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[MOGADISHU, 20 January 2009] - Hassan Maye, 13, has been fending for himself and his family in the streets of Mogadishu since he was ten. He shines shoes in the Sinai neighbourhood in the southern part of the Somali capital. On a good day, he says he earns 18,000 shillings - equivalent to roughly 50 cents. Maye risks danger every day for this meagre income, as shooting regularly flares up around his workplace. He also has to keep an eye out for the gangs of armed freelance robbers that roam the streets of Mogadishu. His earnings make a small contribution to the income of the household he shares with his grandparents and sister. Hyperinflation makes survival a struggle - a cup of tea costs twice as much now as it did a couple of months ago. The cost of staples such as rice and flour, which were already prohibitively expensive for many here, have risen as a much as 10 percent for the past two months. Maye is not the only child trying to survive in the streets of Mogadishu where basic infrastructure has all but collapsed, social services are barely available and the price of food has skyrocketed. But in a country embroiled in anarchy and deadly violence for almost two decades - Somalia has not had functioning central government since the fall of Siad Barré in 1991 - precise statistics on the number of children in the streets of the city are hard to come by. "There are several factors that force children into the streets," says Mohamed Gaab, a social worker. "One is poverty caused by either unemployment of the main breadwinner of the family or by his or her death." Unemployment is rife in the country and with the breakdown of social security provided by aid agencies, many parents who are unable to take care of their children have allowed them to take on jobs or begging, thus exposing them to risks on the streets. "The other reasons include neglect on the part of the parents for one reason or the other or the child escaping abuse from his parents, but the overriding cause for street children is poverty," Gaab told IPS in Mogadishu. Since 2001, many Islamic charities that catered for vulnerable children closed down after funding for them was cut. "Since 9/11 many Islamic charities lost their funding from the Gulf States, mainly from Saudi Arabia, after the US wrongly branded Islamic charities as supporters of terror activities. Since then many orphanages in Mogadishu that relied on their funding were closed," Gaab said. Gaab himself is a former employee of the Saudi Arabia-based charity Al-Haramain. In the current upsurge of violence, which has forced nearly half of Mogadishu's two million residents from their home, Gaab says many orphans, vulnerable as they are, have had their only safety net pulled under them. They find themselves backin the streets of Mogadishu either doing small menial such as shoe shining, car washing, dish washing or working as domestic servants to support themselves and their poor families. Maye, the shoe-shiner, has been through it all and says working in the streets of Mogadishu to eke out a livelihood is a struggle for survival in a dangerous environment. "I and my friends work as shoe-shiners but there is sometimes fighting around where we work or stay, and we often see dead and injured people all around the place," said Maye. Many street children have been killed or injured by the stray bullets and shells fired daily by both warring sides in the conflict while others have been deliberately killed on suspicion of being spies or planting roadside bombs. "I do not go close to the Somali government forces or the foreign forces. They kill shoe-shine boys. They think we are spies," said Osman Dahir, a friend of Maye. There are other street children who do not work but are instead engaged in begging to survive. Most of those beggars are from the more recently displaced people who have left their home villages to come to Mogadishu because of violence, famine or drought that prevent them from continuing to farm on their lands. They are rarely able to find even low-paid work like Maye because the small cost of setting up - brushes and polish, needles and thread to repair damaged shoes - are beyond them. Maye and his mates were fortunate to be set up by a relative or neighbour. Some of the new arrivals do manage to save enough to set themselves up to work on the streets. But they must begin their lives in the shattered city sitting outside mosques in their ragged clothes, shouting blessings for those who would offer them small charity; others go around the city from house to house asking for offerings. Like his friends, Maye does not go to school - very few children in Mogadishu can, as schools have mostly been destroyed or closed because of the incessant violence in the city since 2006 when fighting broke out between Islamist insurgent fighters and Ethiopian troops who invaded Somalia in 2006 to help Somali government forces topple an Islamist administration that controlled much of southern and central Somalia. "I would like to have an education and learn to read and write and go to university but I cannot because I have no money and there are no schools here," laments Maye, who said if he had the opportunity he would like to be a doctor and help treat the sick and the injured people of Mogadishu. Both local and international humanitarian agencies in the country have been trying to help alleviate the suffering of the most vulnerable families in Mogadishu and in the internally displaced people camps on its outskirts, but chronic violence in the city, illegal checkpoints on the roads, and piracy on the high seas off Somalia combine to frustrate them. For the most part, children like Maye face the struggle to survive on their own. The full costs of this on his generation will only be seen in the decades to come.
Further information
pdf: http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=45482