Media

Dark lives of the tunnel children

Sunday Times
February 4 2007
Author: Nicola Smith

On a busy city street where office workers in thick coats were shopping for groceries on their way home, a child’s hand reached up from a manhole and
beckoned me into the shadows below.

With palms pressed against the ground on either side of the hole, I lowered myself into it until the soles of my shoes hit a hot pipe. I perched there for a moment, disregarding the stares of curious passers-by, then jumped the remaining few feet to the bottom of the shaft.

A tunnel 4ft wide stretched ahead, filled with steam from pipes carrying hot water to a cluster of apartment blocks nearby.

As my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, I saw the hand again. A little boy of 11 named Vlad was gesturing to me to follow him into a Dickensian underworld that hundreds of children call home.

It was the heat that had drawn them underground. While the temperature at pavement level touched freezing, the tunnel was warm enough to stand in without a coat. But the humidity was stifling; the stench of rotting rubbish and excrement almost overpowering.

Vlad pointed to electricity cables lining the walls as a warning to avoid touching them, then tapped me on the arm and urged me towards the labyrinth,
oblivious to his guest’s rising panic at the proximity of rats and dread of getting lost in the dark “We have to walk half an hour to reach our sleeping
places,” said Vlad’s friend Dimitru, who claimed to be 20 but looked no older than 14. “We find our way using this torch.”

He proudly held up a broken cigarette lighter that gave off a faint blue glow.

The children had agreed to show us the caverns where they shelter from the cold in return for supplies of food. About 1,400 yards from the manhole -a safe distance from police and predatory paedophiles alike -were their “beds”, the torn mattresses where they stretch out after a day of roaming the streets, begging or picking pockets to feed themselves.

Here and there, a candle attached to the wall provides a hint of homeliness for the children, many of whom have fled abusive homes for a harsh and dangerous life under the street.

Most are in their teens but the youngest I saw was an 11-month-old baby being raised among cockroaches by a child mother whose devotion to her could never make up for the lack of hygiene and security, let alone creature comforts such as toys.

The plight of children eking out a pitiful existence in sewers and service tunnels has become well known in Latin America and parts of Asia and Africa. But this was the capital city of Romania, a European Union country whose critics say it should have paid more heed to the lessons of its recent past.

Romania was shamed when the scandalous state of its orphanages was exposed after the Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, was overthrown and executed in 1989.

Today’s democratic Romania is haunted by the ghostly figures of equally neglected “tunnel children” stealing in and out of manholes yards away from
shops filled with treats that they can only dream of.

“They don’t belong to anybody,” said Maria Capriel, the director of Parada, a charity that tries to help street children. “Nobody has responsibility.”

Estimates of the number of children in the tunnels by non-governmental organisations vary from 500 to 2,000. The municipal authority that oversees the
city centre puts it at 750 and has set up a shelter, although Unicef says there are not enough places to go round. City officials and central government
disagree over the extent of the problem and the scale of the action needed to solve it.

Meanwhile, children such as Vlad live like the vermin that scurry past their beds at dead of night.

How they came to be there is difficult to discern. The children resent intruders and are reluctant to give any details that might identify them to
officialdom.

Vlad would rather pull his oversized white woollen hat down over his face than explain how he came to be a world away from his family, but charity workers say most tunnel children simply see a precarious life with streetwise and self-sufficient peers as preferable to whatever they were enduring in
impoverished and broken homes.

By day, they do largely as they please, free from the constraints of adult supervision. By night, many are said to fall prey to sexual abuse. Some sell
themselves to paedophiles, including foreign men attracted to Bucharest by their availability.

Little wonder, then, that many of the children in the tunnel I saw were carrying plastic bags filled with a cheap radiator enamel called Aurelac. They
inhaled it for a fleeting “high” without a care for the damage being inflicted on young lungs.

Whatever Romania’s hopes for a brighter future in the EU, the cycle of street life shows every sign of continuing. Homeless teenagers are spawning the next generation of street children. Some of the girls become pregnant when they are raped. Others fall in love and try to create the family they never had.

Hormose met her older boyfriend Augustin in the tunnels when she was 12. She is now 17, he is 21 and they will celebrate the first birthday of their baby,
Bianca, this month.

The family home is a chamber, less than 10ft square, which lies beneath a patch of wasteland and was being shared with nine youths when I dropped by last week. They have mattresses, a chair and a small table. Baby clothes washed in a bucket were drying on a line above their heads and Hormose had decorated the walls with some discarded Christmas tinsel.

A little flat in which to bring up her child seems a remote prospect to Hormose.

She has no ID and, without that, she cannot register for social housing.

Instead, Hormose has become the matriarch of an unruly mob. It was clear from her request to me for a list of provisions from the supermarket nearby that she is used to getting her way.

Her toughness is typical of the children who have found themselves on the streets since Ceausescu’s fall. Until then, street life was virtually unheard
of, according to social workers. Abandoned children -many the product of a ban on contraception -were swept into the vast state institutions where up to
300,000 were reported to be languishing in the early 1990s.

Under pressure from the EU during its entry negotiations, Romania found new homes for thousands of institutionalised children. The number in children’s homes has fallen to 33,000 and the conditions are much improved.

But thousands were shut out of the system and left to fend for themselves. Charity workers say the government did little until 2005, when a programme to get them off the streets was started by Bogdan Panait, the secretary of state for children.

Cosmina Simean, a senior official in the minister’s office, conceded that previous governments had neglected the problem, but claimed only 100 street
children remained in Bucharest.

“There are more places in shelters than there are street children,” she said, adding that the most hardened children were still living rough because they
preferred their independence.

The claims were dismissed by non-governmental groups. Capriel said resources and shelters were still lacking. A strategy was also needed to prepare for the unwanted impacts of Romania’s eagerly anticipated EU membership, she insisted.

Many rural businesses will be vulnerable as EU standards are imposed, requiring high levels of investment to keep them going. Some analysts predict a
migration to cities ill-prepared to cope. More poverty in cities could mean more street children.

“What you have in the streets today is not so much the problem -what you will have in the future will be the problem. We will have a very tough period to
come,” Capriel warned.

Baroness Nicholson, a Liberal Democrat MEP who has lobbied for years on behalf of Romanian children, said there was “still more to be done”.

The story of Corinna, who fled an abusive mother at 12 and moved underground after her jaw was broken in an attempted rape, offers some hope to others.

Corinna was so desperate to study that she slit her wrists to make the education authorities find her a place in school. “I started making plans and
having dreams about the future,” she said. “Other people saw I had potential and believed in me.”

She was still sleeping in her tunnel when she graduated from high school, but went on to complete a law degree at university and has now set her heart on a job in the European commission.

The prospects for 11-year-old Vlad and his friends, however, are much less bright.

“They don’t believe they will live,” said Capriel. “They are only interested in today.”