‘We can learn from these kids’: Street children in Zambia

When Daniel Mulilo Chama, a Zambian social worker, and Chris Lockhart, a longtime American aid worker in sub-Saharan Africa, met at a conference about youth empowerment in Lusaka, Zambia, in 2011, they quickly realized they shared a mutual wish. They wanted to see the stories of children living on the streets in Zambia told better.

When they were written about at all, street children often appeared as statistics, or worse, “treated like subjects and not real people,” Mr. Lockhart says. And Mr. Chama, himself a former street child, knew there was a heft and complexity to these children’s lives that could never be captured in a non-governmental organization’s report.

That meeting was the beginning of a nearly 10-year project that culminated in a new book, “Walking the Bowl: A True Story of Murder and Survival Among the Street Children of Lusaka,” which follows a group of kids who become entangled in a murder investigation. After the discovery of the body of a street child, the book’s protagonists – among them suspects, family members, and bystanders – must navigate what justice could look like in a city that treats them as expendable.

Mr. Chama and Mr. Lockhart spoke to the Monitor about their research process, the book’s message, and the particular challenges of writing ethically about young people living on the margins of their society.

The book’s title, “Walking the Bowl,” comes from a story about a hungry traveler who is given a bowl of food by a good Samaritan. Her only condition is that he walk that same bowl to someone else in need – to pay it forward. Why did you give the book this title?

Mr. Lockhart: At one level, we want folks reading [“Walking the Bowl”] to be aware of the social inequalities these kids face, the structural injustice. We don’t want them to look at it and say, “This is about Africa. These kinds of inequalities exist only in Africa or only in Zambia.” This is a global issue. Street kids are everywhere and the inequalities that determine their lives are faced everywhere. The number of street kids around the world is growing exponentially. But at the same time, the book is rooted in this idea that small good deeds by individuals can go a long way, which is something that happens again and again in the book. 

Mr. Chama: That idea of doing a good deed for the next person – that every time someone does a good deed for you, you must do it for the next person – that’s a lesson that applies to everyone, and is something we can learn from these kids.

This book is told in a very novelistic style. It’s mostly scenes and dialogue. How did you conduct the research?

Mr. Lockhart: The kids have a name for the kind of researchers they meet a lot of. They call them clickers, because they come with their iPads and they just click, click, click, taking down all the information and then going away. We didn’t want to fall into that category. We wanted to build trust. So we spoke to the ethics committee at the University of Zambia, and someone there suggested we create an independent community ethics board to oversee our research. So that’s what we did. We included teachers, local leaders, people from faith-based institutions, local nongovernmental organizations, respected elders, and one shopkeeper because that was somewhere the kids spent a lot of time. They advised us.

And then for the research itself, we worked with five former street kids – four boys and one girl. We basically trained them to act as embedded journalists. That took a year – training them on participant observation, rapid interviews, recording with an audio recorder. And then they fanned out to different areas [in Lusaka]. They each had a special area where they worked and they each had a different relationship with one of the four kids who’s at the core of the book.

Mr. Chama: We focused on observing events as they unfolded. Just observing everyday life. You entrust yourself to these kids. You have to win their trust. That trust was very important. And me myself, from being there, I know what that life entails. The intelligence and the heartbreak. That it’s not an easy thing.

How do you make sure you’re portraying them fairly and accurately?

Mr. Lockhart: As part of the data collection, we did these things called event reconstructions with the kids. We went to an empty lot and said, “OK, tell us exactly what happened here” – even if we did have a researcher who observed it directly and had an audio recording, which we often did. But we always did these kinds of event reconstructions with the kids. It almost became like putting on a play. They would tell us, “This is what happened here. This person was standing here when I entered the scene. This is what I was thinking. This is what I was smelling. This is what I was seeing.” And they knew that because we were going through all of this, [it] was going to be part of the book. So they could say, “I don’t want this in here. I don’t want to talk about this.” We respected that.

As researchers, did you ever feel a tension between wanting to just observe what was happening in the lives of these kids and wanting to intervene, to help them, which might then alter the story?

Mr. Chama: There were a couple of kids who are not included in the book specifically because of that. They wanted to be included but there were big issues with abuse and violence going on. So we had counselors step in at those points and it really changed the trajectory of those kids’ lives, and they couldn’t be part of the book anymore. There was always a risk-benefit analysis that we had to reassess as we went along.

What do you hope readers take away from this book?

Mr. Chama: These kids have dreams. They are resilient. And they have a story to tell, like any children do.