Helping street children to be Street Smart

To say this past year has been challenging for our Street Smart operation would be a huge understatement.  First of all, we had a full lockdown in March 2020 which went on for the remainder of the year.  This closed schools and centres such as ours and also put our mobile school on hold.  We faced many restrictions including a curfew which made it very difficult to do our street outreach work in the early mornings and evenings.  However, we did manage to continue a limited outreach and reintegrated many children home from the streets during 2020, providing as much assistance as we could in suffering households to ensure the children could safely remain home.  

In January, schools reopened but our centre faced fresh challenges from a major development programme in town which included demolishing a whole line of businesses (including our centre) to make way for a major new road and extension of the railway line.  So, imagine how down we were - finally allowed to reopen after 9 months, only to find ourselves 2 weeks later facing bulldozers.

As we scrambled to look at alternatives, we were tipped off that a further lockdown was in the works and we are currently now back in lockdown as Covid 19 numbers rise in Kenya.  

So, never an organisation to give up, we continue to look for funds and implement street outreach without using a drop in centre and working around curfew and regulations.  We are still successfully reintegrating children and doing all we can to assist with home-based care.  The good thing about the current lockdown is that businesses were not closed this time and so most families can still earn a living.  So our present outlook is more positive than all the months of 2020 when many businesses were forced to close.

We remain optimistic that, as better Covid 19 treatments are found and as more people can access the vaccines, the numbers will reduce and we will be able to find funding to open a new drop in centre.  In the meantime, we are reaching as many as we can.

Thanks for all your support at this difficult time.