Not a single institution or structure has exact information on the number of homeless children in Ukraine. State statistics gives only data on the number of inmates of Ukrainian shelters for minors. Meanwhile the country is overflowed with the third wave of children's homelessness. In contrast to the first two waves (Civil War and the Second World War) when children became orphans and got in the streets, the majority of modern homeless children have alive parents. Now an awful concept appeared – “social orphans”. These are those who nominally have where to go but who will go never there. These are their native families, families of trustees, parents of their parents. In the Odessa streets children from all Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Prydnestovye and Russia coexist.“According to data from official statistics about 3 thousand children live in the streets of Odessa. According to the words of the specialists it is just a top of the iceberg”, Tatiana Semikop, Chief of Criminal Militia on Youth Affairs. In the streets children rescue from the parents’ aggression and violence, lack of understanding and unwillingness to stop using drugs and alcohol, stereotypes in education. The street is a complex environment, one has to survive, struggle for each living day here. Uniting into groups and searching for deserted basements, garrets and hatches children get their own life niche with tough rules. The cost of mistake is life. In order to live one must eat. I order to get food one must have money. This logical chain is acquired by homeless children from their first day in the street. They acquire it and start a struggle for their survival. Some of them wash machines, work as loaders, do casual repair work. Others beg, becoming professional "homeless children", the third steal. "Kind uncles and aunts" turn handsome boys and beautiful girls into sex-toys. A payment for such kind of service is a bottle, a doze. Especially obstinate children are beaten. Juvenile homeless children brighten up their uneasy life however they can - by the cigarettes picked up on asphalt or get from a passers-by, alcohol, drugs, glue. The group does not stand "outsiders" and today the child with a polyethylene bag, tube and an aura of gluing aroma became a norm, rather than exception. What fruits will give these plantlets tremulously grown by deflected morals and severe distortion of normal human values?The street means illnesses, from "harmless" bronchites and lice, to tuberculosis, infectious hepatites, HIV. According to researches of OCF “The Way Home”, two thirds of street children are HIV positive. They die with AIDS diagnosis in crude cellars and impregnated by miasma hatches.Street children do not go to school. Not because they are silly. The glue indeed does its business and the intelligence of the child sustains irremediable losses. Homeless children do not go to school because they have nothing to put on, to take with themselves on a lesson. And they simply have no time, in fact they have to earn on their livelihood. And what for to come to those who sneers at you among whom you feel yourself an outlaw? Besides, the majority of homeless children are not written in school registers. They are not registered in polyclinics, in the list of those who are waiting to get a school-leaving certificate, the passport of the citizen of Ukraine...The generation of 80ies is called "lost generation". What can we tell about them? Ephemeral generation. Having no or having lost the number of the birth certificate, the right of getting the passport they automatically move to another world, alien to the usual one, they move to the world of alive ghosts. That is why in fact state structures do not care about how many homeless children are born in hatches, how many die. In fact they simply DO NOT EXIST in the state scale.

What we do?

We work aiming at changing the situation and returning to children belief in people and normal life. OCF “The Way Home” developed and implements a number of projects addressed to street children: ·             “Social patrol” ·             “Rehabilitation Center for Children in Crisis Situation” ·             “Children Health and Education Center” ·             “Legal clinic” ·             “Computer Based Database for Street Children Registration” The long-term objective of our projects is to develop a vital universal basis for support and rehabilitation of these children, to provide legal, medical, psychological, information and educational support to street children of Odessa.