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Klueg and social worker Fred Achola have brought a mobile health clinic to the boys and girls living and working on the streets of this coastal city in southeastern Kenya. Klueg treats minor cuts and abrasions to prevent infection, while he sends more serious cases to a regular clinic or hospital.
The children, some still clutching the bottles from which they sniff glue vapors, are a jumpy, excitable bunch, friendly and starved for affection, but loyal and tribal among themselves. At night they huddle together in doorways or sleep in shacks they build from corrugated metal and scavenged lumber on vacant lots.
In the two years since Curt and Anita Klueg arrived to do mission in Kenya, the couple's work has focused largely on reaching out to these youngsters, waifs of the numerous tragedies that have beset the area—poverty, AIDS, violence and drought—and driven them to precarious and dangerous lives on the street. Curt Klueg also finds time to minister to prison inmates on death row.
About 4,000 children live on the streets of Mombasa, the country's second-largest city after Nairobi, the capital, whereas 20 years ago there were virtually none, says Achola, who works with a hostel for street boys called Grandsons of Abraham. Street children, he says, fall into three categories: those who have no choice but to live and sleep on the street, those who are sent into the streets by their parents to beg by day but return home at night, and those of the street who choose the adventurous life and freedom it brings.
For all of them, it is a hazardous existence, and many turn to drugs to escape. Their drug of choice is glue, which is cheap and available. Older boys buy cans of Tough-Bond and sell shots to the kids, some as young as 8 years old, who sniff from plastic bottles. The toxic fumes they inhale give them a numbing high and take away hunger pangs. Young brains and lungs are ravaged and lives stunted in the process, leading to early death unless they break the habit.
As part of his work with these children, Klueg helps some of them get off the streets via Grandsons of Abraham, which was started by Maryknoll Brother Loren Beaudry in 1997. There, former street boys stay in safe dormitories, get basic education and a couple of good meals a day.
Some of them go on to study at the Marianist Brothers' Vocational Training Center in the Bombolulu district of Mombasa, where Anita Klueg is a teacher.
Anita, 31, from Texarkana, Texas, first tasted mission life as a lay missioner with the Salesians, working in an orphanage for girls in Bolivia. Curt, 32, from Plainfield, Ind., was a program coordinator for the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and worked with inner city youths in Birmingham, Ala., as a Salesian lay missioner. After their marriage, the couple lived in Houston before joining Maryknoll.
"We want to give opportunities to the most vulnerable youth, such as orphans, very poor families, school drop-outs and girls who had early pregnancies," Anita says of the Marianist center, where she teaches courses in self-awareness and faith. "We try to prevent kids from getting lured into prostitution and drug abuse."
At the center, young men and women ages 16 to 25 get training in metalworking, woodworking, catering or hairdressing and often find jobs as soon as they leave.
"Life was hard on the streets, and it was my lucky break to go to 'Grandsons,' " says Salim Juma, 18, a former street boy. "Even better, now that I am studying a trade at the Marianist's, life is sweet and I hope to get a good job when I come out next year."
Read the whole story only in the pages of Maryknoll magazine.
Help support Maryknoll in its work with the world's most vulnerable.
mklmag@maryknoll.org
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At the Grandsons of Abraham home for street boys.
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Mombasa team: (standing l-r) Lay Missioner Coralis Salvador, Brothers Frank TenHoopen and John Mullen, Fr. Joseph Kengah, (seated) Archbishop Boniface Lele, Lay Missioners Anita and Curt Klueg with baby Clare, visiting Lay Missioner Courtney Crean.
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