Shegues

When I was working in Kinshasa, a colleague of mine was managing a project called ORPER, which is run locally by the Catholic Church. The project helps street kids with shelter and sustenance, and reintegration into their families. It is difficult to pin down the number of kids who are homeless, but estimates range from 25,000 to 50,000.

Fifty thousand is the number of people living in my town now -- an entire city's worth of kids living on the streets of Kinshasa.

The word for street kids is shegue [sheh-gay], and you can find them everywhere. They guard cars for 100 francs congolais, or less than a quarter. J'ai faim (I'm hungry) is a common complaint, and they often pat their stomachs in a tired entreaty to be fed.

The phenomenon is not unusual, but in Kinshasa it is definitely more visible than other places I have lived and traveled. And I didn't understand how or why a project would reintegrate the children with their families. Part of the explanation came from reviewing an application for funding for ORPER.

And just today, I found this article, which makes it clear that children are being beaten, abused, starved, thrown out of their homes which brings all the hardships and dangers of living on the street, at least in part because fear of witchcraft is cultivated among their parents. Preachers are consulted as to whether the children are possessed. The consultation demands a fee, and the resulting 'exorcism' based on an answer of yes, your child is possessed, requires an additional fee.

The preachers capitalize on parents' fear, parents pay money, and even after 'exorcism,' children are thrown out.

In the article, one man comments that this scenario is not traditional, cropping up within the past couple of decades. He says that nobody knows how to handle it, which is a problem that ORPER has faced. They have had great success with feeding and sheltering kids, providing them with some medical care and some skills, but reuniting them with their families has proved to be a great challenge.

Edit: Here is a photo from a visit of Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles from his visit to ORPER in October 2004. Oh, and that's my colleague Mireille to his right! Hi Mireille!


Photo by Kevin Hartigan, CRS