Street Children

Street Children
It was the children who live on the streets of Kathmandu, Nepal who broke our hearts and motivated us to initiate one of our first projects, our Runaway Help Line, in 2005.  The problem of street children can be found in about every major city in the developing world and is one of the most challenging social issues to address.  Street children are marginalized, despised by society, and are often bound by addiction to drugs, glue-sniffing, and sometimes the most challenging, the intoxicating freedom of life without rules.

Without intervention, street children will live short, desperate lives in constant conflict with the rest of society.  They learn a life of petty crime and begging, and thus are frequently jailed and beaten.  They quickly learn they are hated and thus quickly learn to hate themselves and the world around them. Eventually they die without notice, usually sometime in their 20’s, of an overdose, infections like HIV, or from violence.

Runaway Help Line
It takes years and years of consistent effort to help a street kid change; it takes a miracle.  But it takes almost nothing to change a child on the street before the addictions begin.  When a child is first on the streets, he is scared, alone, and looking for somebody to help them.  That somebody will either be the numbing drugs of the streets, or someone who intervenes and provides for him.

Our goal is to find every street kid that arrives on the streets of Kathmandu within two weeks and either return them home, if the situation permits, or put them in one of our children’s homes.  We send someone every day to all the areas where there are street kids, looking for new faces, talking to the existing children, and doing what we can to spot new street kids.