Despite initiatives to protect Cairo street children, Serene Assir is alarmed by just how many of them remain prone to hunger, poverty and fear "Which football club do you support, Ahli or Zamalek?" 10- year-old Ahmed (not his real name) asks. "You know the match is on tonight, right? I'm going to watch it, it doesn't matter where; any coffee shop will do. But it'll be good!" Bright-eyed Ahmed has been sleeping outside the Hussein Mosque for the last four nights. By day, he sells packets of handkerchiefs to pedestrians and tourists. "I'm not a beggar," he declaims proudly. "I work." Already, at the age of 10, he has been twice detained by the police, having been caught selling handkerchiefs. "No one came to pick me up when I was released," he explains, "no one even sent me food while I was in there. I hardly ate -- just bread, whatever other inmates had to spare." For children like Ahmed, conditions at home are so hopeless that street life seems to offer a brighter future, however marginally. "I manage, with God's help. Am I happy? I'm cold -- as we sit and talk now I'm freezing." Nor is this his first experience of living on the street. This time he left home because of his mother, he says: "She beats me so often. I don't keep a tally on how often she beats me," he laughs, "but I tell you it's a lot. It's better this way." "I want to go home, but not so long as my mother's there. She's going to go and stay with my father in Hurghada, which is where he's from," he continues. "She goes often enough, and every time she travels, she takes my two brothers and two sisters with her. But I'm the naughtiest of the lot, so she leaves me behind." Fatma, a tall peroxide blond who looks 12, does not know how old she is. Her friends call her Sattuta -- which roughly translates to "little madam" -- though she scolds them for it. Unlike the vast majority of them, she has a home she can go back to. "Sattuta's like my elder sister," says Ahmed. "She and I are always together." The two children are keen to know where their stories will be published, and whether things will change for them as a result. Media exposure notwithstanding, their living conditions inspire little hope. "I don't go to school. Of course I'd love to, but it's too expensive. So it has to be this way, I suppose," Ahmed says. It is at this moment that two police officers approach us -- to inform me that it is strictly forbidden to conduct interviews with street children. Though it is impossible to verify how many Egyptian minors find themselves living, working and sleeping on the streets -- with the majority of cases still occurring in Cairo and Alexandria -- UNICEF estimates that there are 200,000- one million homeless children in Egypt. Among the threats they daily confront are illness, hunger, injury, sexual abuse, physical violence and exposure to and consequent dependence on illicit substances, not to mention the psychological trauma of growing up without a sense of belonging to a home and a family -- a trauma in no way helped by the way in which they are systematically marginalised. By Egyptian social standards, they live in a separate world with its own, separate set of rules. "These aren't children," one passer-by interrupts the conversation to remark. "They're devils -- don't believe a word they tell you." Last month at the Nasr City Conference Centre, representatives of a range of organisations from the Hope Village Society, UNICEF and Caritas-Alexandria to the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood (NCCM) gathered to discuss a range of outstanding issues relating to street children. Entitled "Children of the Street: Reality and Dreams", the event was a forum for individuals and organisations working to improve the lives of street children to come up with new and "creative" solutions, at which 40 street children were present. Programme items focussed on specific issues like "obstacles to raising awareness" of the problem and difficulties peculiar to street girls. But it was Heba, a 17-year-old girl with her four-month-old baby Donia in her arms, and Abdel-Azim, 13, who made perhaps the most pertinent contribution. In simple language, Heba managed to articulate the brutality of her existence, how she became pregnant, how her father refused to allow her back into the household when he found out she was no longer a virgin, and how the unified Egyptian child law does not allow her to receive state endorsement because her parents are still alive. And since it is impossible to verify the father's identity, she cannot even enter her child on the public registry. Thus the problem is perpetuated -- a street child gives birth, by necessity, to another street child, and the two slip further and further away from public consciousness. Yet Heba refuses to take refuge in a home for children, such as those set up by the Hope Village Society. "It is often the case with street children, particularly among the older ones, that they no longer wish to be re-integrated and refuse to take shelter in our centres," Mahmoud Mohamed Ahmed, the Hope Village Society's research and training unit manager explains. But Heba does visit the association's Imbaba centre regularly, and there, she said, she finds "tenderness" as well as emotional and medical support. For his part Abdel-Azim received help from Caritas- Alexandria in order to find his way back into his family home after living constantly under threat of physical violence from his father, then spending three months on the street. He thought he would be better off away from home but on the streets he was soon subject to "very dangerous" attacks, including physical abuse by the police: "I was very scared of the police." Now he works at a bakery, making sweets: "I feel really proud of myself. I'm the one who brings the money in to support my mother and siblings. I even have e-mail now..." Hani Maurice, director of Caritas-Alexandria, interrupted the boy's energetic speech to tell the audience how Abdel-Azim had asked the bakery owner to send sweets to the centre for the value of his first week's salary. Such an act may be a simple token of gratitude, but coming from a child who has lived through hunger and homelessness, deprived of an education, beaten at home and on the street, his youth irrevocably damaged, it really means the world.
