“In 2001 and 2002 I began to notice the increasing number of children on the streets. At the time I had two young daughters who hadn't started school yet, and it was very painful to realise that these kids had far fewer chances than my own children. I started looking for NGOs that worked with street children. There was only one NGO at the time, so I approached it, and we started working on a reception centre in Imbaba in Cairo for girls because at the time there weren't that many girls on the streets,” says Hanna Abul-Ghar, president and founder of the Banati Foundation that offers street children a new life and helps to keep girl “In 2005, a gang of street children were arrested for various crimes. At that time, they were in their early 20s. It was known as the Torbini case. Everyone including the media dealt with the case in an extremely negative way, so I sent a letter offering my point of view to the editor of Al-Masry Al-Youm, Magdi Mehanna, and he published it,” says Abul-Ghar. “On the same day businessman Samih Sawiris called as he had been touched by the letter. He said he wanted to help, and as a result we started working on a shelter for street children in 6 October City. He donated the land and the buildings and we worked from scratch with the architects,” she adds, pointing out that the foundation is the only NGO in Egypt that works only on sheltering street children. Many of the young women using the foundation's facilities today have nothing but good things to say about it. “I was in the second year of preparatory school when I joined the Banati Foundation. I used to be in a school, but it was far away, so it took about a year to transfer my documents to another school before I could go back to school again. Before I joined the foundation I wasn't feeling secure or self-confident. There are many good opportunities and people I love there. For example, there is a chance to practice sports, even training for the Olympics team,” said one girl who is a beneficiary of the Banati Foundation. “I am 17 years old and in the second year of commercial secondary school. I was in the first year when I came to the Banati Foundation in Port Said. They transferred me to Cairo. My mother told me that she would take me back, but I decided to stay at the foundation. Now I want to be a maths teacher because I have loved it ever since I was a little girl,” said another girl at the foundation. “I am 18 years old and in the second year of commercial secondary school. Before I came here, I was in the first year of preparatory school. When I came here, my life entirely changed. I used to be a negative person, but now I know the meaning of having goals in life and what it means to make my dreams come true and to discern the positive things in myself. We are treated well here, which helps us to achieve our goals. They care about education, and they help us overcome obstacles like getting birth certificates if we don't have them. They make us feel that we are part of society. Now I am dreaming of becoming a policewoman when I grow up,” commented another girl. “We target girls mainly, and sometimes the boys who are related to them, like their brothers or sons because we don't like to split up families,” says Abul-Ghar, adding that they also take in infants as there are many teenage pregnancies among street children. “We target those who are on the streets and those who are liable to go on the streets, including children in risk situations like the daughters of imprisoned women,” she says. Abul-Ghar said the foundation was currently helping 230 children, offering them some form of education. They are divided into groups according to age, and each age group has its own educational programme. “Many of the girls don't have identification documents or birth certificates. So while we work on that they get in-house schooling. We have lots of different systems and four nurseries. Two of them are kindergartens and pre-schools. In the first, the children learn to read and write, and the second one is a nursery for infants. Then we have the regular government schooling, and our children go to eight different schools in the area. One of them is an experimental government school, while the rest are regular schools,” she says. The foundation also has an agreement with another NGO that allows the children to study in community schools, a system accredited by the Ministry of Education. The children go to this school because they don't have documents. “We hope they will all be admitted to universities at some point. We have one girl who is enrolled in the Tourism and Hotel Management Institute in Cairo and another who is in the second year of high school. She has a special background, so she is the only girl who goes to an international school. Of course she had a lot of psychological problems, but she is now very well rehabilitated and her family is still sponsoring her schooling. This girl hopes to enter the Faculty of Engineering, and I am very much hoping that we can help her to do that.” “Whatever their hopes and dreams, we will try to help them,” says Abul-Ghar. Education and training: The foundation has an average of 140 children enrolled in different educational institutions at different stages. The external school works with most of the children, while other children learn in special illiteracy classes in which a teacher teaches an average of four students at a time instead of in schools that could have up to 80 students per class. This is especially important for primary school children until their level has improved and they are able to cope with general education, says Abdel-Samei Labib, deputy director of the foundation. “I have worked for the foundation since it started in 2009. We work to re-integrate children with a focus on girls through five steps. First, we deal with children on the streets through research and mobile units composed of a sociology department and a medical department to enable us to reach out to the children. Then, we put them in reception centres, what we call ‘clubs', a name that attracts children, in which we provide them with different services such as psychological services and accommodation services in order to enable us to deal with their cases in detail. “At this point we try to reunite the children with their parents. If we can't, they are provided with shelter at the foundation. We try to change their way of thinking in terms of their attitudes towards each other. The third step is what we call the ‘temporary stay', a centre that accepts children over eight years old. It works with 12 children at a time and is equipped to prepare children to transfer from the no-rule life of the streets to a new way of life in a new home. The children who pass the examination period in the shelter then come here to the 6 October City Centre, which is the fourth step. The fifth and last step means graduation and rehabilitation,” he says. According to Labib, the foundation deals with all components of children's personalities, including the physical, psychological, sociological, and intellectual aspects. “We try to organise activities to serve each aspect. This helps us to design a successful individual rehabilitation plan for each child. There are also sociologists and psychologists who study the personalities of the children. They also try to deal with the families and solve the family problems of the children. “We have sports activities that are related to the physical needs of the children. We have a football team, and some children have won championships. Other children have won places in competitions like karate championships.” He adds that they also have other sports and activities like taekwondo. “Some children travelled to Holland and represented Egypt in athletics in Brazil last March. Others have been given prizes in competitions like the National Geographic Competition in Abu Dhabi for children under 14 years old,” he says. Labib says that the foundation accepts girls aged two to 15 and children in general aged eight to 12. “We have a philosophy in the work that we do, which is that we are better than the streets and that a home is better than the foundation until the opposite is found true,” says Labib. “We try to be a big home for the children, aiming to make them feel safe and loved.” He points to drawings on the walls by the girls. “I liked the colours and shapes in these drawings, and I thought that it would be nice to hang them in my office. Drawing is one of our activities,” he comments. The foundation also organises exhibitions of the children's work, the aim being to invite the children to see their work and see how other people react to it. This guarantees that they see a different attitude from people than when they were on the streets. Labib points to medals hanging on the wall in his office. “These medals were won by girls who took part in sports competitions. We are trying to help them develop their talents,” he adds. Workshops and activities: “The foundation has many workshops. The photography workshop was one of the earliest and most successful, and it has been repeated about eight times. We have exhibited the children's work at the Cairo Opera House, the Al-Hanager Arts Centre and the Zamalek Centre,” Abul-Ghar comments. “Each time we have a professional photographer, and once he was an Italian who came through the UN Children's Fund. We send girls out on trips to take photographs as well,” he says, adding that they sell the photographs and the money goes to the girls in the form of bank accounts. “There are crafts like crochet, origami, and sewing. As a result, we are able to cover all our needs regarding bed sheets and other things. We haven't had to buy sheets for the foundation for the past seven years, and we make all our own curtains. We have a pottery workshop, and we sell quite a lot of it and sometimes get orders that we have successfully delivered,” Abul-Ghar adds. “We have signed contracts with interior designers who have exhibited our products, and they have given us wooden products like chairs that the girls paint. They ask us for certain patterns, and we do them,” says Abul-Ghar. “But the aim of our workshops is rehabilitation. It is not to find an income for the girls,” she adds, saying that they do nevertheless work on quality control so that the girls could later make products that could offer them a living. When the girls sell their products, it helps their self-esteem, she says. “There are 140 employees in the foundation divided into three centres, the shelter, the reception centre and the Imbaba centre where children who have been severely abused go from six months to a year until they are rehabilitated enough to go to the shelter,” says Abul-Ghar. “Our workers come from different backgrounds. We have 20 social workers, some of them essential assets due to their experience with street children. We also have five or six psychologists, though this is too few to cover our needs. We have 10 teachers between the nursery and other forms of education and 50 supervisors.” “We try to provide the children with services. Any success we experience is better than our not being there at all for these children and leaving them to face the unknown,” says Labib. Abul-Ghar agrees, and she narrates a living example. “We took in a family of three, two girls and a boy. At the time when they came the youngest girl was less than a year old, and the oldest girl was six. These children stayed with us for three or four years and entered school and were fully rehabilitated and off the streets and things looked good for them. Then their mother decided that she wanted to have them for a long vacation, and afterwards she refused to let them go back. So they ended up on the streets again, begging and selling things, and they also left school.” “We always follow up on such cases, but the law is not on our side as we cannot simply take children from their parents. There is nothing we can really do, except follow them up. Later, we found that the children in this case had been abused, meaning that we were able to get them back. The eldest girl had a compound fracture from the abuse. The youngest girl had been severely burnt and the boy had been raped. It took us two years to rehabilitate them. We had gone so far the first time, and it was tragic that we had not been able to continue, but this story shows how limited our power is,” she laments. The foundation cannot prevent even abusive parents from taking back their children. Although the 2007 child law states that child-protection committees should be present in every district made up of government representatives, the police, the judiciary system, the educational system, and people from civil society, these may not be able to intervene. “Maybe important figures from the area in question have the authority to go through cases carefully, and according to the law they have the authority to protect children from their parents or even to take them from their parents, but in reality this does not always happen as the law is not always properly implemented. Egypt has major deficiencies in how it looks at child protection and the rights of children, and even today children are seen as their parents' property,” Abul-Ghar says. Labib analyses the problems of such children, saying that “there is no single reason behind their being on the streets — it could be due to domestic violence, bad financial circumstances, or even bad friendships. Our aim is to study the problem on an individual basis and do all we can with the facilities we have,” he says.
Challenges to come: Abul-Ghar lists the barriers the foundation faces in doing its work effectively. “We have chronic financial issues because we don't want to lower our standards, and we have very high standards that cost a lot of money. People should realise that the work a mother does at home costs money. All the activities we provide, the mental health rehabilitation, the activities on the streets, cost a lot of money. Every time we save a child, there are three others going on the streets. We have to reach more and more children,” she says. Though the foundation has major donors, those who are least likely to be affected by the turbulent economic situation are individual donors because throughout history individuals in Egypt have constantly maintained strong social support. Abul-Ghar invites potential donors to visit the foundation's website and learn more about it. “The other problem is the way people see our children. Many people see our children as ones who have somehow chosen to lead this kind of life and to live on the streets. But these children come from abusive families; some of them have been physically, mentally or sexually abused to the point where they may never heal. Yet, in spite of this they are strong enough to come to us, to go through rehabilitation, to go back to school, and to try to live a normal life. “I want society to know that children on the streets are not there by choice. All children in the world prefer a home with parents. It is the parents who fail them, and the society that fails them, and it is not the children who fail society,” she says, adding that she would like people who pass a child on the street who is begging not to ignore that child. “I am not for giving them money, as this is not the right way to deal with them and the money goes to someone around the corner anyway. But you can give them sweets because at least that will make them happy. If you feel you can't do anything, please just look them in the eye and smile because when we talk to our girls they tell us that what hurts them the most is that people ignore them, making them feel invisible.” The Banati Foundation's headquarters are in Cairo, but it receives girls from other governorates such as Minya, Aswan, Sharqiya, Gharbiya and Alexandria. After the children complete their education, Banati assists them by providing them with jobs inside the foundation, like assistants helping other children. It also aims to give professional training courses and seek job opportunities in factories or elsewhere. All children who have been on the streets should be treated as post-traumatic stress disorder victims, as they may have been exposed to emotional, physical, or sexual trauma at a very young age, both at home and on the streets, Abul-Ghar says. She adds that the foundation has to act as a medical health provider as well as a social and educational provider. “That is part of the philosophy that we need people to understand, who may believe that our children do not stick to social norms and somehow need a firm hand. This is something we have to explain all the time,” she says. Instead, Banati hopes to relocate children from the streets to a safe environment where they can rediscover their talents and needs. “Children who take the decision to leave home are often very unique. They are often strong willed and very intelligent because they have been able to survive on the streets despite all the hazards. They often have unique talents. So our role should be to help them dream and fulfil their dreams.” “We deal with all the government institutions that any ordinary family deals with, including civilian record departments, hospitals, police departments, and so on. It depends on individuals and their readiness to help us out,” comments Labib. He also points to an essential need, which is for more research on the different street children in different governorates. However, this will need a lot of financing, volunteers, time and effort, he says. “We need more co-ordination with other foundations in order to be able to accommodate children in other governorates. There is a problem of awareness, as some families simply give up their children. The law does not give foundations the authority to take children away from irresponsible parents. We should not wait for a child's rights to be violated before taking him away from such parents, however,” he says. “We are seeking further partnerships with governmental and non-governmental organisations in order to put an end to the problem of children without shelter in Egypt at a time when this problem is increasing. We want to be a lighthouse for internal and external experts working in the field. We want to be a good example for everyone inside Egypt and abroad, and we would be happy to share our expertise with others,” he says. “Right now, we want to expand our health departments because we want to be more inclusive. We need more staff. We enjoy excellent cooperation with the Cairo University department of psychiatry, and a professor from the university oversees our mental health department. But there is still more to be done. We also need to secure our financial status. Egypt is going through a difficult period, and we would like to know that in coming years we will at least be able to secure the children we already have and our employees,” Abul-Ghar concludes by saying.
