Children

Being orphans is one of those things that makes you doubt of the existence of a logic, of a greater power greater that is incomprehensible and that can decide everything. Being orphans is probably one of the toughest conditions for a human being. Being an African orphan involves even greater complications.
Children who I’ve known have hard and sometimes troubled stories, even despite their short life. Actually, not all children living in orphanages are orphans, only a few, in fact, have lost one or both parents, in most cases, during one of the civil wars that have battered the Congo and in particular Brazzaville between 1993 and 2003. Others have been abandoned by their parents, and the reasons of abandonment may be several. The most common is the inability of parents to keep their children because of extreme poverty, especially during the early years, when the costs for care and education are high and children are still too little to work. It happens also that the children are abandoned when a marriage ends or if the father dies, the relatives of the dead can take over his properties and leave to their fate the widow and children: in such cases, ending up in an orphanage can be considered a lucky event.
The break of family and solidarity ties, typical of African cultures, the social wreckage left by a decade of fighting among Congolese people, has generated total indifference to the poverty of others. It 's a hard thing to behold, and no one would expect to find here in Africa.
Among children of the orphanage there is one that is 11 years old; he was a child soldier until he was 5. Just to write a sentence like this upsets my stomach: try to imagine what it might mean for a preschool child to participate in actions of support to scenarios of war or guerrilla. Ask yourself what scenes his eyes may have seen, what sounds his ears may have listened to, what smells his nostrils may have been impregnated by.
The plight of abandoned children does not end here. Especially in villages, in fact, there are animist cults that occasionally mix with the Catholic religion, that here has deeply impressed its white intrusive footprint. According to these cults, some children are evil presences, sorcerers whose presence will damage and even destroy the village if they are not sacrificed. I met a boy who was accused of witchcraft when he was a child: here it’s a mark that it is not possible to take away. In fact, often these accusations made against children are an issue for community life: for example, if a widow remarries, the children of first marriage are in the best case abandoned, in the worst ones accused of witchcraft and killed.
The orphanage is a better fate that may lie to those who come from such stories. In the orphanage they have an education, eat regularly and are under constant medical surveillance. The alternative is the street: street children phenomenon, children who have nowhere to go, do not have to eat and live on alms and glue is growing.
There is no support from the State, the orphanages are activities operated by private individuals, in some cases connected with the Church. They live of donation and support that come from the rich Western world. There are also cases where unscrupulous people bring up an orphanage just because they have identified as an asset that could allow easy money: just resell at least part of the aid coming from the groups which support them, if they do not guarantee continuous monitoring within the orphanages.