6-17-06, 12:59pm

ST-LOUIS, 16 Jun 2006 (IRIN) - Plumped on a sofa with a bevy of children, grand-children and nieces and nephews sitting all around, Awa Cheikh Sow is trying to keep her eyes glued to the television screen, but simply can’t.

She keeps looking over with disbelief at the tall young boy sitting on the ground in a corner of the room in this small house in the old seaside colonial capital of West Africa, Senegal’s St-Louis.

It is the day after the return of her prodigal son. “I cried so much,” says the small frail woman, prematurely aged by illness and hardship. “I was so happy to find my son again.” The boy, whose name is Ale and is around 15, looks up and nods in agreement.

No one had seen Ale for a year and a half, and there had been not a single word on his whereabouts until his return the previous day in the company of three young men from a group that runs a shelter for street children, called Village Pilote. Its aim is to return children to their families and home environment.

“We looked for you everywhere people said they thought they had seen you,” said his older brother. “Not long ago someone said you were near Touba (some 200 kms away) and I was planning on going to fetch you there.”

He turned to the three men from Village Pilote. “Thank you for doing this, it’s really extraordinary,” he said.

“We never force anyone to return home,” said Sherif Makhfou Ndiaye. “But when they’re ready we do everything we can to help.

“Sometimes it’s complicated with the families, however,” he added. “Some of them don’t care, others don’t trust us and think we want something from them. So I tell them we’re only acting in the interest of the child, and that that is why we are bringing him home.”

Forced to leave the violence

It was because of another older brother that Ale left in the first place. When his father died, and with his mother gone to live in St-Louis, he was left in the village to work with his brother in the rice-fields.

“Whenever he came home and saw me and my friends and brothers playing instead of working in the fields, he would beat us,” Ale said. The boy ran away from the village three times to his mother’s small house in town, but each time she brought him back.

So in 2004 he fled as far as he could go, joining the tens of millions of other children living on streets worldwide. The UN children’s agency UNICEF said in a 2006 report that it was impossible to determine exactly how many minors were living alone across the globe.

Beggar children, lucky to have a meal



Like the others Ale learned quickly how to be mobile. After slamming the door on his home he traded in his watch against a ride on one of the battered blue-and-yellow mini-buses, or “cars rapides”, that crisscross Senegal.

He got off 169 km down the road in the central town of Touba, where he struck up a friendship with a gang of four street kids on his first night out looking for a place to sleep. The boys taught him how to beg and how to steal chickens they would then resell. The group stuck together for three months.

Then, three of them took off on a 190-km trip to the shantytown suburb of Pikine outside the capital, Dakar, where they lived like thousands of others - begging for lumps of sugar, rice, peanuts and cakes that they ate or tried to resell. At nights they slept under parked trucks.

Ale and his mates used to resell their daily takings in a pigsty by a train-line that is home to several families from Guinea-Bissau, forced to sleep and live in mud and garbage alongside their pigs.

“Then we’d go to the video-club and watch films all day with my favourite actor Jet Li, or with Jean-Claude Van Damme,” the actor also known as “the muscles from Brussels.”

SAVED FROM VIOLENCE ON THE STREETS

It was after reaching Pikine that Ale went to live in the refuge - in February 2005. He stayed there for more than a year, with a dozen other 8 to 15 year-olds, most of them from the country and most having fled Koranic schools where they had been placed by their parents.

He saw only one of his old street-friends again, during a football match for street kids organised by the shelter, and tried to convince him to come to live in the refuge too. “But he was hanging out at the time with kids who sniffed solvent and who had a bad influence on him. I never saw him again.”

Ale said he went to live in the refuge after being saved from a stabbing on the street by one of the youth workers in the shelter. “I had a fight with a kid who hit me in the mouth. He ran off to get a knife and Mamadou (the youth worker) turned up and took me to the shelter. The kid followed us waving the knife but Mamadou chased him away and I never left the shelter again.”

Drugs, violence and sexual abuse are common problems among the street kids

Violence is common among children fending for a living in the streets, as is sexual abuse and drug involvement. But Ale said: “I have never been a victim of a sexual attack though I met kids who had.” According to Sherif from the shelter, Ale must have been one of only a handful there to have escaped sexual abuse.

During his time at the shelter, Ale learnt how to read and write and trained as a baker, which is what he hopes to do in St-Louis, unless he takes to sculpture like one of his brothers.

Getting up and sitting down next to his mother on the sofa, he said: “If it weren’t for Village Pilote, I’d still be living in the street. I’d be sniffing, stealing, in prison, or maybe even dead.”