Bangladeshi street kids bowled over by cricket World Cup chance
DHAKA: On a dusty football pitch in Bangladesh that doubles as grazing for cattle and a laundry for local residents, teenage cricketer Sania Mirza hits the last ball of the innings to the boundary.
Next week, the 15-yearold trafficking survivor will be wielding her bat in the considerably grander surroundings of Lord’s cricket ground as one of eight chosen to represent Bangladesh in the first Street Child Cricket World Cup.
“This is like a dream to me. I can’t believe that I’ll be playing the World Cup. It’s unreal,” Sania, 15, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation before leaving Dhaka for Britain.
The competition, organised by British charity Street Child United, will pit teenagers from nine teams representing countries around the world against each other.
The tournament starts on Saturday and aims to draw attention to youth homelessness, a problem experts say leaves young people at risk of abuse and trafficking in many parts of the world.
There is no data on how many young people live and work on the streets, putting them at risk of exploitation, although the United Nations has estimated the figure at up to 150 million.
A study by the Consortium for Street Children, which represents children’s charities including UNICEF, said street children in rich and poor countries had “strikingly similar” experiences, facing violence from an early age.
The teams have been brought together by organisations that work with homeless and socially excluded children in their countries, from Bangladesh and Nepal to Mauritius and the Democratic Republic of Congo, with the aim of tackling stigma.
Sania now lives at a shelter run by the Bangladeshi charity called Leedo.
Three years ago, she was sleeping rough at a railway station after running away from the life of servitude she had been sold into by her desperate father.
The family had been forced to sell their small plot of land after Sania injured her arm and needed costly medical treatment.
Soon afterwards, her mother died, and when a local woman offered to take Sania to a couple that could employ her as a maid, her father agreed. At first, she was well treated. But that changed when the couple had their first child.
“The wife would beat me up with brooms and spoons every time I made a mistake. They would make me lift heavy things, even though they knew my hand was injured,” said Sania - now fully recovered from her injury.
Eventually she ran away and got on to the first train she saw, arriving at Kamalapur station in the capital Dhaka, where she was found a few days later by rescuers from Leedo.
“I was scared,” she said. “There were many men at the station who asked me where I wanted to go. I ignored them. All I wanted to do was go back to my father. But I realised after running away that I didn’t know the way back home.”
About 700,000 Bangladeshi children live on the street, a third of them in Dhaka, according to a European Union-funded study released this year.
Leedo tries to get to the children who arrive at Dhaka’s stations and ferry terminals and offer them help before the traffickers can get to them.
The charity runs a shelter and a mobile classroom - taking education to children who would not otherwise miss out.