by Grace Ndanu
It is not everyone who has the chance of leaving the city to another home. It’s in the few dry and wet and dark spots that a forgotten bunch of people hide from the harsh winds and extreme temperatures, which are slowly dropping. Am going to write about Kenyan street families because they are the ones I know of, and I understand their history pretty well. These groups of homeless people depend on the company of each other for survival and to see another day.
Street people have for a long time fully depended on begging for money, food or doing casual jobs to get money, but with how Coronavirus is affecting the world, specifically the economy sector, all their sources of survival have been deflated, creating a threat of hunger that I believe is more severe and more dangerous that the Coronavirus itself.
I was reading through the news in my phone and I got so emotional when I came across a boy who ran away from home in 2007 due to poverty and domestic violence. The article read: “Even if you have fifty Kenyan shillings to buy food, you end up buying a loaf of bread. One slice for you and the other slices for the others. You don’t know how many days they haven’t eaten and it’s only that one slice of bread they are getting.” He added that, there might be new members in their group who do not know how to work or look for food, meaning that they are learning and also getting to adapt their new environment.
To add to that, I also think the Corona Virus has also contaminated the money or even people who are now taking advantage of the voiceless street people. When a street person decides to work for someone then this person may end up telling him or her that he doesn’t have cash and therefore he has to do the payment through mobile money, and yet the street person doesn’t have a phone, which makes things more and more difficult and complicated.
In an effort to contain the spread of Coronavirus, directives such as closure of schools, closure of hotels, staying at home, a 7pm curfew and shutting down of many non-essential businesses have greatly affected the street people community. The closure of schools brings more people to the streets – especially children – due to poverty, sexual violence and domestic violence in general. This adds pressure to people who are already in the streets. When the hotels were open, they supplied this community with the food that remained, which at least made their stomachs full, but now the Coronavirus crushed the hotels to the ground, leaving them hungry.
For the street people all that they have got is each other and a little slice of bread that barely sustains them each passing day. Even though their unity is their greatest strength, it appears to be their greatest fear and enemy as efforts of social distancing are tricky because they live to share. If they don’t have it then the others won’t have it either. They live by faith and caring for each other.
As the news get hotter and hotter I heard that the government rolled out a Covid-19 emergency response fund to cushion the painful wounds inflicted by the Coronavirus pandemic, for example the street families, the elderly, the refugees and the poor. And yes I was shocked when I discovered that no help trickled down to the street people who I know are the neediest people and makeup more than twenty one thousand of Kenya’s population (according to the last conducted census).
In all these government and non-governmental organizations, those with no homes, no job, no families and some with no hope of tomorrow are clearly forgotten. About this I am talking to the whole world. At least make sure that a street person has something to eat. Share the little that you have, because there are women with small babies and they do not have milk in their breasts. They haven’t eaten and kids haven’t eaten. Just show a little humanity, which is free of tax.
As we fear for the days to come and wonder how long this pandemic will last, many in the street think of the present; of where and when they will get their next meal. If you get a chance to show you generosity never fail to show it; Make someone remember what you have done for him or her because whatever you do to least it will be done to you.
