Plan's work with street children in Surabaya

Indonesia is known to many as an exotic holiday destination. However, the ‘emerald belt’ also has less idyllic sides as thousands of Indonesian street children know all too well.

Surabaya is the second largest metropolitan city in Indonesia. Many from poor surrounding villages come here to try their luck. Yet only few fair well and the unlucky ones become members of the ever-increasing marginalised group of individuals eking out a subsistence living as they can on the streets. It is the children who bear the brunt of their family’s precarious situation as they are required to make a contribution to meet the family’s needs. With no real skills, no education, the children wander the streets begging or doing any odd job to get money.

A boy is hiding underneath a bridge. He cannot be seen from the busy intersection. He is sitting on a water pipe and eating a tofu. When we try to speak to him he flinches, frightened, jumps and runs away. A little later, we see him again standing under a tree together with a few other street children. Later we discovered that his name is Iman and according to the other children we talk to, he is new in Surabaya. It is hard to guess his age. He could be 12, or maybe even 14. We can only guess what he has gone through. Street children are often sexually abused; they are beaten, picked up and locked up by police.

The intersection is the territory of the ‘pengamen’ – children who beg at traffick lights alongside waiting cars. They sing songs for small change. For some their only possession is a guitar, but most of them have to get by with cans and bottles. We observe them for a while from a distance; someone give them 100 rupees (less than 1pence) but most people do not give them anything. They hope to make 10,000 rupees (70 pence) a day, enough for some tofu and rice.

Wiwit - "Usually my brother Mulyono and I sleep on the streets" - Photo: S.Stoepker

The children can survive this way for years. The father of Wiwit – 14 – for example, never earns more than 15,000 a day with his becak, a bicycle taxi and often he does not earn anything at all. Other parents are day-labourers or sew for a clothing factory at home – however they do not earn enough to feed their families.

There are millions of people in Indonesia living this way. Their children are their only life insurance.

“Normally my brother Mulyono and I sleep on the streets,” says Wiwit. His parents live in a hut of two by two metres, much too small for the whole family of seven to sleep in.

Wiwit wants to learn something. Mulyono and Wiwit have been going to school for the last year.

Plan Indonesia is paying for the school fees, the costs of books and the obligatory school uniforms. Wiwit is learning fast and is now in second grade elementary. He does not mind sitting among seven-year old children even though he is already 14. “I want to learn something,” he says. What he does not want to admit is that he does not want to end up like his older brother Hadi. “He was shot in the leg last week by the police when running away after an attempt to steal a motorcycle had failed,” Wawit tells us.

As part of a project to help street children, Plan in collaboration with other organisations, have arranged for a home for the street-children. In the space provided the children have a shelter so that they no longer have to spend the night on the streets. They are given lessons in arithmetic, English and history; they also participate in music lessons and learn how to play the traditional gamelan instruments. Those who are as motivated as Wiwit can go to school.

Working with street children in Surabaya