Alen, guarding cars around 1 a.m. outside trendy Belgrade bars. Photo: Matt Hackworth/CWS
“These children didn’t choose to live on the street.
They are left there.
They survive on empty stomachs, without love.
They don’t go to school and have never been to the doctor.
They are growing up before they become children.
All it takes is just a little goodwill so their lives can change for the better.”
– The Centre for the Integration of Youths
BELGRADE – It’s almost 1 a.m. and Alen Radosavijevic is hard at work.
The problem is he’s only 12. Like many of Belgrade’s street children, Alen works a job to help provide for his family. Alen’s status as a Roma child doesn’t entitle him to clean water. Shelter. Enough food to keep hunger at bay. But his mere presence outside Belgrade’s trendier expat bars is good enough to guard a Mercedes and a BMW for around $1.50.
Alen does have access to schooling in the afternoons but not every day. Sometimes he’s just too tired. For kids like Alen and those who manage to stay awake, school can provide a profoundly stabilizing force in an otherwise turbulent life. For many Roma children, it is the day’s opportunity for a meal. A chance to get away from makeshift shacks and rummaging in dumpsters. A chance to play. To have a fleeting glimpse at what the rest of us count on as a normal childhood.
In a country where more than 300,000 children have no access to health care or education because of poverty it doesn’t come as a surprise that the number of street children is on the rise, especially in the capital – Belgrade. They come here from all over Serbia in hope of finding a better life and a place they could call their own when they are hungry, sick, when they need to talk, when they need support and a smile. What they usually find instead is violence, sexual exploitation, neglect, chemical addiction, and human rights violations. When you are able not just to look but to see, you will spot them everywhere – in parks and benches, in ruined buildings, cardboard boxes, manholes, on the streets asking to wash your windshield, on the parking lots offering to guard your car, on the side of the road begging, selling things we rejected, near the garbage cans looking for today’s meal…And although each child has its own story, a painful chain of events that lead them to where they are now, there is an underlying root cause that connects all the stories – poverty and inadequate access and support of state institutions to solve their problems.
A child in front of the Bellville Roma settlement Photo: Matt Hackworth/CWS
One of the few organizations in Belgrade fighting for and protecting the street children, the Centre for the Integration of Youths (CIM), runs the well-known 24 hour drop-in center, Svratiste, for street children. Recently, they opened a day-care center in New Belgrade that offers a safe place for between 30 and 60 street kids daily where they come to eat, take a bath, change clothes, and receive medical and psychological examinations. Marko Sijan, program coordinator at CIM, states that the children who use the services of the day care center are predominantly Roma of different backgrounds: some ran away from their biological or adoptive parents, others fled orphanages or other institutions, some are refugees and internally displaced while some are working to support their families. “Poverty has taken root, and is particularly difficult when it comes to kids. Among them, the most vulnerable are the Roma children, who live in unhygienic conditions or in the streets of Belgrade.”
These kids do not have continual access to food and even when they do, the food is often of low nutritional value and quality. Fruit or hot meals are a treat. They have no place to bathe, have no place to wash their clothes if they have any. Street children often do not have medical insurance and in some cases even birth certificates. In the day-care center, they receive one hot meal every day, they have a place where they can take a bath, wash their clothes or get new clothes if they need it. The center also offers a psycho-social support through individual and group work, educators and volunteers offer games, socializing, positive role models and conversation, a medical nurse is giving basic medical treatment, develops hygienic habits and takes care of urgent cases (wounds, burns, cuts….). The center reports every new arrival to the Welfare Centre and, in cooperation with the center’s social worker, tries to remove a child from the street by helping them obtain documents, exercise their rights to health and social welfare, reviving contacts with the authorities, linking them with the proper institutions.
Volunteers at the day care center. Photo: Jovana Savic/CWS
The street kids don’t go to school (90 percent of them). “From our experience in working with street children, they do not choose this life, but are forced to live it and do not have other alternative,” Sijan continues. They would rather go to school and later find legal employment, but existing system of social welfare doesn’t have sufficient capacity to support them or their families. Although they live in extremely poor conditions, 75 percent of registered within the CIM are not receiving any support from the Centre for social work nor any other agency and only 2 percent are registered within the local center for social work. CIM has established contact with three schools that would be interested in cooperating with them, one of them being the primary school Branko Pesic, Church World Service’s long-term partner.
The school now teaches close to thirty street kids following individual teaching plans, trying to integrate them into the class setting. In the school, we meet Sasa, Stefan and Mile, working with their teacher Darko. Their usual day starts at the day care center, where they take a bath, wash their clothes and then head to attend the classes at Branko Pesic. In the afternoon, they come to the center again to have some lunch and rest for a while because most of their nights are long. They, like Alen, work on parking lots guarding expensive cars for as long as the owners pay them to. Usually, the guarding takes place until the early morning hours.
The boys look tired, using every silent moment to close their eyes for just a few seconds. Time spent in the center or in school is a safe time for them. “I work to survive, and before the center and the school, I had neither place nor time to play and to be a kid,” Sasa says. “Here, I feel sheltered, relaxed.” In spite of the harmful life style, their teacher tells us that somehow they manage to find the time for education. Sasa (age 12) and Mile (age 14) are brothers who live in one of the poorest Roma settlements in New Belgrade, ironically situated across the new and costly residential complex, Belville. They live in a cartoon shack, without the running water, and they work to support their family. “A house in which we live is not a house. It’s a one room carton box where we all live. We live behind those beautiful buildings in New Belgrade. Do you know where it is? Yes, we know all too well. Stefan (age 13) lives in similar conditions, in one of the Roma settlements across the famous Belgrade’s lake resort, Ada. Sasa and Stefan love math and learned to read and write in a month. Jokingly, Stefan adds that the vital motivating factor for them was to be able to write love letters and messages to girls. Sasa and Stefan want to absorb as much knowledge as they can because when they grow up they want to work, but not “as car guardians” but in a job that can secure a better life. They see their parents struggling, collecting recyclables and waste paper. “Our parents didn’t complete even the primary school and we want something better for ourselves.”
The day care entrance, in Belgrade. Photo: Jovana Savic/CWS
Mile is devoted and comes to school every day, but his true love is soccer which his nickname Ronaldo strongly accentuates. If he doesn’t succeed in becoming a soccer player or at least a referee, he would like to have enough money to open a car repair shop. “I’m good with legs, but I’m also pretty good with my hands.”
Although the premises of the day care center are small, consisting of one room, one bathroom, and one small office for volunteers, these boys love going there because they have a warm place to eat, wash, play, learn and relax. This is a place where kids not having a chance to be kids are becoming who they are – boys who like to laugh, listen, talk, play with their friends, tease each other and learn. They survive because they believe they can do better. So do the CIM and Branko Pesic primary school who, with the support from CWS, make possible for street kids to enjoy rights and build future that would enable them to step out from the circle of violence, neglect and risks related to the life on streets.
CWS Europe will continue to work in forging successful partnerships in care for vulnerable children and in providing holistic services for the street children. The only way to break this cycle is to start with the next generation, hoping today’s kids will grow up to see Roma children not as a cheap way to guard an expensive car, but as a child who deserves as much love and care as any of the rest of us.