No holiday season for Africa's homeless kids

it may be worse in africa but it's not just there that it's a problem... it's a worldwide phenomenon - latin america, particularly brazil and colombia, the balkans, the "'stans" (uzbekistan, turkmenistan, etc.) s.e. asia... but worst of all is the glue... after not very many of years of use, glue-sniffing turns the brain to mush and life expectancy drops dramatically...

The morning call to prayer echoed through the city as Ahmed Abdulraham, 14, a small boy with cloudy, yellowing eyes, rose from his version of a mattress: a pile of trash spread across a gutter.

He rubbed some murky brown water over his face. He prostrated himself and prayed, he said, for a day when he would be safe and earn a lot of money. Then he took turns with his five friends sniffing glue.



After they got high, the boys took off across a rocky escarpment on the recent morning, over some aging train tracks and into the choking traffic of downtown Khartoum. They were ready to work.

Ahmed, known in local slang as a "mouse," is one of an estimated 35,000 minors who live and work on the streets of this dusty capital city. Some, like him, have been here less than a year, since fleeing the Darfur conflict in the west. But most are runaways from rural poverty, forced to support their families or orphaned by AIDS.

They are part of an unprecedented and growing phenomenon of homeless youths in Africa's exploding urban centers, according to studies by UNICEF and Save the Children. There is no reliable estimate of their total number, but studies indicate it could be as high as 1 million.

children are our future and they're being thrown out with the trash...

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