A Journey In Search Of Identity

Nairobi is a city with a good number of street children. You find them everywhere. I have them outside my home; I find them surrounding the city. Obviously their lives are - miserable, often short and violent.

Their lives are full of infections, brutality, accidents. I know of a boy in Nairobi who sleeps in a small building that houses an electric transmission station. One day when the rain water enters that little building he will be electrocuted as if he has been sleeping in an electric chair. I have asked him Insisted that he lives. But he refuses “It’ is my house,” he says death does not worry me.”

The lives of the street children are miserable but it does not mean that these children enter the street for the same reasons. Every child has his or her specific reason. Every street child has his or her specific reason for living in the street. Make no mistake about that. Many of them have chosen this life because the streets are better than whatever they have run away from.

Every child has a story. So, I shall choose one of them and I introduce you to Richard. When I first met him, he was about eight years old. He had come from nowhere and had found himself into a group of children from who sorted out the parking outside a restaurant close to my home at that time. There was something special about Richard may be his eyes, his calmness, and a sense of him being an old man even though he was a child. Whatever it was we got some kind of contact from the first time we met. I started to ask him questions and I soon realize that whatever answer was a lie. After a couple of months, he had in his story buried his mother twice, let her live again and she abandoned him while she ran off with another man.

He knew nothing about his father. But the one night a serious traffic accident occurred close to the ruins of a house where he was sleeping and the next day he told me a story about how his father had been killed long time ago in a car accident. There were indeed no limitations to Richard’s imaginative forces. He told me wonderful stories that eventually did not say anything about him: He told me hoping that I would be moved and give him more money. I suppose it took several months before he felt any confidence in me, at least not grow up people. He was indeed a street- child because of the post-election violence that rocked the country. His parents were gone, dead or alive, he did not know. He had lost contact with his brothers and sisters and in his memory the reminiscence of his childhood was so weak that he could not even remember the name of his native village. The only thing was so sure that he came from somewhere in the middle of the country that could be understood because of the language he spoke.

It took time but one day I finally understood we had reached something that eventually could be called friendship. It was when I could ask him about his dream. What did he long for? If he tried to foresee the future, what did he want to see? I must admit that what he said surprised me. I have to confess that I could never in my life have imagined what the answer would be to the question of what he wanted most from life. I might have been able to if I had though a little deeper, but I did not. What change in his misery was most welcome? I thought he would say that the most of all wanted a mother, the resurrection of a family, a home, clothes, shoes, school a decent food, health. But the answer was completely different. Richard said something that I shall never forget as long I live.

So what was his answer? He said “What I want most of all is an identity card with my photo and my name. That shows that I am I and not exchangeable. “Even though I at the time, realized why he had answered that way, I asked him. “Why?” “Why is it so important?” He looked at me with that special look of being a bit bored having to answer stupid questions instead of doing things like washing cars and earning a bit of money. He said “You cannot understand anything about anything if you don’t know who you are.” I think it is important that we all reflect upon the wisdom of Richard. I believe he is right. Poverty and Education, yes, but before that comes the question of identity, which is probably very profound and basic for someone to believe in education that knowledge, can help you. A nobody will never ever bother to learn. And he will never ever bother to learn to read so that he can understand why his life is miserable.

The ID card, the civil right of anyone to know who he or she is, the feeling of not being a nobody in a society of nobodies, yes, I believe, Richard is right. Without feeling your identity, why should you even bother to confront your life with arms of education?

I do not know what Richard is doing today. One day he just disappeared. Someone said he had gone to see his mother. I, wonder which of them, the mothers he had created in a dream of his real mother. If she was still alive. I hope he found her. And I hope that one day he will have an ID card in his pocket.