that a person you just met”. He emphasizes that
seeing change in these children is a process since no one is transformed person overnight.
Through the meetings they hold and the time they share, the children get mentors and build relationships which results to
behavioral change. Michael states that the aim of their community is to “Live out their Christianity”, by assisting those in distress.
Through their programs, they also want to encourage the society to lend a helping hand to the most stigmatized people in our
communities such as the street children and the elderly.
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