What does it mean to be a street kid?

First of all, forget Charles Dickens. We're not talking about Oliver Twist here.

Imagine you are eight years old. Maybe your parents beat you, and you ran away. Maybe they didn't have the money to support you, or maybe it just seemed that way, so you decided to leave home so there would be more food for your little sister. If you live in Colombia, Peru, or southern Mexico, maybe the army or the guerrillas killed your parents, and you could never find the aunt they had always told you lived in the city. In the end, you are eight years old. The reason doesn't matter. What matters is that you are alone.

Your first day on the street, a gang of street kids found you. They taught you how to survive: how to coax a tear from your eye when you ask at a restaurant for leftovers. How to beg for change. How to find food in a trash can. Where to go to the bathroom. Your new friends also keep you warm at night. When the police attack, or when the vigilantes come with submachine guns, they tell you where to hide. The gang keeps you alive.

Unfortunately, your new friends are also killing you. The older ones probably demand sexual favors, whether you are a boy or a girl; yes, you're only eight, but that just means you don't have HIV or herpes. Others give you drugs -- in Colombia, it's probably bazuko, a cocaine derivative that makes crack look healthy. In Mexico, they'll give you activo, a PVC pipe cleaner that you put on a kleenex and sniff. It gives you a hell of a headache and literally eats away your brain, but it also allows you to forget.

The days pass, each pretty similar to the last. Your gang has found a decent storm sewer to sleep in -- it keeps the rain off, and people can't see you all the time, but the stench is horrible. All the kids use the corner for a bathroom, and the place is littered with rotting food, but what else can anyone do? You squat in the same corner as everyone else. One of the older kids taught you how to clean windshields, so you stand at the traffic light each day, breathing the diesel fumes, trying to coax small change from cabbies.

After a robbery at the local hardware store one day, the cops raid the sewer. Maybe one of the kids robbed the place, maybe not -- no one can remember -- but the police don't care. They swing their clubs at everyone and knock you unconscious, then as you wake you see a couple of them raping an older girl back where everyone usually sleeps. Before they pull up their pants and leave, they hit her a couple more times and remind her what will happen if she tells anyone.

Life returns to normal after a couple of days; one of the kids was able to steal some aspirin, so your head doesn't hurt as much as it did, but it smells like one of the cuts or bruises the cops gave a friend has gone to gangrene. The girl is curled up in the corner all day, crying, and no one knows what to do. You don't know where to go for medical or psychiatric help, and any hospital would turn you away at the door anyway. You're filthy, bruised, young, and after sniffing all that glue, you can't really form words the way you used to.

One night, as a friend is crawling out of the tunnel to look for food, you hear a couple of shots, then loud laughter. Bullets spray down the tunnel past her body, then all is quiet. Just rich kids out for sport. Everyone talks about finding someplace else, but where would you go?

The story sounds exaggerated, but it's not. This is generic life for a street kid in a major Latin American city. Details just make it worse: in Guatemala City, you might live in the dump, fighting the vultures and goats to pick your food out of the trash. In Bogotá, you might live in the sewers, surrounded by excrement. In Quito or Ayacucho or La Paz, it would freeze at night, and in Santiago, snow comes some winters.

Police don't just beat street kids up in Guatemala: they shoot them. In Brazil in the 1980s, vigilantes killed dozens of street kids every weekend. Though no one has confirmed it, rumors circulate throughout Latin America of people who give poisoned meals to homeless kids.

Disease runs rampant. Most children are sick all the time with parasites, respiratory diseases, food poisoning, sexually transmitted diseases. AIDS approaches epidemic proportions in Honduras, and it's already there in Haiti.

Rape by police officers and random men is hardly the only problem for girls -- and boys -- on the street. Central America has become a new center for international sex tourism, and many are forced into prostitution. Those who aren't forced will often gladly exchange sex for a roof, a bed, a shower, and breakfast. Sex among street kids is promiscuous and unprotected; it may be the only glimmer of pleasure in a miserable life.

Violence is a part of every day. In Mexico, when you're older, someone will probably ask you to join a gang to smuggle drugs. In Buenos Aires, the street toughs have a longer, more romantic history, but they do the same work, smuggling drugs, running skin rings, threatening local businesses. In Medellín in the 1980s, there were 5000 murders a year, almost all the victims and perpetrators children or teenagers. In Central America today, deported Crips and Bloods will initiate you into their gangs whether you want to or not.

In spite of the worst circumstances anyone can imagine, these children survive. Some even manage to get themselves off the street -- sometimes through crime, sometimes through prostitution, sometimes because a shelter or a church finds them a place to sleep. Others make good money as fakirs, laying on beds of nails in Mexico City or eating fire in Rio. It takes wits to survive on the street, and these children do survive.

And some people help them use their strengths to become something else. Hundreds of organizations throughout Latin America give kids shelter or food, others teach about health and sex and drugs, others teach families how to make sure their kids have a place to live, and in Brazil, street kids organized themselves into a political movement to demand human rights, fair treatment, and social services.

Though we know about the tragedies of life on the street, and we want you to understand what it would be like to be eight years old and homeless, Shine-a-light focuses on the solutions. We support the agencies that help street kids, we enable the best to share the secrets to their success. Whatever the emotions the life of a homeless child might inspire, Shine-a-light is not here for pity. We're here to make a solution.

• In collaboration with researchers, Shine a Light publishes "Essays to Understand the Street", a monograph series on the issues that are most important to children living on the street and the organizations that serve them. These essays attempt to bridge the gap between academic researchers and grass-roots social service agencies.
• In order to understand the programs that offer social services for homeless children, we suggest that you read the essay understanding social services for street kids in Latin America.
• To learn more about the experiences of street kids in the United States and Latin America, click here to read Shine a light director Kurt Shaw's collection of radio commentaries on youth homelessness.