You are standing at the crossroads, child … i want to beg your pardon for everybody, who is guilty of this: for those, who became the cause of your existence because of pleasure; for those, who for the sake of a single moment, destroyed your eternity; for those, who instilled vulgarity in your pure soul and destined you to poverty and humiliation. FORGIVE EVERYBODY, CHILD.

I am a child of the street …
I know that I don’t look like your son or your daughter. I don’t have my home where I could return in the evening. My mother doesn’t wait for me near the window, not taking her eyes off the road along which I return from my school.
I don’t know my father’s embraces either. Safety given by my father’s hands stroking my hair and boundless love of my mother’s kisses are unknown to me. I have neither mother, nor father, nor home. I lost my home. I lost it and I found myself in the street. The streets became my home.
Twenty-four hours a day I am in the street. The days are passing by, but I can’t run towards my mother’s embraces and I don’t kiss my father’s hands. I fall asleep sometimes in the street, sometimes under the bridge, sometimes in a park; and I wake up there. I sleep in the embraces of dark night. The walkway slabs became my home. I grow up among cold and diseases.

I have neither family, nor school. I have neither warm stove, nor pencil, nor copybook, where I could draw my colorful dreams. I am in the open street with the unwashed, uncombed hair, with my body, which already forgot what clean clothes are, with my heart and stomach, which diminished of hunger.

Streets … You can’t even guess how cold, callous and hard to live in they are. There is neither home warmth, nor safety here. They are cold and dangerous. Threat is waiting round each corner.
It becomes your inseparable fellow since the moment when you find yourself here.

We create small groups among us in order to protect ourselves from those dangers, from which parents protect their children. There are certain rules in the groups. If you don’t follow them – you are turned out; to be turned out means to bid farewell to life.

In order to withstand against difficulties of street life with our thin bodies and weak hands, we start to take light narcotics. In order not to feel pain … Begging turns into aggression because of losing shame. Or maybe it is an answer to indifference …

No, it was not we, who chose living in the street. We didn’t come here of our own free will, we found ourselves here. Our parents either died, or divorced, or became poor to the limit when they couldn’t feed us. We couldn’t go to school, and then eat, and then we didn’t come to our senses as we found ourselves in the street. Who wants to get into the street? What else does the child need besides his mother’s embraces and his father’s eyes promising safety?

We all want to find the warm home, the place and the people who would make us a present of peace and knowledge.
We kill ourselves continuing to live this worthless life in the street. And we know that if we continue to live in this way, you will die as well. Because the streets will become insecure because of us (!) … and you won’t be able to cross the threshold …

We feel with our children’s hearts that this can’t continue any more for a life time. It seems to us that one day the people with gentle hearts will come and they will open their hearts for us … We dream of them and believe that one day we will be taken away one after another from here. We will also have our home. Then we’ll have school … Warm and clean beds … Mother’s loving eyes … We will be loved and we won’t be hungry anymore … And this day will become the holiday for our stomachs and hearts. Our minds will be decorated with good and useful knowledge.

This wonderful dream supports me and all the other children living in the street. We live for the sake of this wonderful hope. It hurts to feel that those people around us look at us with disgust as if at something hideous and they are afraid of touching us as if we were dirty rags. We have no choice but to console ourselves with the dream that one day, when we turn around, we nevertheless will see mother’s embraces and father’s eyes.

I don’t know if you noticed this?!