Medical Help for Street Children for a month; £16

If you live on the streets you're more likely to get ill or to be hurt than if you don't.
If you live on the streets it's harder to get medical treatment (or preventative medicine) than if you don't.
The combination of these two statements spells bad news for homeless people all over the world.

I never thought that I'd find a G.P. I actually liked - but my current one in Harrow has proved me wrong. He's got a huge brain (according to his practise colleagues too), he's a Christian, he doesn't patronise me, he fills in background & history on conditions and medications and he listens. Oh, and he's got a surreal twist that pops into apparency occasionally! Much as Fergus is a good doctor, even the best G.P. would struggle to care for homeless patients.

Their lifestyle, their lack of address, the difficulty in finding them, their poverty, the lack of trust in other people that many have - all conspire to strangle their health even more than it already has been by living rough. This present {scroll to 5}would allow people who have got a bond of trust, and who the street-children would feel able to seek out when needed, to help these vulnerable childre take care of their health. Prevention is always better than trying to cure something that's already there - and even now there are illnesses that elude medical science's ability to make them better.


Bianca lived on the streets all her life. Her experience of life was of being used and hurt at every corner. Yet she had a beautiful smile and a beautiful spirit. She was one of the first girls to move into one of the first homes opened by the charity for former street girls. She had come home. However, it soon became obvious she was very ill.

Bianca was one of a growing number of people in Guatemala with HIV, which developed into AIDs. Children have many medical problems when they come off the streets, from minor skin infections, to psychiatric problems which are dealt with - but this was an illness for which we could provide comfort for the symptoms but not a cure.

Tragically, the final toll of AIDS on Bianca’s life was too much for her to want to share with her new family and she left the home to die quietly alone. The street team met her shortly before her death and she said how grateful she was for the brief spell of happiness and love we had given but especially for the hope she now had of a life beyond this one.

[ Toybox Charity, www.toyboxcharity.org ]