Tajik Street Children Face Daily Struggle
One in five youngsters in Tajikistan have to work, often in difficult conditions, and they are missing out on education as a result.
Tajik Street Children Face Daily Struggle
One in five youngsters in Tajikistan have to work, often in difficult conditions, and they are missing out on education as a result.
The freezing cold of a February morning rouses 14-year-old Hamza from his fitful sleep on the concrete floor. There is no electricity or plumbing in the building, so he lights a small fire in the corner of the room and heats some water in a can.
It’s still very early, but the boy knows that he has to leave the relative comfort of his filthy unheated room and head down the icy streets to Dushanbe’s Sakhovat market if he is to have any hope of earning enough money to eat today.
Hamza sleeps in his ragged and dirt-encrusted clothes in a bid to keep the cold at bay. His arms are thin and covered with new sores and old scars. He has never been to school and cannot remember a day without work or responsibility.
But he is the sole breadwinner in his family, and even if he is caught by the authorities and sent to a state boarding school, he will have no choice but to run away and start working again.
Hamza is one of many young children who earn around one or two US dollars a day by carrying heavy loads or selling plastic bags at the market. Even in poverty-stricken Tajikistan, that’s not a lot of money. A bowl of thin soup at the market canteen costs more than half that amount, so Hamza either goes hungry or eats discarded piecrusts and pieces of offal bought for a few cents from market traders.
It’s a far cry from his early childhood. While Hamza barely remembers the father who has been missing, presumed dead, since he was a toddler, he can remember happiness and laughter with his mother and two sisters in their home in the village of Tubek, not far outside the capital.
But when Tajikistan’s civil war began in 1992, one year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, his father left home and was never seen again. As the fighting continued for five long years, the family fell deep into poverty and misery.
Still in the village, Hamza’s mother looks far older than her 34 years. After years of hard work picking cotton, she became ill with depression and is now housebound. She told IWPR that the final blow was the loss of her eldest daughter, who left home a year ago in the company of a distant relative who claimed that he had found work for her in a new restaurant.
There has been no news of the pair since, and Hamza’s mother is now convinced that her daughter has been trafficked and forced into prostitution. Her grief and guilt have led her to place her remaining daughter under “house arrest” – she is not allowed to leave to get an education or to work.
As a result, Hamza has no other option other to work long hours at the market, so that whenever he returns to the village he brings enough money to support the family.
In addition to long hours and paltry reward, Hamza has to watch out for a number of hazards. He is often beaten by traders and customers alike. And the police occasionally carry out swoops and round up all the underage workers, who are then deposited in state boarding schools and to be educated whether they like it or not.
But he told IWPR that it is all worth it when he sees the happiness on the faces of his mother and sister when he brings money home – and shrugs when asked if he is bothered by the prospect of supporting his family indefinitely.
Tajikistan is home to thousands of children like Hamza. It is estimated that 44 per cent of the republic’s seven million strong population are aged under 15, and more than 100,000 of them were orphaned during the civil war on 1992-97.
These children are either poorly educated or have not attended school at all, and the majority live in crowded and substandard conditions.
The United Nations Children’ Fund, UNICEF, estimates that one fifth of all children aged from five to 14 in Tajikistan are working instead of studying. The majority wash cars or sell plastic bags, while others work as porters and traders.
Manzura Salomova, a representative from the Dushanbe mayor’s office, told IWPR that a single raid in a district of Dushanbe in January had revealed more than 140 homeless children.
A further series of swoops on February 11-12 at a market in the southern town of Kurgan-Tyube led to the detention of dozens of youngsters working illegally.
The local media reported that those caught had been working in the market by day and then sleeping in the tandur – traditional clay ovens used to bake bread – at night, as the bricks retained some of their warmth overnight.
When such children are detained they are generally held for a couple of hours until a parent can be traced, at which point they are released with a warning and sent home. If found to be orphans, they are packed off to live in a state boarding school.
These special schools take children aged between ten and 14 who have committed minor offences and are referred by police or the courts. However, while discipline is strict, the facilities are educational, not penal. While UNICEF believes that more than 11,000 children were housed at such boarding schools last year, the true figure is unknown as the authorities do not collect statistics.
Dushanbe’s Boarding School ?1 is currently home to more than 700 children, although the Soviet-era building was designed to hold only half that number. One teacher, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IWPR that while the majority were from one-parent families and around one in five were orphans, the school was home to many whose parents turned them over to the state as they could no longer afford to feed them.
The children are far from enthusiastic about the schools. As well as being overcrowded, lack of funding means the conditions are spartan and the food unappetising at best. Meanwhile, a life on the street has left youngsters ill-prepared for the schoolroom, and many choose to run away rather than learn.
A number of non-governmental organisations have moved in to fill the gaps left by the state, including the Dushanbe-based group Children, Refugees and Vulnerable Citizens, which has been providing shelter and food in the city for nine years.
More than a hundred children a day receive a free meal, health advice and basic medical treatment at the charity’s headquarters. As well as being able to relax in warm, clean rooms, watch television and socialise with other children in a similar situation, the youngsters also learn to read and write, and can practise sewing, carpentry and music.
Music teacher Lola Sharipova told IWPR that the majority of children who use the facility have little or no idea of personal hygiene when they first arrive. “They are surprised that we make them wash their hands with soap and comb their hair,” she said.
While the plight of the homeless children scratching a living on Dushanbe’s streets touches many, their numbers are increasing every year. And while most have jobs of sorts, a sizeable number survive by stealing.
According to the General Prosecutor’s office, the number of offences committed by children rose by 11 per cent from 545 in 2003 to 609 in 2004 – mostly cases of theft.
Sanovbar Davlatov of the Tajik Prosecutor General’s office told IWPR that civil war and poverty were not solely to blame for the present situation.
“These youngsters are the product of a demoralised society, where parents do not look after their children, and even force them to work for them, allow them to become involved in crime and prostitution, and sell them to foreigners,” he said.
Some analysts say that Tajikistan’s social problems are so severe that few parents can cope with the stress. The war caused loss of life, traumatised the survivors, and did great damage to the republic’s infrastructure, which was already weakened by the collapse of the Soviet Union.
“In this lengthy transitional period, when even men - who are usually better educated - cannot find anything to do in Tajikistan and have to go to Russia to work, women are simply unable to provide decent living conditions and education for their children,” said a Dushanbe analyst, who asked not to be named.
Dushanbe resident Zuhro told IWPR that she would love her children to be educated at the boarding schools – even if she had to abandon them there.
“My husband left for Russia five years ago, and since then there hasn’t been any news of him,” she said. “As I don’t work, I have no means of feeding my family, so my children beg on the street all day. It would be better for them to live at the boarding school, out of harm’s way – and that way they might even learn something.”
But Hamza speaks for many when he rejects this option. “I’m not scared of work and I want to eat, but I won’t go to school,” he told IWPR with a firm shake of his dark head.
“It would be a waste of time going there. Instead, I’ll work at the market for another two years, and when I get a passport I’ll go to Russia to find a job. They say the pay is much better over there.”
Valentina Kasymbekova is an IWPR contributor in Dushanbe.
