Poor children need helping hand

Finding a real solution for children in the sex industry or living on the streets is no small undertaking. Those of us working on their behalf must strive to gain a real understanding of their struggle and of their communities.

For several months I shared a small room in an area of East Jakarta with five child prostitutes from West Java. Our room resembled a cave, with a cement floor and rock walls crawling with insects.

There was no furniture except for the bare floor, which was used for everything from eating meals to servicing customers. The entire community shared one source of water, which was used for everything from bathing, washing clothes and dishes, to carrying away human waste. All the water ran untreated into a stream that wound its way through the entire slum area. But only newcomers seemed bothered by the smell.

The girls' days were filled with chaos. They worked from dusk until dawn, coming back to the room at 6 a.m. exhausted. They would immediately fall asleep on the floor without changing or taking off their makeup.

Sometimes on the weekends army members would show up at 7 a.m., wanting to get drunk with the children. No matter how tired they were, the girls would get up again and continue to work.

In this area of East Jakarta, incidents of rape, teenage pregnancies, STDs, abortions, police raids and self-mutilation come with the territory. Nobody really reacts to them anymore. Sometimes one of the girls would come home early in the morning, screaming about wanting to commit suicide after a bad night with a customer. These incidents were somehow dealt with as they arose, but it took a lot of effort not to get swept away in the madness of it all.

Before living on a daily basis with this community, I had many misconceptions about their industry. The biggest one I had was that all the adults involved were pure evil.

Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Living in this area has forced me to reevaluate my idea of what it means to be an adult and what it means to be a child. In terms of maturity, education or level of consciousness, there is very little difference between children and adults here.

Everybody depends on the sex trade for their daily survival, and age only determines one's place in the system. The pimps are former sex workers, and many child sex workers go on to become pimps.

The people here almost never venture outside this kampong, so their view of the world is shaped almost exclusively by their experiences with each other within this two-mile radius.

Simply growing older in a place like this does not magically produce the responsible, enlightened beings we like to refer to as "adults". And it's unrealistic to expect them to measure up to a standard of behavior or a system of values that they have never even encountered.

The girls here have good relationships with their pimps, most of whom are women. They don't hate them or view them as exploiters.

They are all struggling together to make a living, and everyone understands that the others are just doing what they can to get by.

The girls, their pimps and the criminals in the park form a united front against the police and the military. The lines are drawn based on what you do for a living, and not on things like age or the law.

I moved out eventually to help my friends who had just opened a new transit house for street kids. Three of my former roommates from East Jakarta actually left their jobs and pimp to stay with us in the transit house.

We found sponsors to replace their lost income, and things were OK for awhile. But the girls were never really comfortable in their new environment.

The neighbors complained about the way they dressed and their overtly sexual behavior toward all the men in the community. They didn't mean to do it, but after years of that lifestyle they just didn't know how to interact with men in any other way. They missed their old community, where they were accepted unconditionally and didn't have to be ashamed of their past. Eventually, they all went back.

After the girls left, the transit house filled up quickly with street children. The children in our transit house are referred to as hard-core street children.

They were totally separated from their families and living alone in Jakarta. None of them were in school, all of them smoked, and most of them were addicted to sniffing glue. They were all between the ages of 10 to 13. Most of the time, the house was in total chaos.

They would come home at all hours of the night, yelling outside the door and waking up the neighbors. We had a lot of rules in the house, but it was hard to discipline 15 youths who were used to sleeping on the side of the road and not having to answer to anyone.

As the months went by, however, there was some improvement in their behavior. They learned to respect the rules of the house and to share simple chores. The truth is that most of them were really good children. They deeply appreciated what we were trying to do for them, and they considered the transit house their real home.

Many of them were from far-off places like Medan and Ambon, and they loved to tell stories in the middle of the night about their dreams, former life at home and their journey to Jakarta. We were like a family, and that's the first step to really being able to reach a street kid.

Unfortunately, last month after a particularly unruly evening, the neighbors had had enough. They enlisted the help of our landlord, and the kids were evicted from the transit house.

Although we reassured them that we would find another house as quickly as possible, it was very traumatizing for them to lose their home and be separated from the few adults who actually cared about them, and even loved them. Our dilapidated little transit house had meant much more than we had first thought, and we all cried for a week.

I don't know what is in store for them, or if we can really make up for everything that they have been through. But I do know that even after the years of hardship, they will still be full of hope and courage.