The Street Children of Somalia

[Crow]

I saw this on Twitter and was left utterly disgusted.
This country has a street kid problem that no one seems to want to acknowledge. This thread isn't meant to target any region or for fkd but to just share available information on this problem. I will start with the most comprehensive account by Vice in 2014.

The Glue-Sniffing Street Kids of Somaliland

No matter how prosperous Somaliland might become, it's doubtful that any of that good fortune will trickle down to Hargeisa's homeless children—young outcasts living completely on their own who are at best ignored and at worst abused and treated like vermin. They are a near-constant presence, crawling around the shadows of alleys and squares in a city where poverty and wealth butt heads on nearly every street corner: shiny new office blocks sit beside ancient shacks, currency traders have set up open-air stands where they display piles of cash, Hyundais brush past donkeys down the city's sole paved street.

Behind that street is a café that serves up coffee and soup to midmorning breakfasters. This is where I first met Mohamed. "Salam," he said quietly after I introduced myself.

Mohamed told me that if he sleeps too close to the skyscraper that shields him from the light of dawn, a security guard beats him with an acacia branch until he bleeds. I noticed that he had an old lemonade bottle tucked under his filthy sweatshirt. It was filled with glue, perhaps the only escape he has from his harsh existence. He took huffs every few minutes as he spoke to me: "I could stop. I could definitely stop. But it's hard... And why?"

According to the Hargeisa Child Protection Network, there are 3,000 to 5,000 homeless youth in the city, most of whom are Oromo migrants from Ethiopia. Around 200 a year complete the voyage through Somaliland and across the Gulf of Aden into Yemen, where they attempt to cross the border to Saudi Arabia and find work; many more don't make it.

For more than four decades the Oromo have been fleeing persecution in Ethiopia, where they have long been politically marginalized. Mohamed arrived in Somaliland as part of this ongoing migration. Five years ago, he told me, his family made the 500-mile trek from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital, to Hargeisa. The Somaliland government claims up to 80,000 illegal immigrants—mostly Ethiopians—reside in its territory. Many of them trickled in through the giant border of Ogaden, a vast, dusty outback on the edge of Ethiopia's Somali Region (the easternmost of the country's nine ethnic divisions, which, as the name implies, is mostly populated by ethnic Somalis). Some travel in cars arranged by fixers. Others make the long journey on foot. Almost all won't make it past the border without a bribe. Given their options, a few bucks for freedom seemed liked the best deal for Mohamed's family. But after their migration, things only got worse.

A short time after his family arrived in Somaliland—he's not sure exactly when—Mohamed's father died of tuberculosis. Quickly running out of options, he left his mother in a border town called Borama to try to eke out a living, working whatever job was available some 90 miles away in Hargeisa.

Instead Mohamed ended up where he is now, wandering around the city with his friends and fellow Ethiopian migrants Mukhtar and Hamza (all three have adopted Muslim-sounding names to better blend into the local population). Their days mostly consist of shining shoes for 500 Somaliland shillings (seven cents) a pop and taking many breaks in between jobs to sniff glue.

On a good day, the boys will combine their meager earnings and pay to sleep on the floors of migrant camps on the outskirts of town, where persecuted people from all over East Africa live in corrugated shanties in the desert. If they don't shine enough shoes, it's back to the storm drain. "I live in the walls," Mukhtar said. "No one knows me."

Though they fled Ethiopia to escape persecution, the Oromo migrants often endure even worse treatment in Hargeisa. The first time I met Mohamed's friend Hamza he was plodding through the crowd at an outdoor restaurant, offering shoe shines in the midday sun. An older man dressed in a cream apparatchik suit like a James Bond villain sitting next to me shouted at the child, who cowered, turned, and ran away. "Fucking kids," he said to me in perfect English. "God can provide for them."

Reports by the local press on Hargeisa's growing homeless- youth population have done nothing to help the kids' reputation. The authorities have told journalists that street kids are the city's gravest security threat amid a backdrop of tables covered with gruesome shivs, shanks, and machetes supposedly confiscated from the wily urchins. "The grown-up street children have become the new gangsters," local police chief Mohamed Ismail Hirsi told the IRIN news agency in 2009.

One claim that the government can't make is that these kids have chosen to live in squalor; for them, there are no viable alternatives. Somaliland offers no government-funded public education—schools are generally run by NGOs, and other private groups rarely accept Oromo children as students. Even if they did, enrollment would be a nightmare because the vast majority of these kids are without identification, homes, or relatives living nearby. They're often left on their own to scratch out an existence in a city that hates them and offers them next to nothing.

Ismail Yahye, who works for the Save the Children campaign, used to be a Somaliland street kid himself. He despairs at the pipe dreams they are fed before relocating from Ethiopia—many leave home believing the rumors about how life is so much better in Somaliland.

"The main reasons they come here are for economic prosperity and job opportunities," he said. "They pay bribes at the border and come by foot. They can't return. They're trapped."

The Hargeisa Child Protection Network reports that 88 percent of the city's homeless children have suffered some form of sexual abuse or harassment. All of the boys I met denied having been raped or abused during their time on the streets, but my fixer told me he strongly believed that they were too ashamed and scared to admit to any such incidents.

 

[Crow]

Many kids earn small amounts of cash doing menial tasks like shoe-shining and washing cars. Others find work running alcohol, which is illegal in the Muslim state. If you ever find yourself at a party in one of Hargeisa's sprawling, plush villas, chances are the gin in your gimlet was smuggled into the country by a kid who sleeps in a gutter.

It was with Shafi's help that I was first able to meet Hargeisa's Oromo children. He told me the best place to find them was around the convenience stores they visit daily to buy fresh glue. On our first attempt and without much searching, Shafi and I found a couple of kids who appeared to be homeless hanging out in an alley near a school. We spoke with them for a bit, and when I felt that everyone was comfortable I pulled out my camera. Before I could take their photos, a guy who said he was an off-duty cop appeared out of nowhere. He approached us, shouting at me in gravelly Somali and quickly confiscating the bottles of glue from the kids.

"He called you a pedophile," Shafi translated, adding that it would benefit me to reimburse the boys for their stolen solvents.

After the cop left, one of the boys grew somber. "I hope I stop using," he said. As he spoke I noticed the painful sores etched across his face. "I just miss my family. I haven't seen them in years. I'm alone and no one helps me."

The stigma that surrounds these children is such that even those trying to help them are treated with suspicion—as are reporters hoping to tell their story, as I found out the hard way one night while Shafi and I were trying to track down Mohamed and his friends.


It was a typical breezy fall evening, full of the usual scenes: men sipping tea and debating loudly, women and children hustling soup and camel meat, a mess of car horns cleaving the air. Shafi was sure the kids were nearby, but that didn't mean much because they usually try to remain hidden so as not to cause a scene.

It didn't take much time to spot Hamza's tattered bootleg Barcelona soccer jersey peeking out from behind the edge of a wall. As we approached, more kids appeared from behind parked cars and emerged from alleys, and some even popped out of a nearby storm drain. Within minutes more than two dozen homeless children had surrounded us, clamoring for cash and posing for pictures. An empty square in the middle of town had suddenly transformed into a glue-sniffers' agora.

Our time with the kids didn't last long. A couple minutes later an old man who was lounging outside a nearby café decided he'd had enough, sprung to his feet, walked over to us, and began hitting me and the kids with his walking stick.

Some of the children scattered. Others stayed, presumably with the hope that holding out for the payout from the Western journalist would be worth the licks. In a surreal moment, as the old man continued to swing his stick and scream, one boy, who said his name was Hussein, walked over and, huffing on his glue pot, told me about his hopes and dreams. "I want to be a doctor," he said, staggering about and staring straight through me. "Sometimes I dream when I get hungry. But there's no food here, no help. I expected a better life. I don't now. But sometimes, I wish."


Just then, a scuffle broke out—the old man had lured a couple of his friends into the argument, and they came to the collective decision to grab me and smash my camera. Shafi and my driver, Mohammed, struggled to hold them back.

Two cops arrived on the scene soon after the scuffle. Instead of punishing the old man for attacking the kids and trying to destroy my camera, they dragged me off to a festering cinder-block carcass covered in graffiti that serves as the local jail.

"You cannot photograph the children without their permission," the more senior cop said, pointing to my camera. "They do not want you to photograph them."

Shafi translated as I tried to explain to the policeman that that the kids were clearly desperate for someone to be interested in their plight, and that they were even posing for pictures. That's when I stopped, realizing that the subject wasn't up for debate. It was clear that writing about or photographing these street children was taboo.

In the end, I compromised by deleting most of the photos I had taken and then sat in a corner of the jail while my driver, Mohammed, and my captors read one another's horoscopes outside the gates.

A couple hours later I was released. Mohammed was waiting for me outside, and he immediately pulled me aside to tell me something that I had already accepted the moment I entered the jail: my reporting on the children had come to an end.


Mohammed looked unnerved. "We can leave now, Insha'Allah... The kids thing is over. They are invisible."

 

[Crow]

These kids are from Mogadishu and lost their parents to suicide bombings. They sniff glue and sleep on the streets as well:

This boy has just started sniffing glue four days prior. He says that he typically smokes cigarettes and shiisha and eats khat:

The FGS says that there are 5,000 street boys in Mogadishu and they can't afford to do anything for them:

 

[Crow]

One thing that you'll notice in all of these videos and pictures is that there isn't a single girl, just boys. I'm certain that they've been taken into human trafficking and are being prostituted out by depraved degenerates.

 

[kickz]

Terrible, the government should set up orphanages.

 

[Samaalic Era]

One thing that you'll notice in all of these videos and pictures is that there isn't a single girl, just boys. I'm certain that they've been taken into human trafficking and are being prostituted out by depraved degenerates.

That's probably what's happening atm. Wallahi the only Somalia can ever come out of this is Somalis from the diaspora who have emaan to change things on the ground

 

[Crow]

This article from 2017 dispels two common myths:

1. These children are not all Oromo.
2. These children are not all orphans.

Homeless children sniff glue to take 'away the pain' of surviving Somalia's streets

HARGEISA, Somalia — Plastic bottles litter the ground as children emerge from an abandoned mud-brick building in this hot, dusty East African city.

The dirty bottles used for sniffing glue are a visible clue of what life is like for these homeless kids. “It takes away the pain I have,” Mohammed, 13, said, looking down at his sand-covered feet as other children take a hit of glue nearby. “The glue helps me go to sleep.”

Hargeisa is home to hundreds of street kids like Mohammed, who are victims of one of the worst droughts in the region over the past year. These sad-eyed children have nowhere else to go and often suffer from illnesses such as tuberculosis.

Poverty-stricken children surviving on the streets of Somali cities is not new but the sheer number is.

The government estimates one-fifth of the kids on the streets of Somalia's second-largest city are there because of the devastating drought.

Teenagers and young homeless adults fiercely guard the dilapidated building where Mohammed sleeps. A putrid stench radiates from the murky hole in the building’s wall that the youngsters enter and exit through.

Several of the children interviewed coughed as they lamented that they were getting sicker and their clothes were becoming tattered rags.

These are women and children in an internally displaced person camp in Hargeisa, Somalia.

“Some children leave their homes because the parents have no means to provide for them, others run away because of problems at home like divorce or neglect, but some are also being forced into the cities from rural areas because of the drought,” said Filsam Husein Khalif, director of the social department in Somaliland, the name for the autonomous region here that considers itself an independent country.

“But these rural children have no skills to help them find work in the cities, so they end up living on the street and getting addicted to drugs,” he said.

USA TODAY is withholding the full names of the children interviewed because they are minors.

The glue-addicted children beg in the streets and frequently end up fighting each other. Some of the battles turn fatal. The same week USA TODAY visited Mohammed, one of his friends was beaten to death.

“We have a lot of problems from the fights. My ribs hurt because of the fighting,” Mohammed said. “When I’m using glue, someone will try and grab me and take the glue from me to have for their own, and then the fights start.”

Deaths caused by malnutrition and diarrhea are not uncommon in the worst hit parts of the country. At least 50 people died from diarrhea in recent weeks, according to Adis Salah, the mayor of the nearby Baladiye District.

Some poverty-stricken parents have sent their children to urban centers in hopes of giving them a better life.

Sakkari, 14, ended up polishing shoes after being sent to Hargeisa by his parents to escape the drought.

“When the drought began, I was sent to Hargeisa to live with an aunt,” Sakkari said. “But my aunt had many children in Hargeisa, and we didn’t get on. We had a fight one day, and I ran away.”

“I’ve not heard from my family for months. I think their situation must be bad,” Sakkari added.

Other children have become homeless after being separated from their family as thousands of Somalis became displaced in the desperate search for water, food and grazing land for animals.

Abdelqader is one of the homeless children. “I lost them,” the 12-year-old boy said, looking down. “That’s how I ended up on the streets.”

His family was forced to leave their village when water ran out, and Abdelqader got lost in an unfamiliar place when he collected water to bring back to his family. Carrying a full jerrycan but with no idea where to go, the boy walked for three days in desert-like terrain hungry and exhausted before he found a main road.

Flagging down a truck, Abdelqader asked to be taken to the nearest city. Hours later he found himself in Hargeisa facing a night in the biggest and scariest place he’d ever been.

“I didn’t know how to survive in the town on my own. I spent days and nights without food. Some people saw me struggling and gave me some food and water,” Abdelqader said.

After some weeks surviving on the streets in one of the world’s poorest nations, Abdelqader was picked up by the government and taken to a center for street children on the outskirts of Hargeisa.

That center is prison-like in it’s appearance but provides a bed, food and schooling. It takes care of around 100 destitute children. However, the center is already running at full capacity, and 3,000 more street children remain in Hargeisa alone.

In Somalia’s capital of Mogadishu, one of the world’s most dangerous cities, an additional 5,000 children are believed to be homeless.

As the drought continues with no end in sight, even more children may soon be on the streets.

“Sleeping on the streets was the worst experience of my life. The other children beat me,” Abdelqader said. “I feel lucky that I’m not there anymore. I hope to find my family again.”

 

[FBIsomalia]

Let us give a credit to the Kacaan era. Those boys and girls were called the ubaah or Kacaan children. Kacaan era was giving care to those children s.

 

[Timo Jareer and proud]

Disgusting

 

[EDsomali]

Let us give a credit to the Kacaan era. Those boys and girls were called the ubaah or Kacaan children. Kacaan era was giving care to those children s.

This isn't true.

The kids used to exist during Siad Barre's time.

Here is one, an extremely malnourished street child in Mogadishu taken in 1985.

A combination of bad governance, lack of family planning and an individualistic society cause things like this to happen.

 

[NotMyL]

Disgusting, what kind of grown man laughs and records little kids smoking? What kind of xaywaan is this

 

[GBTarmy]

This isn't true.

The kids used to exist during Siad Barre's time.

View attachment 77738

Here is one, an extremely malnourished street child in Mogadishu taken in 1985.

A combination of bad governance, lack of family planning and an individualistic society cause things like this to happen.

they were not common, street kids can be found everywhere

 

[Crow]

Disgusting, what kind of grown man laughs and records little kids smoking? What kind of xaywaan is this

I noticed in the other videos that these boys like to dance and perform for the camera in hopes of getting a small donation. It seems that they are used to being used by adults for entertainment.

 

[NotMyL]

I noticed in the other videos that these boys like to dance and perform for the camera in hopes of getting a small donation. It seems that they are used to being used by adults for entertainment.

That’s just heartbreaking, we collect so much money in Minnesota every year for children, I wonder where it’s going to, I thought we had orphanages. Nothing gets to me more than children and old Somali women in need of help.

 

[Samaalic Era]

That’s just heartbreaking, we collect so much money in Minnesota every year for children, I wonder where it’s going to, I thought we had orphanages. Nothing gets to me more than children and old Somali women in need of help.

You have to go in person and do the work. There is too much corruption and your money will never reach those children

 

[AussieHustler]

@Tukraq said to me, every Somali child has a clan to look after h/her, can anyone answer him, what happened to their clans?

 

[Tukraq]

@Tukraq said to me, every Somali child has a clan to look after h/her, can anyone answer him, what happened to their clans?

in somalia kids have more freedom and can turn into ciyaal suuq, with or without parents

 

[Gibiin-Udug]

My heart


May Allah swt help them.

 

[AussieHustler]

in somalia kids have more freedom and can turn into ciyaal suuq, with or without parents

@Tukraq

Off course mate, there are no orphaned kids, no kids with extremely poor parents (mostly single mothers), they’re children from good homes who are misbehaving. Furthermore, those who did suugo research about Somalia and claimed that our blessed country to be one of the worst places to be a child are lying. Finally, we never had orphaned children brainwashed and indoctrinated by Alshabaab terrorists and nor had we ever seen orphaned child soldiers fighting for the militias because their clans won’t allow them. It’s all foreign propaganda aimed to humiliate Somalis and Somalia. I and many others missed this memo. Ok. We got it now.

 

[Vanessa]

Somali government are stealing their un and charity money kulala can’t afford anything for them.