garibouts

In the background you can see some of the people and the activity on the base from the Assembly General we had here at Eastertime. In the foreground are 4 garibout boys eating rice out of a big bowl. Garibouts are boys taken to live together by a Maribout, a Muslim teacher, to memorize the Koran and fund the Maribout with the money that they get from begging on the streets. They are given by their families at quite a young age and then they are treated worse than animals and sent out on the street everyday to beg for food and money. It is really a heartbreaking situation that I am faced with every time I leave the walls of the base, or in this case I didn’t even have to leave the base because the boys came to the gate to ask for food since they heard the noise of all the people that were here and they came to beg for leftovers. This is one of those things here that is hard to see and hard to think about, but I don’t ever want to become calloused to it.