All My Children

The majority of children settle happily into the early years setting — some take a bit longer than others and may go through a shy or tearful phase while others bounce into the room with confidence from day one. A lot depends on their experiences prior to joining your nursery or playschool. If they have already experienced playing with other children, have visited other people’s houses, been to the park and discovered the excitement and pitfalls of

Swings and slides and have learnt how to cope with sharing toys and games with brothers and sisters they will probably cope with most early years situations. Continue Reading »

Establishing a street children committee

Towards the end of the meeting of the community resources, it is important to ask those present to indicate whether or not they wish to commit themselves to becoming part and parcel of a proposed street children committee. It is important to indicate the implications of such a commitment which are, among others:

• to have regular meetings (possibly every two weeks), especially at first in order to get organised;
• to possibly become part and parcel of the care group to screen or assess the children;

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Getting organized in a town

As contact is being made with the children by the street animator, three to four committed people willing to get something off the ground need to get together. Their first step is to identify the possible resources within the community and to communicate with these people and organisations with a view to calling a first meeting of concerned citizens. It should be made clear that the meeting is exploratory and that people do not commit themselves in any way by attending. Such resources could include the following:

• Child Welfare in the town and township;
• Two priests/ministers of religion (preferably belonging to a ministers’ fraternal) one in the town and the other in the township;
• A lower and higher primary school principal/teacher in the township;

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Getting started in a town

To state the obvious, one needs to identify the whereabouts of street children in a town and to try and establish how many there are. The usual places to find them during the day are the supermarkets where they will volunteer to push trolleys, the taxi ranks where they will wash taxis, parking areas where they will offer to wash cars, etc. It is important to remember the five `categories’ because, for instance, although part-time working children are street children, their situation differs from runaways or abandoned children. Part- time working children who attend school and sleep at home in the evenings are not a ‘problem’ as such, although care needs to be taken that they do not become full-time working children or runaways. Continue Reading »