Street children

The first street kid I ever really met was Andy. I was at Place Boyer with my students eating street food, assessing an orphanage we had just visited. This was also the day I was sick to my stomach about orphanages. After seeing so many, orphanage culture just got to me.

90% of the 300 kids I've met in orphanages, have parents.

Their parents have resigned to extreme poverty and subscribed to the cultural solution to give your kids to anyone who can feed them and give them education.

If you couldn't feed your little one today, and you couldn't afford for them to go to school, and there was no such thing as a job application- wouldn't you?
You think you wouldn't... but you would.

So, a little nauseated from the combination of street food, and 95 degree Caribbean sun- I closed my plate with lots of left overs. Behind me immediately popped a cute little boy. He didn't communicate with me how I would have expected. He was timid in spirit, but aggressively standing close to my heaping plate of rice and beans. I made eye contact with him, picked up my plate, and tried to talk to him a little before I gave him my left-overs. But, as soon as I outstretched my hand slightly, he forcefully grabbed the plate and took off with it.

But, I watched as my food made it's way to a pack of cute, dirty little boys who shared and demolished the food within a minute.
I stared at them with one sobering assessment: it is HUNGER that is causing them to act like this.
Holy crap. There are starving kids right here.

So, I told my students they all had to share their food, and we walked over and sat down with the pack of boys. This was the day we met all of them, but Andy was my first assessment.
Pa gen mama, pa gen papa, domi lari. (no mama, no papa, sleeping on the streets...)

And so began my love affair with 11 dirty little hoodlems. Moslows hierarchy of needs taught me that for me to have any relationship with these guys, they would need to have food in their bellies first. So, my first objective was to just simply meet their need for food.
When we first started bringing food to the park, there was screaming, fighting, crying- street kid chaos over motege. (food) They were so frantic. They were soooooo hungry.

After a couple of weeks we had feeding the street kids down to a complete science, and everyone sat patiently and waited calmly for their plates. Everything about them had changed. Next we started asking the real questions. We met their families, matched up stories, climbed mountains, searched for missing aunts and grandmas, found older brothers, took mottos to dangerous communities to meet mamas, and climbed a lot of mountains.

Where are we now?

All of the kids have a Social Worker that they love, and communicate with. We have built relationships with all of the families, and they trust us. We are working tirelessly to get birth certificates so we can get them all in school, we are making sure they are all living with the best family member possible, we are finding housing for homeless mamas, and we are making big plans for how we can sustainably make a difference for these families.