A young street child came up to us to grab some left over food from the table. I started chatting to him like we always did, but this time I started asking more questions. How long have you been living on the streets? Where is your family? When was the last time you saw them?  I shouldn’t have pried into his life like that.

His eyes filled up with tears as he reminisced about his family that he hadn’t seen in five years. He’d been living on the streets since he was 6! All I achieved with my naive questions was that they stirred up all the memories he’d been trying to block out. That’s why he sniffed. He tried to hide his cloth dowsed in glue in his pocket, but I could still smell it on him.

I had seen lots of young children like him on a daily basis, but some how I had got used to seeing them. So much so that they just became part of the surroundings, giving them a few Dirhams whenever they approached me just made me more immune to their situation. Just a simple way of easing my conscience I suppose.

Its only when I spoke to this young boy properly, and when I returned home to see my younger brother, who was the same age as him that it really hit me. What if it was him, my younger brother? How would he cope? Where would he sleep and eat? All those strangers that he would have to approach for money to eat! It’s then that I began to research more and more into the increasingly dangerous phenomena of street children in Morocco.

Dahlia Maarouf - Trustee

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