Baccalauréat · Série A · Anglais — 2017

Text: Street Children

She chose to spend the night on the old cardboard laid out in front of the provision store at the Agbogbloshie market place because it was a Sunday. The reason was simply that if she hadn't, she would have run the risk of losing her newly acquired job of washing carrots at the vegetables market. Fofo would have spent the Sunday night into Monday dawn with her friends across the road at Sodom and Gomorrah watching adult films her fourteen years required her to stay away from, and drinking akpeteshi, or at best, some slightly milder locally produced gin. Ultimately she would have found herself waking up Monday morning beside one of her age group friends, both of them naked, and unaware of what time during the night they had taken off their clothes and what exactly they had done with their nakedness.

A boy and a girl of about Fofo's age and making a home on the streets of Accra like her were once asked by a reporter from one of the private FM stations during a survey about their most passionate dreams. The reporter thought the children would strongly desire material things like shoes and dresses or more practically blankets for warmth at night. But alas! They strongly desired warmth all right, but of a kind that many children at home with their parents took for granted.

“My dream”, began the boy, “is to be able to go home one day to visit my mother and see a look of joy on her face at the sight of me. I want to be able to sleep beside her. I wish her to tell me she was happy I came to visit her.”

The girl said, “One day a kind woman I met at a centre made me very happy. Before I went there, I knew that by all means she would give me food. But this woman gave me more. She hugged me. I was dirty. I smelled bad. But she hugged me. That night I slept well. I had a good dream. Sometimes I wish to be hugged even if I am smelling of the streets.”

Adapted from Faceless by Amma Darko, pp. 1-2.

I. Guided commentary