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FOCUS: A place for Maputo's children.
Architects for Aid has been dispatching architects to some of the world's most embattled places to assist with disaster relief and reconstruction. Zoae Blackler travelled to Mozambique to report on a project to build a brighter future for the city's street children
Thinking about it now, it was probably only a toy gun. But surrounded by 40 teenagers living a Lord of the Flies existence on the margins of society, most likely in an altered state through glue or alcohol, arguing with our minder in an African language I couldn't understand, I was ready to believe the worst.
We were in the rubble-strewn back yard of a derelict shell of a building in downtown Maputo. Home, if you can call it that, to a gang of street children aged between 15 and 21. We were here to try to talk to them for a short film on the work of Architects for Aid, to be shown next month at BD's Architect of the Year Awards. But as their hostility made clear, they weren't keen to talk to us. Another British journalist had been here a few months before and had paid them for interviews. Information was now a currency to be traded, a commodity like the junk the children scavenge to sell on the street. There would be no filming without an exchange of cash.
How much of their resistance was deep felt and how much play-acting was hard to tell. Children are forced into early adulthood, and the evidence of that dual state of being was all around: a game of ball against the back wall among last night's empty gin bottles; an anarchic regime without the rule of parents but still with its own hierarchy (it soon became clear that one boy, the oldest perhaps, was their leader); teasing each other and fooling around among the grown-up squalor. The gun I spotted in the hands of two boys no more than 15 - a toy or a weapon? It could have been either.
The number of children living on the streets in sub-Saharan Africa rises daily. In the Mozambique capital, Maputo, the problem is particularly acute.
As summer begins here - with temperatures near 30xC and humidity soaring - so does the rainy season. Six years ago the rains brought with them the worst flood in living memory. It destroyed the country's infrastructure and left nearly a million people destitute, the worst hit of course were the most vulnerable slum neighbourhoods. It was a cruel blow to a country that had just begun to rebuild itself after 16 years of vicious civil war, hampering the reconstruction effort. Even today more than 50% of the country's population lives on less than $1 a day.
The legacy of this combination of political and natural disasters - exacerbated as well by the Africa-wide HIV/Aids pandemic - has been to devastate the traditional family structure.
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