Emergency Assistance for Street Children

ChildRescue has begun working with a mobile unit which can be dispatched to assist street children or children in at-risk situations. Ministry representatives work alongside government social services workers to help the child in need. If the child needs medical care, they are taken to the Emergency Medical Center for treatment and then they are taken to ChildRescue's Rehabilitation Center where they can live until their family situation is evaluated.

Last week I spent a day learning how this ministry works and seeing it in action. I arrived early in the morning at a government social services office where a representative of ChildRescue, three social workers, a "criminal police" officer and I gathered to meet the van and begin our drive around the city.

We spent the morning and early afternoon traveling to internet clubs and looking for children who should have been in school. This is the social workers and police's work and when they find children in the clubs, (there were numerous children in every club we visited) they take down their identification information so that the parents and schools can be contacted. Some children were very young and had either been left there for the day by parents or had traveled by themselves across the city without their families knowledge. In these cases, the children's parents or guardians were contacted and they had to come pick them up.

We walked into one large internet club and there were about fifty children sitting in a room full of computers! Everyone blocked the doors and a very large "bust" began. I then ended up helping the group by blocking one of the exit doors that the owner of the club had unlocked to let children out!

The highlight of my day was that in one cafe we found a boy about twelve years old who said that he worked there, but he obviously did not have anywhere to go and was possibly living on the street. We took him to a Medical Center to have a doctor look at him and then he was taken to ChildRescue's Rehabilitation Center. He was obviously pretty upset. His father had left the family long ago and his mother had died. It was unclear who were his legal guardians.

This was a highlight for me because without this ministry, this child most likely would have been left to live on the streets or taken to a "lock down" facility where he would live for three months before he would be placed in an institutional style orphanage. I knew that he would receive the care and protection that he needs at ChildRescue and also experience love which will help change his life.