An encounter with a six-year-old street girl whipping herself to elicit money from passers-by at Bombay Churchgate railway station inspired David Maidment to establish Railway Children in 1995. David, former controller of safety with Railtrack, was on a business trip at the time. "The girl was being abused and exploited by an unscrupulous adult who had instructed her to behave in this way to provoke sympathy and maximise takings," explains David. "If I had given generously, I would merely have demonstrated the effectiveness of the ploy. The girl would have kept nothing and been forced to hand over her earnings to the adult ‘running' her. Her mournful brown eyes haunted me for weeks - until my anger at the injustice drove me to action."
There are many millions of children living on the streets of Latin America, Africa, South-East Asia and, increasingly, Europe, and it is to railway stations that many of them gravitate. In Britain, it's estimated that 100,000 children under the age of 16 run away from home each year - with one in four under the age of 11 - and many of them first come into contact with the harsh realities of street life at stations. A young person arriving on a London platform has, it has been calculated, an average of 20 minutes before an undesirable approaches them.
Railway Children raises about £600,000 a year, the majority donated by railway people and companies, and the remainder by Comic Relief. Working with local children's charities in 60 countries globally - including India, Mexico, Peru, Bangladesh and Kenya - it offers a point of contact for children just coming on to the street, providing them with shelter, healthcare, education, training, protection and, above all, friendship.
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The charity's latest initiatives include two projects in Russia. At the junction of Chita on the Trans-Siberian Railway, it has helped set up a shelter and mobile soup kitchen for children who have to survive temperatures as low as -40º. |
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The charity's latest initiatives include two projects in Russia. At the junction of Chita on the Trans-Siberian Railway, it has helped set up a shelter and mobile soup kitchen for children who have to survive temperatures as low as -40º. In Moscow, it has helped fund a shelter for children arriving from the countryside
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