Rehabilitating & Reintegration

Rehabilitation

One of the major problems which street children face is drug and solvent abuse and addiction. In order to stave off hunger and to keep out the cold and pain on a daily basis, children begin sniffing glue, paint thinner, and other illegal substances which provide temporary relief but which have devastating long-term effects such as stunted growth and brain damage.

Whilst on the streets, children are subject to abuse and exploitation and violence both from adults and their peers. They lose the valuable life skills they have learnt, and quickly become hardened to street life, looking out for themselves, fighting others for their right to survive and learning to trust nobody.

Through our Day Care and Interim Care Centres, we run detoxification programmes, enabling the children to break drug and substance addictions. We also provide children with life skills, where they are encouraged to learn values such as trust and respect - both for themselves and each other - and where they are taught about issues such as peer pressure, anger management, domestic violence, drug addiction and HIV and AIDS. Children also go through individual and group counselling, helping them to deal with the negative experiences of their past and to come to terms with their present.

Reintegration

Once the children have successfully completed rehabilitation and are ready to go back home and to school or vocational training, we look at how we can help them to do this.

The children that we work with through our Day Care Centre and Interim Care Centre have often been living in the streets and have lost touch with or fallen out with their families. Worse still, some children have been neglected, abused or even abandoned: sent out to the streets to fend for themselves. Some children come from the Thika District itself whereas others have been dumped there or have drifted in from rural areas in the hope of finding work.

We believe that a child's place is at home with his or her family and not in an institution or care home. Therefore, we prioritise family reunification wherever possible, enabling children to return to their families and home communities. This invariably involves our staff in careful mediation work with families, helping to resolve conflicts between street children and their family members, and to reconcile their differences so that they can live together again in peace. Where children have been displaced, this may also involve family tracing work - to help locate the children's home town and parents or surviving family members.

Where it is not possible to reunite a child with his or her own parents, our staff make contact with members of the extended family to discuss the possibility of care. Where these solutions fail, we work with the local District Children's Officer to find suitable permanent homes for the children and to ensure that they are cared for in loving and stable environments.

However, our support does not end there. As well as helping children to return home, we also aim to facilitate children's return to full-time education. On occasions this is a straightforward process, and our staff can simply contact one of our partner schools to arrange enrolment procedures etc. However, often meetings with the children's parents reveal their total inability to meet their children's basic needs to food and clothing, let alone to buy the mandatory school uniforms and books, or to pay expensive school fees. In these cases, we may make small loans for income-generating activities to parents, offering them the chance to become financially self-sufficient and to send their children to school.

In more extreme cases, we will appeal for sponsorship for that child. For more information about how to sponsor a Kenyan child through school, please contact kenya@actionchildren.org.

If children are too old to return to school, we assist them to enter vocational skills training and employment so that they can support both themselves and their families financially. We continue to provide support to them through regular work and home visits, so that they know our doors are always open and we can tackle problems or challenges immediately, minimising any fall back to the street.

We currently support former street youth to train in a number of professions including mechanics, hairdressing, tailoring, farming, welding, carpentry, shoe repair and bicycle repairs. If you are keen on finding out how you could make a difference and help a Kenyan youth to become self-sufficient, please email kenya@actionchildren.org.