Right now over 100 million children are raising themselves on the streets of this world. Orphaned by AIDS, abandoned, running from hunger or abuse, our most vulnerable world citizens are double victims of both extreme poverty and global indifference. In October and November of 2007, I was part of a documentary film crew on the last shoot of a global film about street kids. The film was produced by my husband, Len, and he and I co-directed it. This last shoot was in Kenya.
Prologue
Where I grew up, in a sleepy South Jersey seashore town, every kid who could walk the length of Asbury Avenue in her Halloween costume got a silver dollar, handed out by the mayor . . . the Halloween parade. We all got the coin, whether we had a great costume or a twenty-five cent eye mask. It was a public show of sweet child-love. I was adorable. I was worth a shiny new silver dollar. My small town loved me, many years ago. This is normal. Right? Cut to four decades later - "the Roundabout," downtown Nairobi, Kenya. A boy grabs me by the hand and will not let go. His pants and shirt are stiff with filth. His acrid smell is overpowering, till I get used to it. He strokes the sleeve of my UV sun-protective travel shirt. He hugs me around the waist and we haven't said a word. Clinched between perfect teeth, a plastic bottle dangles from his lips, a half-inch of shoe glue swimming at the bottom. I am swamped. I am surrounded. I am separated from our film crew by my own crowd of street kids, as is my husband, as we all are. We are tall Americans, swamped by stunted growth. Some of the "big boys" are tall, but they stay back. They watch, and will fleece the little kids who get anything out of us. Of course none of this I know on day one, or two or three. I am still clutching the remnants of my silver dollar, trying to figure out what's happened. Where's the mayor? Where's the sweet child-love in these streets? What kind of parade is this?
Kenya1 Sweat We simply walk. What's your name? "Robert." What's yours? "David Kamau." "John." "Kibaba." "I'm Emmanuel." He lets go of my hand to feel my hair. He is stoned. I readjust my sunglasses with my newly freed hand and he grabs it back. He is belligerent, pulling me. "I want to go to school right now!" "This way!" I'm being called by the crew. "Over here." It's Florence. She is the young Kenyan woman translating Swahili and Kikuyu. "We're going to the Maasai market - that hill over there." Most of the boys around me run away to other crew members, crowding in on Ian, our cameraman. Wilfred, the immaculately dressed Kenyan cameraman, is more intimidating. Ian is smaller, athletic, British, has boys of his own who play soccer. He is swamped. Kids dance around him, mugging for him, looking and laughing into his forward-facing LED screen. They squeal at their own performance and he laughs. They are kids . . . not vermin. Police grumble at a distance. Are these filmmakers sanctioned? "Where are we going?" My hand is sweating with Emmanuel's. His filth and sweat blend with my sweat. I think about the bottle of antibacterial gel in the van and a wave of shame floods me like a hot flash. We move on, climbing into Maasai Market. Rock-hard dirt ledges require two hands so I force disengaging with this boy. He suddenly yells, "Bravo!" and runs away. As intensely as we were attached, we are free of each other. I am back with the crew and my husband approaches.
"How are you doing?" Of course I tell him I'm fine. Business as usual, swamped by hungry street kids in an open field in the center of a capital city in Africa. "Is Ian getting this?" "Yeah, Ian's got it and Wilfred's doing close-ups." Florence and I reunite, first time since we left the van. She is soft-spoken and sweet. What must she think of us? Her hair is in a dignified and beautiful swirl of cornrows, neat and cool. I am a mess. My too-casual cargo pants are wrinkled, my hair is pulled back, but with straight, light strings falling from an over-challenged barrette. Reflections in car windows have the look of a middle-aged, unkempt, white "visitor." Often children are asked to "say hello to the visitors," and the sound wafts me with shame again. I am the sunburned, unkempt visitor. Are they thinking, "we will be rid of them soon?" Or am I just guilty and self-conscious? Florence seems to accept us. That's good. It's reassuring. She is a graduate of Makere University in Uganda and has done social work, volunteering to help children. We don't know quite how we'll work together yet, but I like her openness and she stays close. She seems to approve of us and I realize, as in a revelation, how important that is to me, and how it is not a given. We have come to make a film about street children. We work together, my husband, Len and I. I'm usually the writer and he's the producer/director, but lines fade and switch sometimes. We are climbing up the hard-packed earth of Maasai Market. The terraces (filled with goods during market hours) are empty now, but for scattered families young girls with babies, grandmas with babies, but mostly children with children. "Mama! Mama. Mama!" I hear a familiar voice and turn to see that boy, Emmanuel, now holding the hand of a tall man and trying to drag him over to where we are. The boy is talking to me. He is calling me Mama. "This is Bravo! Mama . . . Bravo is my friend." He is shouting to me from a terrace above. He runs over, talking, his glue bottle bouncing up and down between his lips. Ian is filming a family squatting on a ledge, a baby in a bright pink T-shirt and no pants. Emmanuel drags the tall man right in front of the shot. At a distance I can see Len
is annoyed. Another girl and baby take the tall man's attention. The boy leaves him for a group of boys sniffing their glue as Len reaches me. "That kid's ruining the shots. We've got to get those toddlers with the little girls." I tell him, "Wilfred's doing close-ups. He's on them." Strands of hair stick to my temples and stick to the spf 15 balm on my lips. I can't get the hair off my lips. Ian hands me 3 tapes. "The Roundabout is one and two. Three's Maasai Market." My cargo pants pocket bulges. Wilfred hands me two more tapes. "Three and four are Maasai market. One is the end of last night's driving shots. You have two, right? The Roundabout." "Yep." I check them. One of 5 tapes is labeled. I scramble for a pen before I forget. "Roundabout 1 & 2. Maasai Market 3. 3&4 Maasai market, 1 Tuesday night driving, Nairobi." Where's Wilfred's 2? Ah, shirt pocket. Re-scramble . . . Wilfred in left cargo leg pocket, Ian in right leg. Wilfred doubles back. "They're all the Panasonic." Ian's the Sony, Wilfred the Panasonic. At least for today. Len swoops by. "We have a night shoot tonight. Did you get that guy Bravo's name and contacts? Get his cell phone. We could really use him tonight. Florence, does Bravo speak English?" (and back to me) "Be sure to label which camera shot which tape. We have to know what's HD. Where's the van?" Len is off. "Georgia, I'll take your black book and get Bravo's name and cell number." That's Florence. "Ah, thanks." I pull the black book from by pants and Wilfred's tapes spill to the ground. I scramble before little hands can grab them. One tiny boy grabs one and puts it in my hand. A precious moment. Before Florence gets back a young woman sitting on the dirt motions for me to come over. She is sitting with two others, their feet straight in front of them. They look to be 17 or 18, I can't tell. They are still but have a wild
look. The girl who motions to me is singing. Kids of all ages are sitting on the ground all around, but these three girls are off to themselves. I step over but am unsteady until Florence returns. The girls are talking to me and I can't understand. "What's this girl saying? over and over. "
She's singing the same phrase
"She's sick." "But what's she saying?" "It's a poem." "What's it say?" "I don't know, she's Kisi. She speaks Kisi." The girl looks up at me, grabs her thin breast through a flimsy T- shirt and yells in English, "I can't nurse my baby!" Her eyes fill. She is upset. "I can't nurse my baby!" I look at her and try to convey something but am struck dumb. An older-looking girl, also sitting on the ground, shouts over to her, "Your baby's gone!" And to me, "Her baby's gone." "Georgia, they're moving. Len is moving." Florence pulls me away. "Ian and Geoffrey are headed for the van." We walk away. "But we need to record her poem." I know we should stay and can see that that girl was once pretty. Florence pulls me. "She has HIV/AIDS. They all have AIDS." I turn and see the group of young mothers with no babies in sight, sitting on the dirt in downtown Nairobi, young women in tatters, and we're leaving. Too fast, but I can't leave the crew. We step into the street. There is no stopping the wild lanes of traffic. We just have to see a break and go for it, like jumping into Double Dutch jump rope. It takes a while, and then we run. When I finally sit in the van, I look at my empty hands. They are the color of Kenyan dirt . . . rusty tan. My palms have lines of sweat streaking the grime and I don't know which streaks are mine and which are that boy's. I look back at the roundabout, but it's too far, too much traffic, to see if that boy Emmanuel is still in sight.