First Children’s Embassy in the World-Megjashi: The Police arrests do not solve mendacity Real social actions and help for the underprivileged families is the only solution for this problem
The action “Mendicity” and the picking up of the children mendicants won’t solve the problem of child labour abuse, says the First Children Embassy in the World Megjashi.
According to the Children’s Embassy, the reason for its failure resides in the temporary nature of the Daily Centers for children mendicants, because of the fact that after couple of hours in the Daily Centers, they are again on the streets.
Megjashi finds the solution of this long term problem in involving of all children in the educational process.
-Children need education, not couple of hours of daily care. The children in our Daily Center are clearly showing this to us, saying that here they feel like they are in school – say Dragi Zmijanac, director and founder of First Children Embassy in the World Megjashi.
-Providing social apartments and employment of one member of the family is the only way for effective realization and resolving this socio-pathology phenomenon, say from the Embassy.
--When these street children will have roof over their heads, and their families will have minimum incomes for living, they won’t look for comfort and money on the crossroads, says Zmijanac.
“Megjashi” are demanding from the Ministry of Labour and Social Politics to develop strategic programs from the Ministry of Labour and Social Politics which will stimulate the street children to be included in the pre-school institutions. The same is suggested along with the earlier proposition for increasing of the budget for education in order to provide more classes in the schools and bigger teacher’s staff. On several occasions, we have also suggested to the state institutions: hot meal, shoes, clothes, free books and school material to be provided for every child.
According to our data, there are 2000 children living on the streets in substandard conditions at the present moment in Macedonia, and there are 18.500 children are excluded from the elementary education. Nearly 30% of them are without parental care.
In the past researches realized in Macedonia, the street children are divided in several groups: children without parental care, children with one parent, divorced parents’ children and children living in dysfunctional families.
According to the Bureau for Social Affairs in Skopje, 15.5% of the street children are on pre-school age, 64% are on the age of 7 to 14, 88,5% of them express socially unacceptable behavior and 11,5 % express tolerable social behavior. Thus, we can come to a conclusion that street children, meaning the children mendicants, they present a problem which needs to be approached on an integrative manner. This matter has to be discussed more open-mindedly and by having in mind all the aspects of the problem, not only of the mendacity as such, which is more as one symptom of the real problem. This is not an “ugly picture of the city of Skopje”, but it represents a social problem of the entire society.
Journalist: Dragan Jovanov
Newspaper “Nova Makedonija”
http://www.novamakedonija.com.mk/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabindex=3&tabid=2&fCat=1&EditionID=187&top=1&ArticleID=7417
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