Brief Testimony of Julian
When Julian was found on a street by a social worker nine years ago, he was thirteen years old, frail, with a melancholic smile. His was a normal story of poverty: his mother and father were unemployed: there was very little food for his three younger sisters and himself. Indeed on certain days they had to go without food entirely. He came to stay with us at Kivuli, a street children home in Riruta Satellite. We were worried about Julian because though he was good and committed, he never seemed to grow physically and his grades at school were below average. Could the chronic malnutrition he had undergone for so long have retarded his growth, both physical and mental? What could he hope to do once an adult?
We thought we could perhaps help him get a driving license. Or he could earn to type and find a job in an office. Julian, however, was interested in othing but soccer, a passion which we thought ill suited for such a sickly body as his. Instead, he would happily skip a meal rather than miss a match. At eighteen, things began to change. At school his grades improved from term to term. Physically he grew taller and stronger. At twenty he was six feet
two, with a physique which in a football field could scare even the most determined defence opponents. When he finished high school with grades bove the average, he went back home, a few hundred metres from Kivuli Centre, and started to work during the day and study at night. He is now finishing a course in bookkeeping and management.
Every time I bump into him on Kabiria Road, he greets me with cheery exuberance. He is a reminder to me that, without being rhetorical, children are and will always be the living icon of the future, of hope, of confidence in life. We may perhaps believe we have understood their talents and limits, what is good and what is bad for them, what job they should go for. Like many unwise parents, we would like to mould them, change them, adapt them to our dreams for them, and somehow turn them into a copy of ourselves. Luckily children show us everyday that this not possible, simply because they are who they are, themselves, not just an extension of us. They are people who ask to be accompanied with patience and love, but left to grow in their surprising and original niqueness.
The evident vulnerability of children, and the feeling of tenderness and protection they arouse, must never make us forget that they are people endowed with rights, as the UN Convention on Children’s Rights states.
But for those who believe in God, children are more than simply people with rights, they are an image of that irreducibly Other that is God Himself. They force us to come out of ourselves and measure ourselves against the greatness, immensity, beauty and mystery of God. For Christians every child is a brother or sister of that little bundle Mary looked after in the stable of Bethlehem.
We do not own a child: we cannot probe all his thoughts and check all his actions. Every attempt to do this would be disastrous. The only thing we can do is to donate ourselves to the child. To donate life. Not only biologically, as parents do: but also to donate time, attention, affection, trust and love to help them to grow. Is it moralising and rhetorical to maintain that this should be the main objective of every mature adult existence? To donate ourselves so that others may have life. Behind the dry matter of this directory – numbers, statistics, addresses
We must be able to hear two powerful calls:
- Individuals and organizations who have the interest of the children at heart, must unite their efforts to make them more effective
- The whole society must look at the vulnerable children not as a problem, but an enormous positive potential for transformation. The problem is the adults, not the children. The children are a hope.
I have the privilege of living next to a home with about sixty children, of experiencing every day their energy, love, potential for growth, failures and struggles. My life is enriched by participating in this
extraordinary flow of life and change. I can only recommend to the readers of this directory: get involved with a street children program, it will enrich your life.
Father Kizito.
Testimony 
