KATHMANDU, Nov 2 – While her husband was meeting the country’s president and addressing the Constituent Assembly to learn about Nepal’s peace process, the UN Secretary-General’s wife was busy meeting street children Saturday morning and urging them to have big dreams. Ban Moon-taek asked two street children at a drop-in centre for street children what they wanted to be when they grew up. One wanted to be a driver and the other an auto-mechanic. While grownups looking on laughed at their answers, Madam Ban herself was quite serious when she told the street children that they too could become like the Secretary-General if they worked and studied hard.
The children probably did not know what a Secretary-General is and who it was who had come to meet them. They only knew that it was a ‘big person”.
“He (Mr Ban) was also born in the countryside. There were no good schools; the schools did not have furniture. Sometimes he studied under a tree. But he studied very hard… worked very hard. Finally he became Secretary-General,” she told the two of them through an interpreter. “You can also be like the Secretary-General if you study hard. I can see your bright future as there are friends to support you.
During his childhood, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s father, who ran a warehouse business, went bankrupt. The family lost its middle-class standard of living and moved to a remote mountainside. The supportive friends Mrs Ban was referring to were the people running Voice of Children, an NGO working for the welfare of street children by the Bishnumati River at Chettrapati, with support from UNICEF.
When she arrived at the centre she was welcomed by the street children singing “Gas bas napaera khate bhaeya” (we became street children because we did not have food or shelter). When the children garlanded Mrs Ban she hugged them.
She asked officials at the drop-in centre about the children’s education and observed the facilities available there. While some come for classes during the day and spend the rest of their time in the streets, others, who were sexually abused, live at the centre.
Paritra Tamrakar, programme officer at the centre, informed the visiting dignitary that sexual exploitation of street children was rampant in the capital. She said that over 80 percent of street boys have been sexually abused, and there was difficulty in taking action against the guilty due to lack of implementation of the law.
After half an hour visit to the centre, Mrs Ban left, but not without leaving behind an impression. “I found her completely different from what I had expected. She showed strong concern about the problem of street children”, said Krishna Thapa, president of Voice of Children.