Hablar con los niños de la calle

I got a personal tour of the streets from my new friend Ruben. He used to live at Genericion, but now that he is older he’s on his own. He wanted to give me a chance to talk to the kids and see what things are really like. It’s really not that easy to just start talking because 1) I can’t speak Spanish very well and 2) They really don’t care what I have to say. First, we went to visit a group of kids where they were trying to make some money on the streets by playing a drum and dancing, so to get them to warm up to me I just started dancing too. I don’t think that anyone really expected that, they all everyone went from looking rather bored to bursting out into laughter. After dancing for a while, I decided that I wanted to buy them some food, because the only money they had was the money they were making on the streets which was 1.5 soles, or .5 cents for seven kids. So Rueben and I went to buy a bag of bread, slices of ham, and some juice. All of that was only 12 soles, or 4 dollars, to give all of those kids some food. So after dancing and giving them some food they were very interested in talking with me. Mainly they just had a lot of questions about me. I want to learn more about them, but I decided that it would be better to return a different day so they can start to get used to me before I start asking them about their lives. I need to keep building their trust.

After we talked to those kids we were to Iquitos Ave., the main drag of prostitution in Lima. There were about 10 girls that Rueben knew that were working that night, and it was only 9 pm, he said it would be much busier later in the night. (Of those 10 girls 3 were pregnant, only one of the pregnant girls wasn’t working because she was 8 months pregnant, but the other two were.) The girls were a little harder to talk to than the other street kids because they were a little bit older, in their early teens, and weren’t as interested in talking to a stranger. But we did get to talk for a little while and they were receptive when they learned that I was a friend of Lucy’s. I am trying to think of ways to warm up to them, I am debating buying a bunch of nail polish and having a mini manicure session on the streets. Any other suggestions?

Basically after this experience there’s a lot of things I realized. Most of them were things that I pretty much already knew, but it took seeing it and being a part of it to fully sink in. The first thing being that this is an insanely massive far reaching multiple causes issue that I can’t even begin to understand or change on my own. The most obvious cause of child trafficking Peru and worldwide is poverty. These kids do not want to be doing this, I know that. They are there because they can make much more money selling their bodies than doing anything else. Ruben said some of the girls used to sell bracelets with him, but they weren’t making enough money. Especially for the girls that get pregnant, they need to work. Also, these kids aren’t in school. So when they are old enough to have a real job, there’s no way that they can compete. It’s a cycle, one that isn’t going to stop without interference.