Just like happiness, I don’t think sadness is an emotion that comes easily to man. You have to see the world as it is, to be able to feel a little bit of sadness. Sometime, I was walking down the street busy in my head. Then a street kid interrupted all that to ask for money, ‘Madam nisaidie ata 20?’ Many street kids often stop me for money, I see them, maybe give them a coin, but I don’t really look at them. Now, this boy had fresh scars on his face, and walked with a limp, and I could see he renewed his pain daily. So I asked him, ‘What happened to your face?’
He told me he was newly homeless in town, and had no friends. He had tried sleeping where the rest of the street kids slept, and they had given him hell for it. Apparently, you just can’t be homeless and sleep anywhere: It doesn’t work like that. So I asked him what he really wanted from me, ‘Should I buy you some food first?’
He said he was hungry, but he didn’t need food. He needed glue. I gave him the money. It might have not been morally correct, but sometimes the moral thing to do can be cruel. I didn’t want to be cruel. I understood that the glue he was sniffing was the only thing getting him through his reality. Without it, his reality would be too painfully unbearable.
At the end of the day, that scenario had me thinking. How much have we neglected the children? Not just the ones living in streets, but also the ones at home we never have time for? We never watch them, or really see them. They are born, life keeps happening, and before we know it they have sprout like mushrooms. They become adults. They become us. They walk around lost in the streets, and they can’t find their way back home…
