Petro Redson is
forced to live on the streets of Blantyre in Malawi, because his mother can no longer afford to feed him. Drought, floods and other climate induced weather conditions has ruined the harvest in the
countryside.
Photo: Petrine Elgaard
Petro Redson drags the cardboard box further up over his head and wriggles himself to a better position on the bench. His stomache is rumbeling
underneath the greasy jersey, but that's just too bad, since there weren't enough people who gave Petro kwacha notes at the market today. Because of that, Petro hasn't had anything to eat. He pulls
his legs further up, to make sure his feet aren't showing by the endge of the cardboard box, and is laying as still as he can. Maybe the older street urchins will not wake him up tonight, it they
don't discover him. They always look for Petro to steal the few kwacha notes he has from begging in the streets. When they find him, they beat him up.
But it is not the thrashing that makes
Petro scared. What scares him are the men, who turn up in the dark and put their hands between Petro's legs. Who force him on his knees in the dust and do unmentionable things that hurt and make Petro
bleed.
The very thought of them makes Petro so horror-struck, that he doesn't dare looking strangers straight in the eye any longer. Petro is feeling at his best, when he is asleep. His
favorite dream is about his mother. Petro dreams that they live togeather in a house. He still remembers his mother, even though she died, when he was a small child.
The dreams that disappeared
Four months earlier, before Petro went by train to Malawi's biggest city, Blantyre, he was a poor 8-year-old in a small village. Back then, he
wasn't afraid of anything. He was living with his father, sister and older brother. But suddenly his sister died, his brother ran away and Petro's father moved to a tea plantation to work, since there
were no more crops to harvest at his small piece of land.
Petro was left behind in the village with a sick grandmother, and then he chose to jump on the train.
Now Petro is all alone. He
spends his days begging on the market. On a good day he can earn just about 20 eurocent. That makes him capable of buing a lump of nsima, the maize porridge that all Malawians eat. Petro has no
friends and does rarely speak to anybody. He doesn't go to school and doesn't have any plans for the future. "Only children who go to school are allowed to dream", Petro mumbles. Sex in exchange for maize porridge
Petro is far from the only child, who is struggeling his way throgh life in the big city. Every year from August to April, Malawi is struck
by a hunger period. During those months it is obvious to the organisations, that work with street children and orphans, that more children in rags, like Petro, turn up in the bigger cities.
They
have been sent away from home by their desperately poor parents, who have ran out of food.
After the parents have harvested in April, the families have enough food for some months, and the
children can return, if the family fields and crops havn't been ruined by drought or floods. But when the few sacks of maize flour, that comes out of the fields, are empty, the children are
again sent away from home to become prostitutes, beggars or to work. Petro and the other street children are a part of the hunger problem, that the global warming and climate changes have created.
Without knowing it himself, Petro has become a kind of climate refugee. The reason is, that Malawi is severely affected by droughts and floods that didn't influence to country to the same extend only
seven years ago. Those changes are the ones, that ruin the harvest and force parents to send away their children. Dark numbers
Research reveals, that in the 1970es there
were approxmately one flood and one season with droughts in Malawi every year. Today those numbers have changed dramatically. Now Malawi faces at least two or three periods with droughts and ten
floods each year, and they have great consequences for the farmers and their families.
Before the rainy season was precise. It lasted from November until February, and from it the farmers could
calculate, when it was time to plant and harvest. But now the rain pattern have changed. The rain has become unpredictable, it starts later and ends earlier. If there is too little rain, the crops dry
out and the havest is poor. During droughts whole fields and the crops in it can end up being ruined. If the development continues like now, by 2020 the Malawian farmers will have a future where they
can only harvest 50 percent of what they harvest today.
"The children are victims of a development they have no part in", says David Chapitz, project officer at the NGO Chisomo, which takes
care of the street children. "And it is difficult to see, how it is going to improve". Petro doesn't have a family to return to, when the harvest is gathered in April. Like many other orphan
children, he'll have to do the best he can underneath the cardborad boxes at Blantyre market.
By Petrine Elgaard, Journalist
[ Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters. ]
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