Child Travelers
When I was in Barranquilla, on the Colombia coast, I heard unusual accents from two 8 year street boys. When I asked them where they were from, they told me Bogotá -- 24 hours away by bus in a country where the civil war makes travel by land a fatal proposition.
“How’d you get here?” I asked.
“Oh, we hitched.”
“How long did it take you?”
“I dunno, seven, ten days. A while.”
“And why go to all that effort?”
“’Cause we wanted to see the ocean.”
In the US, street kids travel -- but they are 16 or 17 years old. To see a nine year old who has been traveling for the last three years is both thrilling and frightening. They survive amazingly well, and many know the politics and ecology of their country better than anyone else, but they never stay in one place long enough to get good services.
