Romanian Street Kids

In 2001, a documentary about five street kids in Bucharest wowed viewers at international film festivals.  Children Underground showed the ‘ordinary’ lives of this group of children ranging from eight to sixteen years old, who lived in Piata Victoriei – a subway station in Bucharest.  I live close to Piata Victoriei and regularly go through the same subway station.  One of the kids, known as Macarena because she was so crazy about the dance, is still living there.

Street kids in Romania are usually a mixture of those who have come out of orphanages – either by running away or ‘graduating’ (turning eighteen) – or are runaways from abusive homes.  There are also kids born on the streets whose parents who are also street kids.

Unless they’re severly disabled, children in orphanages must leave when they turn eighteen.  Lucky ones end up in ’social apartments’ – apartments shared with other graduated orphans – or in social programs run by charities, which are generally like halfway programs that teach basic life skills.  Many others have nowhere to go and end up on the streets.

In Bucharest there are still probably a few thousand street kids.  No one really knows the actual number, but it’s down a lot from what it was just a few years ago.  The street kids live in the sewer canals – hot, stinking places filled with trash and rats.  The often beg or steal to survive and form gangs.  Some ‘work’ . . . washing windshields at stoplights or selling themselves for sex.  Smaller children are often ruled by older children who take any money they earn.  Money is used to buy cigarettes and drugs and glue to sniff.  They are also often abused by other citizens and police.

Street kids and kids coming out of orphanages are highly at risk for sexual abuse, either in Romania or by being trafficked to other countries.

Almost all street kids are addicted to a type of glue called Aurolac.  This highly toxic glue is put into a plastic bag and then inhaled.  It causes the user to not feel hunger or cold.  It also permanently damages the brain, lungs and kidneys, among other things.  Aurolac users don’t generally live past the age of thirty.  It’s not unusual to see children as young as nine or ten huffing Aurolac, with glue all over their faces and wild high eyes, picking up and smoking an abandoned but still burning cigarette butt.  Heroin is also a common street drug in Romania.

Street kids are not all children, a lot of them are now in their twenties and thirties, but they’re still known as kids.  They’ve grown up on the streets and some, like Macarena from the documentary, are more recognized than almost anyone else in the city.  I won’t normally tell such personal stories, but Macarena is well-known in Bucharest; a sort of celebrity among street kids from her documentary appearance.

I once had a long conversation with Macarena as we walked around Piata Victoriei.  She was completely high and gave me an above-ground tour of the sewer canal openings that have been sealed shut.  She told me about children dying in the sewers and about abuse and even murder by police.  She kept switching back and forth between insisting that there were several dying children sealed into one ‘canal’ and a street kid who had been bitten by a huge snake in the canal and needed immediate medical help.  Neither of these situations were actually the case when I talked to her, but probably were similar to situations she had faced in the past.

Street kids aren’t seen as often these days.  There are new hotlines to call when you see a ‘child in danger’ and pictures of runaways on public walls, and the government is running campaigns against child abuse as well as giving money to beggers.  Police also regularly kick beggers out of subway stations and public transportation.  But even while it’s become less evident in my two years here, it’s hard to say if the situation has actually improved.

For Macarena, the situation hasn’t improved.  It was almost ten years ago that Children Underground showed her as a fourteen-year-old addicted to dancing and Aurolac. 

She has graduated to heroin. 

She has never recognized me again after our conversation.

~ by bemis on 14 August 2008.