What is life like on the streets?
Imagine, living on the streets. No food. No love. No future. You are 8 years old. Home is worse than this.

Our non-profit organization works to give these children a childhood. A future.

Support us... to cover the child care costs for the more than 100 children at our residential centers in Tanzania

Support us... to raise awareness of Our non-profit organization work and to recruit other supporters.

Support us... by simply e-mailing 10 friends about us right now!

We also dealing with supporting children and their family, if the family can not pay the basic need of their children, just as,- school fees, uniforms, shoes, clothes, etc.
And as well as the poor family, help them how to handle their family in small project.
We collect used items direct from people who like to support the children future, just as clothes, shoes, school books, computers, as well as fund for school fees and other basic needs for the children.
Make the children grow up in positive and better future.
All who live and work on the streets are vulnerable to wide and extreme violations of their rights. They have difficulties accessing basic services and are verbally, physically and sexually abused. Few trust adults. Many perpetuate abuse on their weaker peers. Although these boys and girls may have a range of skills related to survival and informal income generation, these strengths remain unarticulated and unrecognized by mainstream society.

This combined with the fact that few of them have benefited from sustained formal education means that these children generally find it very difficult to earn money legally. Faced with this situation, many are forced into crime and confrontation with the general public. Significant numbers of these boys and girls seek temporary relief from their situation through substance abuse. They become trapped in a cycle of poverty, violence and abuse.

They are socially excluded, highly visible, mobile and increasing in number. They are unable to access basic services - including school - which generates further problems and demands on already overstretched social services and the criminal justice system. As these children age, they run increasing risk of HIV/AIDS and conflict with the law.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

I'm in couch-surfing because i need to eradicate a street children;

What causes children to run to the streets?
A child's departure from home is seldom sudden, despite common conceptions to the contrary. Rather, it usually takes the form of a series of steps in which individuals find out more about the urban environment, investigate work opportunities and make contact with homeless children. Similarly, the factor prompting departure is less commonly a single event than is often thought - rather, it is often a combination of stressors on different causal levels, as suggested in a recent ILO report:

Immediate: the reasons why a child may leave home and go to work or live on the streets could be a sudden drop in family income; loss of support from an adult family member due to illness, death or an episode of domestic violence.

Underlying: chronic impoverishment, cultural expectations (such as the idea that a boy should go to work on the streets as soon as he is able), desire for consumer goods, or the lure of the city.
Structural: factors such as development shocks, structural adjustment, regional inequalities and social exclusion.

This multiplicity of levels means that few children are able to perceive all the circumstances that contributed to their decision to leave home. The reasons given by a child on the day of leaving home may anyway be quite different to those they offer three months later after s/he has rationalized his/her home situation and their actions.

What causes children to run to the streets in Tanzania?
Our non-profit organization research on child vulnerability in Tanzania country has shown how income poverty increases familial pressures, which can in turn result in frustration, domestic violence and alcoholism. This, in turn, exacerbates income and non-income poverty within the family. It is this cycle of poverty in its widest sense that serves to exclude families and children from traditional social support networks, and ultimately pushes children and youth to migrate from their homes to urban centers.
Specifically, community members (participating in research conducted by Our non-profit organization) explain that income poverty is caused by a lack of education and opportunities. Prevailing social attitudes to women and the poor exacerbate this poverty and cause frustration and anger, which in many cases manifests in alcoholism. This then exacerbates income poverty, but also increases dysfunction by catalyzing domestic violence, corporal punishment and abuse within the home environment.
Within Tanzania there is also a creeping insinuation that poverty is caused by a deficit within the family concerned (i.e. that they are somehow to blame for it).

This is causing impatience and less tolerance amongst teachers, school committees and community members for the consequence of poverty amongst children and a further marginalization of poor children and their families from traditional support mechanisms within the community.

For many poor families and children the only resort to escape such a vicious cycle is to leave the community and to migrate to the streets.
Thus, it must be understood that the reasons children migrate to the streets in Tanzania include immediate, underlying and structural factors.

Immediate causation: Our non-profit organization Participatory Action Research (PAR) in Tanzania has identified that the immediate causation of child migration to the street is conflict. It is a factor within the home environment that frequently pushes children to run away and is endemic in their lives on the streets.
Underlying causation: In Tanzania, underlying factors include:
– The impact of rural poverty on the family unit, marked increasingly by fathers leaving the family home to look for work and subsequent deepening of familiar poverty.
– The breakdown of familiar relationships, marked increasingly by single parenthood, children birthed out of marriage, and death of parents and guardian.
– The breakdown of extended family relationships in urban settings, marked increasingly by single parents engaging in “risky behaviors” (e.g. alcoholism, prostitution) and/or working unsuccessfully to try to make ends meet, but leaving children unsupervised during the day.

Who are so-called "street children"?
International civil society has a vocabulary used to describe and define the situation of children who reside in the streets, and there are various definitions used to classify them. For instance, UNICEF delineates the following:
Full-time: A child who lives, sleeps, works and eats on the streets without adult supervision and care - a child "OF the street".
Part-time: A child who comes to the street environment for part of the day, often to beg or to work as a vendor, and then returns home at night - a child "ON the street".
"At risk" / vulnerable child: A child who lives in poverty or is a victim of family breakdown and thus is at risk of migrating to the street (full or part-time).
Our non-profit organization knows that, as much as this vocabulary is useful in interventions and research, we must be careful about its "shadow sides" and the fact that children who are vulnerable and homeless are stigmatized by the vocabulary used to describe them. By creating an understanding of the reasons WHY children run to the streets, we cast light on the real issues: lack of social protection for youth; lack of investment in youth; the breakdown of Tanzanian traditional systems in a new economic era; the absence of laws that protect young people from the harmful actions of others.

Our non-profit organization work is driven at all times by the understanding that each child is an individual with a unique experiences, aspirations and needs. Simply put, the STREETS do not bear children. PEOPLE do. Children on the streets are YOURS and MINE.

Interests

• international relations
• interacting with people

Music, Movies, and Books

Reading different books, watching different movies & listen love story music

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

As i'm currently start working with the community i have done to collect over 45 children who were living around the street.

Teach, Learn, Share

Couch surfer will get a chance to teach and interact with local people as a part of cultural exchange also the couch-surfer will get a chance to stay in a village simply to experience a really Tanzania life.

What I Can Share with Hosts

I will share with my couch surfer a really Tanzania dressing style and cooking style

Countries I’ve Visited

Kenya

Countries I’ve Lived In

Tanzania