Harder than I thought

This past Thursday night was my first night of actual interviews with the kids. All the other days I just went to hang out so they got used to me, but it's time to start getting down to business. I found a person to translate for me, making my life much easier! Since my project really isn’t on the street kids, it’s about the girls in prostitution and child trafficking victims; I decided that it would be best to try out my research methods with them first.

So, like the other nights we bought food to bring to the kids first which consisted of bread, ham, and juice. To feed about 15 kids it cost around $6. I also bought some candies to give to the kids after I interviewed them. My questions were fairly basic: name, age, where are you from, where do you live (street, room, house), are you in school, do you work on the streets, how much do you make, and if they know about Genericion and if they want to live there or in a place like that.

The answers were pretty similar. The kids were between 12 and 16, they were from lima, they were living on the street some nights but other nights they lived in a room. There are lots of old buildings in downtown Lima where they let street kids sleep for 1 to 5 soles per night (3 soles=$1). I haven't seen one of these places yet but I want to. Only one kid was currently in school, the others said that they were in school but they aren't anymore and others said they have never been to school. Only one kid said that he doesn't want to be in school but all the others said that they would like to be. One of the older kids told me that he wish he knew how to read. They all worked on the streets either selling candies, cleaning cars, stealing from tourist or begging. If they didn't make any money that day, than they didn't eat. About 70% of the kids said that they know about Genericion and they want to live in a place like that, they want a home but there isn't enough room and they don't have the option.

We got to the kids pretty late around 10 pm, which was a mistake because while I was interviewing one of them, the rest of them were getting high sniffing glue.As the night progressed it was harder and harder to talk to them. The container in the picture costs 2.5 soles and that can keep a group of those kids high for days. They put a little bit into a plastic bag and breath in deep. So the last interviews were really incoherent and they were all getting pretty wild.














Also, one of the kids stole my phone out of my coat pocket, it was a really cheap phone that I bought in Peru. There's a store in downtown Lima that will buy stolen goods, so once that kids sold my phone, he would have enough money to feed him and all of his friends for about three days. So I'm really not that upset about it, can you really blame him? Ruben felt really bad, and yeah I really didn't expect it, but I don't think it would have happened if the kids weren't high.

Well, I got the information that I needed and now I know how to do things smarter next time. I knew this wouldn't be easy, but it's definitely harder than I thought.