Joshua

I am sitting at Edrisa drinking a cup of coffee and posting blogs. A dirty faced boy is tapping on the window from outside. He makes a face at me and I mimic him. He motions for me to come over, and I ignore the motions. A group comes in for lunch and the boy continues tapping. It is making the group uncomfortable. I give him the “mom look” and motion for him to leave. He goes.

Rebekah joins me and we decide to go see a friend who is next door. We go outside and the dirty faced boy is waiting. Rebekah greets him. She asks if he is still in school. You see, this dirty faced boy was a street kid who got picked by a visiting lady who chose him and one other to place with a family and put in school. Dirty faced boy has a name, it is Joshua. Now that we are outside I recognize him and feel bad for ignoring his earlier motions.

Joshua starts tearing up. We pull him aside and Rebekah asks again, is he still in school? No, not since September 21st.

Joshua proceeds to tell us this story: He and the other boy, called Moses, were picked by the lady and placed with a family who agreed to host them while they were in school. The family had children of their own and for a while things were good. One day the children were fighting and Joshua got in between them and pulled them apart. The older one had beaten the younger one. When the parents came home the children said Joshua had beaten them. He was given a warning. The kids began telling lies to the parents about the street boys- and it became too much for Joshua to bear. He wanted to leave. Moses wanted to stay.

Finally the parents decided that the street boys really were causing all the trouble and kicked them out. On September 21st on his way to school the lady told him not to come home that night. So he just goes back to the street. Moses joins him and they are soon resettled with the usual gang of street boys. Then Moses gets sick. For two weeks he is sick and then he doesn’t wake up. Malaria. Two of the older boys buy a casket and the kids go burry him outside town.

Rebekah and I exchange looks over Joshua’s head. We tell him we will find him later that day and that we are going to call a friend of ours who works with the street kids, a friend who knows Joshua too. He agrees to keep around the neighborhood so we can find him.

I feel like a jerk for ignoring Joshua earlier. I feel grief for the child who died on the street and was buried by children. I feel anger towards the family who sent the boys away. I feel inadequate.

We talk to one friend who has a local shop- he agrees to let Joshua come sweep the shop each day in exchange for 200 shillings and a banana and bun. We agree to pay Joshua’s wages and leave the first two weeks payment with the shop keeper. We contact our friend who works with the boys on the street and he says he will find Joshua the next day. We find Joshua hanging out with a familiar group of boys and decide to divide and conquer. Rebekah takes Joshua to go see the shop keeper and I take the five other boys to get chapattis.

The boys and I talk about little things as we walk, they know us but still don’t trust us. I tell them about Arizona and Colorado, they tell me about the hill top they are staying on. I try to convince them to try brown buns (cause they are healthier) and they tell me that chapats are really the best, so they should eat chapattis rather than buns.

After purchasing the chapattis we walk back to find Rebekah and Joshua. We sit on a curb and share the chapattis. We tell the boys we are proud of them for staying clean- they don’t have the usual signs of sniffing glue or smoking a local plant. They tell us it has been cold for them lately but they are staying together and building bon fires. We go our separate ways, encouraging the boys to look out for each other.

Rebekah and I head back to Edrisa. We know a guy there who also works with this group of boys and wanted to get some info from him. This guy is also called Moses, so when I tell him the story Joshua told us he laughs; “I am still alive, the boy was lying you”. I have to explain three times that Joshua did not say he died, rather a boy called Moses died. Adult Moses does not know of any street kid called Moses.

He knows the lady who picked Joshua, and according to him, two other boys (not one like Joshua told us). The boys were placed in a home in Feb and started schooling. They did really well for a while. Then they started fighting. Joshua started lighting fires and blaming other kids for them. He started hurting other kids. They moved Joshua to live with adult Moses’ father, a reverend who lives outside of town. Joshua kept running away. Three times Moses went to find him and bring him back. The fourth time Joshua told Moses to leave him alone.

For one hour Moses tells us a long, sad, and discouraging story involving Joshua. I know Moses really does have a heart for these street kids, but he is mistaken in this: Moses believes that the boys can just be good once they are in the group home. These kids are messed up. They have had to struggle to survive. Many of them have severe attachment disorders and psychosocial disorders. Telling them to be good just won’t work.

We cut our conversation short as the truck has come to take us back to the village. We head home with heavy hearts and heavy heads. Who do we believe? I feel sad as I realize that I accept and even expect Joshua to lie to us- he is in survival mode. We still don’t know if a kid really did die, or if Joshua was blatantly lying to us. We only hope he takes the job offered to him. At the wages we set up, he can earn enough to pay his own school fees in time for school to start next year.

One week later we are back in town. Our friend who works with the boys says he has spoken with Joshua. He knew a boy called Moses, but hasn’t seen him in a while. He has heard of a couple boys dying from Malaria recently. Joshua never came to work. The shop keeper gives us back the money. We see Joshua and he crosses the street to put some distance between us. We track him down anyway- I ask him why he didn’t go work. He just shakes his head.

I take a deep breath, say a little prayer, and watch him walk away.