With schools opening up for the first time to allow them to join children from other backgrounds, street children are faced with new hurdles.

For Peter Waweru - a street child who has made Nairobi’s Kenyatta market his home - nothing has changed, apart from the euphoria accompanying the policy on free education evident in the faces and the voices of the general public.

At least not in his daily routine, as he still must beg, only that prospective givers of alms have changed their retorts from pesa akuna sasa to enda shuleni, sasa ni bure (from ‘I have no money now’, to ‘Go to school, it is free’).

Waweru is also concerned by the years he has lots in the streets: “I am now 17-years-old and children of my age are already in secondary school. How do I reconcile the imbalance that results from my staying away from school for so many years?”

He has followed the happenings in the recent past with interest. Nevertheless, the prospect for free education brings a lot of memories in retrospect to the years gone by.

“I remember the last time I went to school, more than seven years ago, and the struggles that culminated to my quitting from school,” he says.

Waweru left school at the age of nine when in standard three at Kivumbini Primary in Nakuru in 1995. Accompanied by his older brother, he boarded a bus to Nairobi where they hoped to look for a relative in Kibera slums. Schooling for him was hard. Being an orphan, there was no one to buy him books, uniforms and to pay the different levies required.

For almost a decade now, he has inhabited the streets of Nairobi, begging, foraging litterbags and garbage piles. And now that life has presented a new opportunity for going back to school, Waweru is still not excited.

Experts see Waweru’s point. And they say there is more to it than just the mis-match of age and educational level. They argue that street children have to be treated differently in the process of integrating them back into normal schools.

Kennedy Makhanu, the Executive Director of The Least of These, a non-governmental organisation that rehabilitates street children says the greatest challenge is the transition that the children have to go through.

“It is important to understand that children living in the streets have a totally different outlook to life and in fact live in a different world with different values. They need to go through a programme that will bring them to the same level as other children,” says Makhanu.

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