Face of Hope

1992 and I am in Nairobi Kenya trying to make sense of what I see, the staggering cruelty of poverty played out on the streets, whole families living in the open, babies raising babies, children picking through garbage looking for food, sniffing glue to dull their hunger, young girls selling themselves and sleeping wherever the night takes them.

It is a peak moment for poverty in Kenya. Nairobi, then a city of three million, has a quarter of a million children living on the streets, all in a constant churn of hunger and homelessness. 70% of rural Kenyans live in poverty, and many children decide to risk all and leave to take their chances for a better life in the city. Here, where there are no jobs and the government wants them out of sight and mind, the risks multiply. Considered bad for tourism. they are hunted and rounded up by the police; they are treated like vermin.

© U. R. Romano courtesy of the Thomas J. Dodd Center/University of Connecticut

With no identification, school records or permanent addresses, these children can disappear into a Kenyan jail, never to be heard from again. They can be exploited and sold for sex, trafficked within the country.

© U.R. Romano courtesy of the Thomas J. Dodd Center/University of Connecticut

In 1996, UNICEF puts the number at 100 million worldwide...two and a half times the population of Kenya. Once they are used up, these children will be discarded like trash along the roadside. It is a reasonable estimate of a population that occupies a parallel universe, hiding in plain sight, living on the edges, up all night, traveling in packs for safety. For the first time in decades, young girls are appearing on the streets in ever increasing numbers.

© U.R. Romano courtesy of the Thomas J. Dodd Center/ University of Connecticut

A quarter of street children retain some link to their family. Perhaps they are hustling by day to bring food home to orphaned brothers and sisters, or an aging grandparent who is trying to raise them. HIV has produced a generation of orphaned children- estimated at a million in Kenya, ten million worldwide.

It is after I have filmed girls selling themselves in clubs, older street boys running packs of children in begging and stealing, it is after I have visited a single city shelter so poor not even a cup of porridge or glass of water is offered to a baby, once I stand silent in a graveyard filled with small crosses for children who had no access to the medicines that prolong life everywhere else, that I feel myself begin to crack.

© U.R. Romano courtesy of the Thomas J. Dodd Center/University of Connecticut

The cruelty of the situation just overwhelms you.

For me, my reaction is anger. I focus that anger through a viewfinder, I keep filming, keep talking and listening to the street children, I let them speak into the camera. After years of forced silence, they know precisely what they want to tell the world.

© U.R. Romano courtesy of the Thomas J. Dodd Center/University of Connecticut

They seek simple things we all wish for our own children, a chance to go to school, a chance to be somebody, a pilot, a teacher, a doctor, a lawyer. They want a safe place to call home, enough food, clean water and a chance to help their families and communities., someone to listen, someone, anyone who will show up and help them.

At my lowest personal moment, something I tried vainly to mask from my crew and my wife, I dutifully went to an unassuming concrete building at the edge of a sprawling poverty-stricken neighborhood to begin another day of filming. The building was the headquarters of The Undugu Society of Kenya. This was to be a day I would remember for the rest of my life.

There, in August 2002, I met Aloys Opio Otieno, Aloys to his friends. A quiet leader, who passed away unexpectedly on April 6th, Aloys led Undugu for seventeen years. His legacy will be the tens of thousands of children his compassion and work rescued, educated, offered dignity and understanding to. The legions of activists and international colleagues he inspired, the impact he had on Kenyan and International law, I will leave all this to others to detail. Instead, I offer more images... from the days that followed.

© U.R. Romano courtesy of the Thomas J. Dodd Center/University of Connecticut

© U.R. Romano courtesy of the Thomas J. Dodd Center/University of Connecticut

Here are street boys being sheltered and sharing lessons, chores and meals.

© U.R. Romano courtesy of the Thomas J. Dodd Center/University of Connecticut

Young girls enjoying books and reading together at informal schools where they can catch up with the basics they have missed.

© U.R. Romano courtesy of the Thomas J. Dodd Center/University of Connecticut

© U.R. Romano courtesy of the Thomas J. Dodd Center/University of Connecticut

Here is a nurse, gently examining a child for disease or stunting. Medicines and treatment is individualized.

Here we see thousands of children being fed daily by volunteers.

A rural shelter for girls where they can study and escape human trafficking and in time, rejoin their families.

© U.R. Romano courtesy of the Thomas J. Dodd Center/University of Connecticut

Among the many things he said to me, this holds a special place:

" We must treat children as our own children, children should be treated equally with dignity and decency. What is good for your child, is good for street children too".

A deeply religious man, a Christian man in the truest sense of the world, Aloys Otieno valued all human life equally and considered children our special trust. If you examine the faces in all of these photos, you will see their earnest work. laughter and hope which he committed his life to.

What better legacy can there be than this.