I can't go back to normal life
Sifa had eight brothers and sisters. It would be said, a typical African family. They were very poor, but they were not too different from most of their neighbors. And then one day Sifa's mom called a family reunion in their small, mud and twig-patterned cottage. She told the children that she had decided that some of them had to leave so that the others could survive. There was only food for four. The children were speechless. Sifa hoped to stay. Still, she was my mother's sweetheart, after all, she was only ten years old.
She spent that night on the road for the first time. She wandered the streets of Goma, a city in war-torn eastern Congo, hungry and terrified. She only thought about how to survive that first night without anything happening to her. She failed. She was new on the road. She didn't know the rules. She was spotted immediately. Today she says she does not remember exactly how she was caught. What he will never forget relates to the next few days. A dozen soldiers who picked her up from the road took her to a remote house by Lake Kivu. Everyone raped her. Two years have passed since then. Sifa still weighs 30 pounds.
The other children mocked her and said she was so skinny because she got AIDS. A few weeks ago, Sifa was rescued from the street and brought to a shelter in Goma. When asked about her parents, she insisted for a long time on the story that she was not abandoned. She also said that she did not steal. When she realized the futility of her claims, after a few days she admitted that she was a maibobo - a child from the street.
There are several thousand maibobs in Goma alone. Most of them are boys between 5 and 15 years old. They are in a better position because there is a risk to their lives that they will be beaten, robbed or possibly taken to a forest where they will join one of the local rebel groups.
It's much harder for girls. Those on the street must find a “husband”, also a maibob, to protect them. Of course, this does not mean real protection because each of them has to pay for that service. The easiest and most widespread way is to engage in prostitution. Sifa's new friends from the shelter Kahindo (16) and Mapendo (15) have been in the same situation for years.
- We have been in this business for four years. Depending on the day, but some average was a dozen clients per night. The soldiers came the most. These of ours from Congo would never pay, but that is why foreigners (op.a. there are currently UN soldiers from India and Uruguay in Goma) would always give more - the girls talked about their ruined lives.
They all say they miss mom. Will the women who so rudely rejected them perhaps re-enter their lives? Hardly, at least that's what Slovenian shelter employee Alenka Zelenc says. The 28-year-old, whom the whole of Goma already calls her mother Alenka, has been working with little street people for a long time and says that such denouements are extremely rare.
- Among maibobs, there are the most children who don't even have anyone. Some are lost in the war so they can’t find their own, and there are those whose families, fleeing the volcano that erupted in 2002, have abandoned their children forever. Of course, some of them left home voluntarily. But in the end, it turns out that for someone who was once a maibobo, there is no going back to normal life - says mother Alenka. She decided to prove it to us.
The night action of "hunting" for children from the street in Goma was a great opportunity for that. We tried to persuade them as much as possible to at least sleep in the shelter. No one refused. We found them in kiosks, in destroyed houses and towers. Some also slept in the middle of the road. In a city of 700,000 residents, where there is no public lighting, piles of garbage served these children as beds and pillows. Of course, no one paid too much attention to the rats.
Some of the maibobs were cooked over an open fire. Apart from water, only a few grains of rice could be found in the pots. Most did not talk. They have some language of their own anyway, incomprehensible to anyone who doesn’t live on those streets. They didn't even run. They just looked at us curiously. In a completely surreal way, they seemed happy. Sifa told us the secret when we returned to the shelter.
- They're happy because they survived another day. Do you know how hard it is on the street? I tell you, tomorrow morning most will cry, from hunger and from despair. By noon he will try to find his parents or some relatives. When they fail, they will start stealing in the afternoon to have something to eat by evening. And then he will laugh again. Of course, those who welcome the evening - concluded Sifa, a girl, prostitute and desperate. Maibobo.