For many people, the phrase "street children" immediately conjures up images of South America rather than Russia and Eastern Europe, but throughout Eastern European countries there is a huge number of children who spend most or all of their time on the streets.
There are at least 1 million street children in Russia alone and most of these children are “social orphans”, meaning they have at least one living parent.
The break-up of the Soviet Union led to massive unemployment (previoulsy unknown), and the resulting poverty caused wide-scale family breakdown. As local economies collapsed, and as men and women sought in vain for work, or took solace in alcohol abuse, more and more hungry and cold children began to appear on the streets, to escape the dreadful living conditions at home, or because their desperate parents had abandoned them.
Once on the streets, each child faces a struggle for mere survival. They will have to contend with hunger, lack of clothing and bitter winters with temperatures as low as minus 40°C. Many sleep underground next to, or even balanced on top of, the city heating pipes, to try to keep warm. Some turn to theft or prostitution to provide for themselves, others to drugs or glue-sniffing to hide the pain.
Based in the Siberian city of Chita, Helping Hands works with children and their families living in extremely harsh conditions.
Rebirth, Dniprodzerzhinsk, Ukraine
Providing support and care for those without a home from babies to adolescents, Rebirth runs a soup kitchen, an abandoned baby project and a respite day shelter for children to temporarily escapte the conditions of neglect and poverty.