NOWHERE BUT HERE
For years, through my foundation, I have been taking care of these children, but this is the first time I’ve found the courage to truly live with them. I spent two weeks by their side, sharing days and nights, immersing myself in the fabric of their daily lives and closely following their paths.
They live entirely on their own. They have no home, no family, no place to return to. Every day is a battle, fought without the certainty of waking up the following morning. Violence and fear are constant: the brutality of the police, who beat or arrest them without hesitation; the threat of rival gangs armed with machetes fighting over territory; and the relentless hunger that defines their existence.
In an attempt to escape these conditions, many turn to drugs: heroin, crack, or when there is no money, industrial thinner. The effects are immediate, knocking them unconscious within seconds. As they often say, “the good thing about thinner is that it makes the hunger disappear.” The reason is that it compresses the stomach so much that there is no space left for food.
Most of these children arrive in Nairobi driven by hope, the possibility of going to school, finding a job, earning money, and returning home with pride. Yet these aspirations quickly prove to be unreachable illusions. For many, the only remaining option is to join one of the countless street gangs and attempt to survive within the group.
Going back home is rarely possible. Some were abandoned by families unable to care for them; others fled domestic violence, mistreatment, or abuse. For them, the streets of Nairobi become the only refuge. A refuge built on danger, addiction, and a constant struggle against death itself.
And while thousands of children wander the streets, the government remains largely indifferent. Policies and resources that could change their fate are absent; the problem is ignored, silenced, erased from the official narrative of a “modern” Kenya that wants to show only progress and development to the outside world. Street children are treated as invisible, or worse, as criminals to be punished rather than lives to be protected. Instead of shelters, there are crackdowns. Instead of social workers, there are police raids. Instead of rehabilitation, there is neglect.
The silence of the institutions is perhaps the deepest wound. These children are not only abandoned by their families, they are abandoned by their country. They grow up in a limbo where survival is the only law, condemned to a life that, for most, will never go beyond the streets where I found them.
