Helping Abandoned Children – A Ray Of Hope

When children are abandoned by their families, they end up on the streets, exposed to a life full of struggle and a daily fight for survival.

There are many reasons that cause a child to live on the streets. Many children are orphaned, abandoned or thrown out of their homes by parent who can no longer afford to keep them.

In developing countries where there is still a preference for male babies, many female babies are abandoned at birth by under privileged parents. These children either end up in orphanages or grow up on the streets without any financial and emotional support.
Estimates show that approximately 400 million children live on the streets of cities around the world and do not receive basic health care and education. These children either end up as beggars or take up small jobs with local establishments where they face exploitation, are beaten up, made to work long hours and even made to stay hungry if they fail to ‘perform’.

Rehabilitating Abandoned and Homeless Children

If anything is to be made of them, street children need to be taken off the streets first. Their basic needs must be fulfilled before we can put them on the path that leads to a respectful life.

These children face so much adversity that they lose faith in people and find it hard to trust adults. Their life on the streets robs them of their innocence many times turning them towards crime, prostitution and drug abuse.

Rehabilitating these children is no small task but it gets easier when people support and understand the gravity of such issues.

Providing Shelter

Efforts are on around the world to take homeless children off the streets and provide them a place to stay, a place where they feel safe. According to UNICEF, around 100 million children live on the streets across the world and are in immediate need of a home where they are loved and cared for.

Foster homes, adoption and government run children’s’ homes are some of the solutions that can help these children and give them a new lease of life.

Providing Education

Education can transform lives and providing free education to homeless children is the key to empowering them. It is not an easy task however; these children become so used to the life on the streets that many become averse to any kind of discipline and improvement. These kids need to be convinced, they need to be taken off drug and substance abuse and they need to be shown that there are people who care about them.
And it’s not only basic education that we intend to provide these kids. Counseling, career guidance and job placement are some of the very important tools to empower these children and have them see life in a different way.

Providing Health Care

Street kids do not receive even the basic health care. They are mal-nutritioned and have not received even the most essential and mandatory vaccinations. Exposed to the worst form of exploitation, abandoned children contract serious illnesses such as AIDS, Tuberculosis, STDs and Hepatitis.

Without adequate health care, many children lose their lives and become a statistic in the national mortality figures.

In an effort to strengthen them emotionally and physically, we provide these children proper medical care and access to medical facilities funded by good Samaritans from around the world.

Providing Love and Affection

More than anything, street kids need unconditional love to heal their broken spirits and to reinstate their faith in the goodness of life. Our volunteers work with these children with 100% commitment, making sure they receive the love and attention that they need to rise and shine as happy, self-sufficient adults.

Street children are not someone else’s problem. The disparities between the privileged and the poor are appalling to say the least and while the rich become richer, the underprivileged strive to earn two square meals a day. And although we can’t take all these problems away at once, we can do our bit, we can try to give these children a better future so that they will not grow up to be petty criminals or beggars.
We need to acknowledge and accept homeless children as our own and ensure that they get what is their right.

We need to educate and empower these children with life skills so that no one can take advantage of them or exploit them.

And with your help and support, we can do all of this and much more!!