Street Children’s Haven

WHAT worse plight could there be for young children, than to not have a home? However, there are hundreds of such youngsters with no shelter, no one to care for them and no one to give them any guidance in life. They can be seen in virtually all major cities of the world and Kathmandu too has a significant number of such forlorn youngsters more well known as street children. Here too, they can be seen roaming around different parts of the capital city in small groups and they can be identified by their dirty and unkempt appearance. In the cold biting winter nights, they can be seen huddled together seeking the warmth of each other’s body, and perhaps there is no one who doesn’t get moved when seeing such young children in such dire straits. However it is encouraging that efforts are being made to help these street children through different ways. Just the other day a "walk-in-centre" for street children was opened at Chettrapati by local NGO with the help of Planete Enfants, a French INGO. The children can just barge into the centre and rest, have tea and even take a shower in the centre.

It can be presumed that the street children are living this hard life not out of choice. They must have tried to escape from one hardship or the other or some may have been lured into the street life by their peers. While encountering them in the streets, one sees only the hard exterior of these children, but it can easily be imagined that these youngsters too are no different from our own young offspring. they too must be bewildered, frightened and in need of love and care. It cannot be said the centre, like the one opened at Chettrapati can provide love like other children get at home, but it can at least offer the street children some place where they can have some semblance of a normal life and even seek guidance. It can be a opening through which they can lead a new and more hopeful life. There is nothing more divine than helping other human being, specially young children who have no one to call their own. It can be hoped the newly opened centre will open doors to a new life for many of the street children of Kathmandu. Last, but not the least, what must be pointed out herein is that the problems that the street children are facing are the challenges of all the national, regional and international non-governmental organisations working in the country and geared towards the educational and socio-cultural uplift of these unfortunate children. As such, it looks to reason for all of them to not only work unitedly, but also come up with a common strategy to ameliorate the problems faced by the nation’s street children.

Safe Mobility

NEPALESE, in increasing numbers, seeking employment abroad is a fact of our national life. As the national economy fails to perform better and employment opportunities are hard to come by at home, a rising number of Nepalese men and women make all-out efforts to go to foreign lands to seek employment, hoping the grass is greener on that side. Hordes of Nepalese going to East Asia or West Asia or the western developed nations has meant that the remittance that is pouring into Nepal every year is a huge sum. Remittance, thus, has begun to form a substantial part of the nation’s funds over these past years. But all is not well on this front. With depressing regularity, woes of migrants come to the fore in media. Tales of how job-seekers have been duped by Nepalese and foreign employment bureaux are heard frequently. All this means migrant workers are a vulnerable lot. Sharks who wish to make quick bucks understand these vulnerabilities and capitalise on them. Many job-seekers find themselves stranded in a strange land in conditions that were not what they had been promised. Many get duped before they catch that flight out. Middle-men disappearing with their money and passport is also frequent.

Not enough has been done at the state level to ensure the migrant worker’s safety and welfare. Strict monitoring of foreign employment agencies is absent. In fact, very little attempt to understand the migrant workers’ problems have been made. Nepalese missions abroad have not acquitted themselves too well either in this respect. Even where there are such missions, Nepalese workers in trouble have found little support and guidance from them. A day-long workshop on Nepalese migrants heard these workers and other participants discuss how to minimise the vulnerabilities of these workers and maximise benefits from overseas employment. They also discussed a relatively new threat i.e. AIDS. The dreaded disease, it is well-documented now, comes to Nepal with these workers. This and other problems of the migrant workers make it imperative for the government to act. It is high time that the Department of Labour and Employment Promotion, the agency that is supposed to regulate foreign employment, got down to serious work on how to ensure safe mobility of economically disadvantaged people seeking employment opportunities overseas- a trend that can only grow as the years roll by.