The streetlights are all red. Hundreds of cars are lined up to move. Nothing is moving, and the rains are coming down. Old and new cars are wet to the brink. The deafening crowd reluctantly welcomes hundreds of street children roaming the traffic, desperately looking for something to do. The youngest cross the streets in-between cars lined up like sardines. The younger ones finger the drivers, and a few hurl insults. The mature ones, whose faces carry lines of early aging, simply stare.
They have nothing to say. Nothing. Their eyes seem to say, we are here. We will always be here.
As the commotion goes on and at far way end, is a beautiful middle-aged woman, surrounded by as many as twenty street children pushing their hands in to her Honda, and she is giving away coins to them, one by one. She smiles at them as she is dispensing with her coins. She knows their names and converses with every one of them.
No body seems to notice.
As soon as the traffic clears, she drives away. The children disperse and disappear in the streets.
According to a local paper, this woman’s, name was Arsema. She died about five years ago, but attended to these street children for twenty years, every day, and at that particular spot, to where the children came at noon.
As the writer put it.“ This was Arsema’s way of serving the Ethiopian street children. She did her part, how about the rest of us?
After all, street children also have rights”
