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• STREET CHILDREN
Supporting specialized homes, service centres and, as appropriate, individual children.
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Street life for children is detrimental to their physical, mental, emotional and psychological wellbeing. They continuously face intimidation from other street children, gangs and the police. Society tends to look down on these children leaving them with low self images. Street children who decide to leave street life and return to mainstream society face many challenges, and often end up returning to the streets.
With increasing poverty, urbanisation and the recent conflict in Nepal, a greater number of children are living on the streets of Nepal’s cities than ever before. The social complexity of this issue and the high stakes involved for the children, demand a carefully considered response.
With the support of CHANCE for Nepal (UK) Shenpen is working with local specialist organisations to help children realize their real potential. This is proving less a matter of “taking children off the streets and into schools” but rather adopting an approach that addresses each child’s individual situation, abilities and aspirations.
Shenpen has recently been supporting two street children organisations “JAFON” and “SathSath” – both offer hostel services for street children. Funds have been used to help set up medical services, support street theatre and radio programmes and help train adolescent children to become taxi drivers and street venders.
© 2006, Rangjung Yeshe Shenpen