Source: Actual English
Kids on the Streets of Buenos Aires
By Alejandra Labanca
Aslim, red burn crosses the left side of Victor’s face from cheekbone for forehead. His eyelid is burnt. His lower eyelashes are gone, charred to the rim on his eye. Only 3-months old, Victor leads a tough life. “He got burnt with a pipe,” says his 16-year-old mother, Marta, referring matter-of-factly to the pipe she uses to smoke paco, a cheap, highly toxic by product of cocaine refining.
With her baby is tow, Marta lives on the streets, begging and stealing, seeking shelter in dark porches or under trees. They rarely spend two nights in the same place. Many times they don’t even spend them together. They eat what she can get, when she can get it.
Marta and Victor embody the plight of most vulnerable of Argentines, the street children of Buenos Aires, a city struggling to come to grips with in your face misery since the 2001 economic meltdown led the country to the largest debt default in history and plunged more than half of all Argentines into poverty.
Some of them have a home and a family to go back to at the end of the day, but at least 700 sleep on the streets every night, exposed to violence, hunger, sickness and drugs.
One a sunny November afternoon in Retiro train station, Marta hangs out with you four other kids. Marta is lean and tall. Her black eyes look just like Victor’s. Marta can’t wait to see her baby walk. “He’s too heavy to carry him around,” she explain, scratching her flat belly through a hole on her white tank-top.
Victor, like the most street kids, is already nobody’s child. He is not with Marta today. Nor is he with his father, 17-year-old Jonathan, who is in jail for stealing.
“The baby is with my mom,” Marta says.
Maria, Marta’s mother, is also homeless. At 40, she hasn’t held a job in more than a decade, and both her children have lived on the streets since their father died in 2001.
Argentina’s slow descent into economic hardship started 30 years ago, experts say, but history hit fast-forward during the last decade.
Unemployment peaked at 18 percent during an attempt to privatize and open up the economy in the 1990s. In 2001, the economy collapsed, pushing almost six out of every 10 people into poverty. Argentina, which had along prided itself on its large working class, awoke to misery.
The impact on the country’s poorest families was devastating. Many were shattered by hunger and despair.
City authorities say one-third of the 700 kids living on Buenos Aires streets left home to escape hunger. Another 40 percent fled abuse and neglect.
Buenos Aires’ street children don’t hang out alone. It’s boring, they say. They form gangs, of 10 or 15 kids, most of them harmless. Their worst crimes are pretty thefts and a growing drug problem.
Children of the same gang share the money they get begging or stealing. They buy food and drugs.
They sleep on cardboard or dirty mattresses, packed together in human piles.
“The gangs work as physical and emotional support for these kids who, under a façade of bravado, actually feel very vulnerable,” said Emilia Zadcovich, head of the city’s Center for the Children’s Integral Assistance, known as CAINA in its Spanish acronym.
The center provides showers, food, play and some education to street children.
Teen pregnancy is a growing problem on the streets. Just among the children who go to CAINA a small fraction of the kids wandering the streets –the center documented 22 pregnancies in 2005. Now CAINA is looking for private funding for workshops for young moms.
Much like its children, Buenos Aires s a kaleidoscope. Half a mile south of Recoleta, the Paris of South America turns into a third-world city. Piles of garbage bags line the streets of Constitution, a working-class neighborhood. Patches or dirt cover a square where children play.
“You should be careful. They’re going to snatch your camera,” says Romina, a 14-year-old girl who hangs out in the neighborhood.
Roberto Gomez, a security guard at the station, knows what Romina, is talking about.
“What’s to be done with these kids? They should all be locked up. They snatch your purse, take your bag if you leave it unattended, tear off your necklace or steal your watch,” he says.
Authorities are under fire for what some Argentines consider a soft approach on underage crime. However, the government argues against repression.
“Statistics show that 70 percent of the children that have been institutionalized end up in jail when they grow up,” Graham said. “What these children need is a future.”
