Confident Children

It's a sunny Saturday morning and I head out to interview Cathy Groenendijk, a woman who helps street kids in Juba. I met her at a Hash race when she was raising money to pay school fees for some of the children.

The driver is busy and I’m running late. It takes five or six phone calls with Cathy to coordinate the meeting time and place. Finally I am dropped in front of a travel agency. Soon I receive another phone call.

“Tim where are you?”

“I’m in front of Muthaiga Travel agency.”

“I’m down by Quality Hotel near the boda-boda (motorcycle) guys. Can you walk toward the hotel?”

I find Cathy soon and she greets me warmly. She is short with braided hair and glasses and has a friendly, warm smile. She is from Uganda originally and came to South Sudan five years ago with a Dutch NGO called War Child. On a five-minute walk down a shady dirt road toward a house she is building for homeless street girls, she tells me how she became frustrated by the slow pace and indirectness of the intervention on behalf of damaged children by the bigger NGOs. She thought a smaller organization unencumbered by layers of bureaucracy could move faster and help more children. She spoke to some friends and contacts and launched her own NGO, Confident Children Out of Conflict (www.confidentchildren.org). An official in one of the new ministries of the Government of South Sudan liked her approach and awarded her a small grant to get started. She picked up donations and cultivated a cadre of volunteers.

Then she went into the markets to find the children she was previously unable to help. The little children are there, begging, picking through trash and digging through drains and ditches looking for food scraps thrown out by vendors and restaurants. At night they sleep in the dirt on the side of the road; children as young as four, five, six.

Homeless, here, doesn't mean that kids live in a shelter. It means THEY HAVE NO PLACE TO SLEEP AND NO ONE TO CARE FOR THEM. When she finds them they are filthy, sick and starving. They do not go to school because there is no one to pay the fees. Confident Children runs a day “drop in” center on Hai Malakal, across from the Mine Advisory Group’s main offices, where homeless children can eat, bathe, wash their clothes and rest in the shade during the day. Cathy and volunteers serve three meals a day there, seven days a week to the poorest and most vulnerable children. Without this food the children would probably starve; spoiled scraps from the market’s trash cans and drains are not enough to live on.

As we talk we walk by a large house on a hill. Cathy says it is the home of an Episcopalian Bishop by the name of Enok Tombe. The Bishop donated about an acre of gently sloping, grassy hillside surrounded by an iron fence topped with razor wire. Cathy is building a house here that will eventually house 25-30 street girls. “We were lucky to get this land," she says.

Here I meet some of the homeless girls. They are playing with balloons in the shade under a jacaranda tree, about ten of them; the oldest looks to be maybe 15 and the youngest, possibly five. They are happy to see Cathy. The younger kids are playful but the teens seem weary and sad. More so than the younger girls, they know that tomorrow is not likely to be much better than today.

The girls are so young and thin. I ask again – ok so where are they going tonight, where will they go? I cannot wrap my head around the fact that girls younger than my own daughters are literally taking care of themselves in one of the poorest and most dangerous countries in the world. I am looking at a girl of about five, covered in dust with a bandage around an ankle playing with a blue balloon.

“They sleep in different places, outside, usually near the market. If it is raining they might go on someone’s veranda until the morning.”

A young British man and a Western woman with a pained expression on her face are just leaving – volunteers perhaps. The British man tells me he works in the rural states, and is just visiting Juba. He seems dazed and subdued. “You see hungry children out there too but the level of squalor here….it just seems inhuman.” Apparently Cathy had taken them to see where the kids sleep and where they scavenge for food.

I take some pictures and draw a crowd of kids with my camera as Cathy gives me a tour of the cinderblock house, which has an attractive red and silver metal roof. It feels solid, with good light, and has cinderblock bathrooms, detached. It was started with money from the government grant, and a group of Canadian contractors are donating their labor at no cost, working on it as they have time, around their regular day jobs. Cathy has finagled most of the building materials as in-kind contributions and estimates about $80,000 more is needed to finish it. The money will go to put in a solar electric system with a backup generator and to dig a borehole (well) for water. She also needs to put in toilets, plumbing, a gas tank and an oven for cooking. An NGO has promised beds already. Cathy tells me the girls often beg her to move into the house right now, and as we are speaking, three of them sweep away some dirt and lie down on the cool tile floor in the unfinished bedroom. Cathy can’t say how long it will take to finish; it depends on funding.

The plan eventually is to plant a large vegetable garden to include maize, corn, cucumbers, lettuce and spinach, along with a huge field of coriander to sell to markets and vendors. She also wants to teach the girls to bake cakes for sale. The children will go to school and learn how to make a living and/or grow food to eat. Right now, they have no way to earn money other than to sell themselves. Some of the girls are already involved in the sex trade.

As we walk out of the property, one of the younger girls, Margaret Dokia, who looks about five, tells Cathy she needs to get a car so she can drive everyone around.

“I will be your car,” Cathy says, slinging the little girl onto her back and walking up the dusty road.