A 12yr old girl surviving on the streets.........

A 12 year old girl, not wanted by her mother, now HIV+ after being raped, drug user, living on the streets, has now come to Kick4Life for help.......

At Kick4Life, our work in Lesotho changes lives.  We are known as an organisation who can connect with the most vulnerable youth and make incredible changes in their lives.  For many years our team has been working very hard to engage some of the most disaffected youth in the country - particularly those who live on the streets and orphans & vulnerable children (OVCs). We now have a regular group of boys who live on the streets, who come to Kick4Life every week for life skills lessons, psychosocial support, food and for a fun game of football in a safe environment.   They live lives that you and I cannot even begin to imagine.  One of our boys took me to where he stays on the streets last year, and I never want to forget what I saw, felt and smelt on that day.  I saw one boy trying to stab another boy in the neck with a broken bottle.  I was told this was quite a normal fight for survival that these boys face on a daily basis. 

Despite the incredibly tough life they lead and their fight for survival on a daily basis, they all say they enjoy coming to Kick4Life as it's a safe place for them.  Some of the boys are very bright, and many are very funny and I enjoy good banter with some of them. This was a piece that Al Jazeera did on our work last year. It features one of our great characters, Motsetse:  https://video.aljazeera.com/channels/eng/videos/lesotho-uses-football-to-combat-hiv-virus/3690150689001

In the last few months, we've come across girls living on the streets for the first time.  This has brought a huge number of additional challenges.....

Our Counselling team came across some girls who were living on the streets and we brought them to Kick4Life, where our team worked with them to find out why they are on the streets and put a plan of support together based on their immediate requirements.  A small group of the girls came for counselling and for a shower.  Many of these girls took voluntary HIV tests and most tested positive.  

One of these girls 'Mikey' is quite a character! She agreed to speak to one of our key donors from Vodafone about her life and the support she is receiving from K4L after finding out she is HIV+.  It was a very powerful session. Since then, Mikey has been involved in a small scale programme, which include 5 kids from the streets who have recently tested positive for HIV.  Normally once a young person has tested positive (and we have already identified over 100 young people this year, who have tested positive for HIV and are on treatment, thanks to our Vodafone Foundation UK funded project) they are given intensive counselling and support from our team and referred to our health partners for treatment. They are always encouraged to have a 'support buddy' who helps them with remembering to take their medication and to go to the clinics for regular check ups.  Depending on the environment they live in, it could be a parent, grandmother, sister, auntie etc.  

The children who live on the streets don't necessarily have this support.  They are also supposed to take their medication (twice a day) with food. Those who live on the streets do not have regular access to food.  Thankfully, a generous benefactor was so moved by Mikey's story and her spirit, that he agreed to fund her food for 6 months. We matched that and are now supporting 5 young people from the streets who are HIV+.  They come to K4L everyday and receive breakfast and a nutritious evening meal, along with their medication.   Mikey was starting to look so much healthier and happier....... and then she disappeared. 

Our Counsellors found her, and tried to reunite her with her grandmother.  She stayed there for a few days before going missing again.  Our team spent a lot of the last couple of weeks looking for her.  We found her on Tuesday and brought her back to K4L on Wednesday.  No one knows what really happened at her grandmothers house and why she left again.  There are two sides to that story - and i'm not sure we'll get to the bottom of it.  She is very hesitant at the moment to say why she choses to live on the streets rather than go home.   She has temporarily ceased taking her medication.  She popped by my office on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, as she does, for a chat and a bit of banter.  I noticed that she had brought some new girls with her.  We've been told that there are a group of around 16 girls on the streets. She has been trying to get the kitchen to give her food - even though she is not on her meds - saying I told them to give her some!! 

On Thursday, I was in our Library and she was just stood at the door looking in at me, so I asked her to come in and have a look at the books.  She said she didn't feel like reading today. I guessed she can't read.  I encouraged her to come in and picked up a book with lots of pictures in it "the cat in the hat" - I just started to read bits of it to go with the pictures. For those few minutes, she stood, engrossed, laughing and touching the book, trying to eat the food from the pictures! It was a nice moment.  

On Friday, I had to tell her she can't have food unless she is back on her treatment.  Sounds cruel, but we have to be tough. She told me she's not coming back to Kick4Life anymore - I said I'd see her next week!  I'd rather have her living a healthy life with HIV, than having her not taking medication - where she could end up dying of AIDS before she is 25yrs old.  

Later on Friday, our OVC Manager came to me to talk about a new girl we had come across.  She is 12 years old - and looks much younger.  We found her on the streets, living with the old man who lives in the hole (There is a man who lives in a big hole not far from our site. He is quite a character, and builds a fire on most evenings and sleeps in a piece of concrete piping).  She has a mother who is in her mid-twenties and hates her.  The mother told our team that she hates the sight of the girl and is preparing her funeral as she wants her to die.  

The girl has tested positive for HIV.  She told our team she was raped by her mothers boyfriend.  She is heavily into drugs - glue, weed and cigarettes being her preference. Our Counselling team have worked very hard to try and re-integrate the child back into her mothers home. It worked for 2 days - but the mother chucked the girl out each day - and forced her to sit outside the front door from 8am until after 5pm when she returned from work. So the girl chose to go back onto the streets.  Our team, who have seen a LOT of difficult situations have been shocked at the mothers attitude towards her daughter.  We needed money from her to start her daughter on treatment for her drug dependency - but she refused. 

The tough thing here in Lesotho is that we cannot place the girls into orphanages whilst they still have a living relative.  It doesn't matter if it is not a safe place for the child to be - that is the rule.  There isn't really a care system in place here either - which is why so many young people feel they have no other choice but to live on the streets, because the alternative is much worse - can you imagine??

We decided that we had no other option but to go to the authorities about the 12 year old girl. There is only so much we can do.  Two of our team went off to child protection services and the police on Friday to talk about the 12yr old girls' case.  We will continue to support her until we get her into a safe home environment.  She is a child for god's sake! No 12 year old should ever have to go through what she has been through.  It doesn't bear thinking about. 

I have been asking the question as to why we have never come across girls on the streets before?  I have come to the awful conclusion that they have either been picked up by other charities (which is great) or the more likely scenario is that they have been picked up and sold for sex or slavery.  Child Trafficking is a huge problem here - but it's only just starting to be looked at seriously by the authorities. 

So this is a new challenge for us here at Kick4Life in Lesotho.  We don't really have the capacity or resources to help at the level that we would like.  It's a massive problem here in Lesotho, and one that will just get bigger.  We won't be able to help every child that comes our way, but we will do everything in our power, whilst we still have breath in our bodies, to help as many young people as possible in the Mountain Kingdom.  I'm very proud of the job that our team do in very challenging circumstances.

We do have a lot of fun with these kids. Whilst they are living lives that we cannot even begin to imagine, they are able to break down those street barriers when they come to K4L, and we get to see the child beyond the tatty clothes.

Her Majesty the Queen has decided to host her birthday party here at K4L in early June - and wants to invite all the kids who live on the streets to share her birthday with her.  The Queen is a lovely and caring (& funny) lady, and with a Head of State who really does care about the plight of these young kids, then maybe they do still have a chance of a good life. 

Check out more of our work here: www.kick4life.org