The urban areas in Nepal experience a lot of street children. These are children who have nowhere to call home or go. They deem the street their home. Across the streets of Nepal, there are more than 5000 children. It is a huge number and increasing daily. How these street children survive in the street?
These are children without any skills, no families, while others yes they have families, but their parents are unable to provide for them they have to get to the streets. Due to the circumstances, these children are facing, they end up taking odd jobs, engaging in crime actives and others getting to be salve workers. Here are some of the major activities Street children in Nepal engage in to survive.
Begging on the street
In almost every corner of an urban city in Nepal, you will encounter street children begging for money or food if they see you eating. Begging is one of the many ways of children in the street of Nepal survive, especially the young ones.
In most instances, they are misunderstood by society, and when they beg for some people to chase them away. As a result, it will prompt the child to steal from you or pickpocket you. It is stigmatization by most people in society, which is negative. These children have no job, so they have to beg you to survive in the streets.
Trash picking
To survive in the streets of Nepal, street children do all kinds of work available. Like most of them start picking trashes for people, and they pay them. These children walk around the city by picking trashes from shops or homes and carry them to the dumping sites. It is a risky job because it exposes these children to bacteria, which can result in diseases. Despite it being a risk job, these street children still do this kind of work to survive in the streets.
Working in bars or restaurants
Some lucky street children are offered a job to work in as bar attendants or as a waiter at restaurants. But the lucky are few according to the percentage of children living in the streets. The job they get they are sometimes exploited by their employers and paid under wage.
Engaging in crime activities
Life in the streets of Nepal is hard for children who live there, giving no other option but to engage in criminal activities. Some of these activities include drug abuse, pickpocketing, and prostitution, among other activities. Out of these activities, they can survive in the streets.
Where street children in Nepal Live
During the day, the streets of Nepal are always surrounded by thousands of street children. Where do all these children go when darkness falls? Here is what you need first to know about these street children.
There are various groups of street children living on the streets. The first group is street children who have lived and been surviving on the streets for years, and they have grown up surviving on the streets. The other group is street children who have recently started living and surviving on the street. These two groups of children, they don’t have a home, so they do live, sleep, and survive on the streets.
Also, there are those street children who come to the streets in the morning and return to their families at night. These kinds of children get into the streets because their families don’t have something to feed them. Their family is poor; parents are unemployed, other family exploits their children by forcing them to go to the streets to beg.