“The New York Times,” March 24, 2002

Childhoods in Uganda Being Lived in the Street

By MARC LACEY

IAMPALA, Uganda, March 22 — Aposi Lakwemwe considers himself one of the poorest people in one of the poorest countries.

All he owns is hanging on his lanky frame, a torn T-shirt and a too-small pair of jeans. Plus there is his slab of cardboard, which is the only thing that separates his body at night from the cold pavement.

"Nobody's poorer than me," he says with a hazy look in his eyes, the result of hours of sniffing aviation fuel. "How can they be? I don't have anything. I don't have a mother. I don't have a home. I don't have anything."

But Aposi, 16, has plenty of competition when it comes to desperation, especially among the thousands of street children who haunt the business district here, as others do in many African capitals, begging and robbing their way from one day to the next.

Street children are just one visible sign of poverty African-style, and of how efforts to help them are sometimes defeated.

Africa's economies are in a long-term stall. In Uganda, well over half the population lives in poverty, mostly in the countryside, where they survive on less than $1 a day.

Yet this country has made rapid economic progress. The dark days of Idi Amin and other dictators, when inflation soared and wages were worthless, are in Uganda's past. International lending institutions now give willingly to Kampala because of the government's fiscal discipline.

But Aposi and many others do not see their lives improving.

AIDS has robbed many street children of their parents. Police officers have little sympathy for them. The boys, and girls too, consider their only escape a whiff of glue.

"Most of us are thieves but not all of us," said Aposi, denying that he has resorted to stealing. "You have to be careful around us. The problem is that not enough people give to us. What are we supposed to do?"

Charities do offer ways out, but they are tough to adjust to after years of scrounging in garbage cans and outrunning security guards and brawling with other street children.

Sometimes the solutions even have problems of their own.

One of the numerous organizations providing for street children is the Africa Foundation, a group founded by Kefa Sempangi, who is a member of Uganda's Parliament, a Christian leader and a longtime advocate of street youth. Mr. Sempangi has set up numerous group homes to turn street children back into just plain children. At first, he allows the children to continue their glue sniffing and other drug taking. Then, he weans them away from destructive habits. As they begin shedding their pasts, they attend classes and turn their backs on the street.

That is the theory, anyway. For every success story Mr. Sempangi can claim, he acknowledges that there are other cases of heartbreak. And the street children are not the only ones who fail.

Mr. Sempangi lost the bulk of his financing recently after a Dutch foundation called Redt een Kind, or Help a Child, accused him of misappropriating the $8,000 a month the group was sending to support 241 street children.

Mr. Sempangi has been forced to close one of his homes in Mukono, which had cared for 500 children from a variety of backgrounds. Ten of the youths have moved in with the local Anglican archbishop, Mpalanyi Nkoyoyo. Those with families have been sent home. But some of the children Mr. Sempangi had been caring for have found themselves sleeping on cardboard again.

Now, along with his political work and his charitable work, Mr. Sempangi is trying to save his reputation. He appeared recently alongside a large group of street youths who marched through the city carrying banners supporting him and asking other donors to help. The crowd included a glue-sniffing teenage mother who held her infant daughter like a rag doll.

Mr. Sempangi dismisses any talk of shady dealing. He says accounting for all the spending is sometimes as messy as the work itself. Do donors want to know, he asks, that new mattresses had to be discarded because boys had wet them repeatedly? Or that blankets were there one day and gone the next, sometimes sold by the very children he was trying to help?

Mr. Sempangi lashes out at other charities that feed the youth right on the street. That acts as an incentive, he says, for the children to stay put.

The children, their expressions part puppy dog and part pit bull, are but some of the faces of Africa's poor. Most of the continent's destitute live away from big cities, in the remoteness of the bush. Aid groups reach them, too, but it is often Mother Nature who decides whether they eat or go without.

"Poverty is everywhere," said Osborn Muyanja, who is one of Mr. Sempangi's success stories. The young man emerged from one of Africa Foundation's group homes years ago and now counsels others struggling against poverty.

"You wake up in the morning and you help everyone you can help," he said of his daily routine. "The problem does not go away though. Someone needs food. Someone needs clothing. There's so much need in this country and there's only so much time."

Time is all that Aposi has. His mother died when he was young and he lost touch with his father. He remembers hopping on a bus from northern Uganda when he was about 14 and arriving in Kampala alone. He says he wants a better life, with an education and a job and a real bed. But until he figures a real way out, he relies on a drug-induced one.

"When I sniff, I forget about everything," he said. "I have another life. I'm not so poor anymore."

As Aposi spoke, some of his contemporaries were busily begging on the nearby sidewalk.

They put on sad faces and extended their palms at a stream of well-dressed men and women, who happened to be visiting government officials from around Africa who were at a conference on international trade. The boys wanted quicker assistance than the conference could provide. They wanted coins.