Telling the story of forgotten children

The posting from Mexico City says, 'My name is Jesus. I ran away from home when I was 13 because the police were after me. They thought I had robbed 4,500 pesos. I did not steal that money. I took a bus, fell asleep and when I woke up I was lost. I miss my mum. It's been a year that I don't see her.'

'My name is Nan Nan,' says a 15-year-old from Fuyang, Anhui Province on the mainland. 'My parents died of Aids when I was nine. My sister was banned from seeing me because I am an HIV-infected child. Now I go to school with friends every day.'

These are two from a roll-call of thousands of examples of youngsters excluded from education who are being helped by a Unesco programme and campaign spearheaded by best-selling children's author Lauren Child.

There are 77 million primary-age children alone out of school across the globe. Although the world's governments have signed up to the Millennium Development Goal of universal primary education, millions of children still fall through the net because they belong to some of the most excluded groups in society; street children, child soldiers, child prostitutes, HIV/Aids orphans, refugees and marginalised ethnic communities.

Now the children's author, well known in Hong Kong and the mainland for her animated series Charlie and Lola, a hit as Cha Li Yu Lao La on China Central Television and broadcast on TVB, is leading a campaign called My Life is a Story.

Her aim is to raise awareness of these children's plights, draw children into literacy projects and provide funds for a Unesco programme, Education for Children in Need, which is finding new ways to reach children who would otherwise never get the chance to go to school. Part of the project will involve gathering children's personal stories from all over the world and giving them a voice by posting them on the internet.

'The idea is to link children around the world,' said Child, who visited Jesus and his friends at the Fundacion Renacimiento refuge and education centre for street children in Mexico City. 'One of the things children said to me in Mexico is that they would like to be connected to children in other places.'

Putting the stories on a website that could be accessed by children internationally was a 'brilliant idea', said Ben Faccini, of Unesco, because children in excluded groups often felt they were nobody.

In Romania many children lack official papers confirming they should benefit from government services. HIV/Aids orphans in many countries have no record of who their parents were or where they came from, and in countries where education is not free, they are frequently denied it as their host family has to decide which children they can afford to send to school.

'By allowing them to tell their story, you create an identity for them,' Mr Faccini says. 'It may only be 10 lines, but it says they exist; they feel they are someone.'

Another strand of the campaign is that one of Child's wittily illustrated books, That Pesky Rat, is being repackaged to include information about her campaign. For three years, all her royalties and the profits of her publisher, Hachette Children's Books, will go to the Unesco programme, which forges alliances with local NGOs to draw into education children who have been forgotten.

'The idea is to get them into literacy and numeracy by firing up their imagination - whether it is through ballet in Brazil or story-telling in Senegal,' Child said.

She said people too often thought that helping poor people was just about removing their poverty, but for street children and other excluded groups who were shunned, it was about providing a sense of belonging and bringing joy and creativity into their lives.

'In Mexico, the street children at the refuge told me about an extremely nice neighbour in one area who would go and give them some food and plug in his television outside the shopfront where they would sleep and let them watch TV, and all of his neighbours hated him for doing it because it encourages them to stick around.'

The children said the best thing about their new home was that a woman took them to school each day and then came and took them home. It gave them a little taste of normality, a sense that there was an adult in their lives who cared for them.

Child is hoping the repackaging and relaunch of That Pesky Rat will raise #90,000 (HK$1.36 million) for the Unesco programme. That would mean selling 20,000 copies, but since she has sold more than seven million copies of her books worldwide so far, it may be a conservative goal.

The book for young children tells the story of a rat who lives in a bin and is fed up with finding his belongings have been thrown out. He dreams of new homes and belonging to someone. So he advertises for a pet owner and is rewarded with a short-sighted old man who is prepared to take him in - because he thinks he's a cat.

'It's a comedy,' Child said with a giggle. 'But there is a serious point. I used a rat because it is probably an animal that most people despise. The idea is to make children think about how one should not look at the outside of somebody - he's more than a rat, he could be you.'

Refreshingly self-effacing, she knows a bit about struggling to belong herself, having faced her own housing crisis in her late 20s when she had to leave her flat in north London and had no money to put down for a place of her own. Child spent months living out of bags, hopping between friends' houses or house sitting.

It was a time when she couldn't get her first book published, was trying to do too many things - 'china painting, textiles design, some window dressing, badly paid illustration jobs, it was getting ridiculous' - and getting nowhere. It taught her that being homeless puts people in a very vulnerable situation, mentally as well as physically, which is why the plight of the street children strikes a particular chord with her.

The turning point for Child came when she woke up in the bed she had had to share with her friend, Nora, and it was her birthday. 'Lovely as she is, I suddenly focused and thought, 'I don't want this'.'

She became an artist's assistant, which allowed her to work the hours she wanted as long as she got the job done, and to concentrate on writing in her spare time. She took advice from a publisher who said to write a book about animals and make it very simple, for young children.

That's when she wrote That Pesky Rat, integrating text with zany illustrations, a personal style that has led her into animation and her success in television. 'The mistake I didn't make was to write not using my voice. I wrote it in the first person and the way I wanted to write it. And sure enough it got picked up. Then my other books got taken up, and I have produced two or three a year since then.'

Child has won or been shortlisted for numerous book prizes since, the most prestigious being the Kate Greenaway Medal. Some of the titles tell their own story: I am Too Absolutely Small for School, I Will Not Ever NEVER Eat a Tomato and I Am NOT Sleepy and I Will NOT Go to Bed. Her gift is her understanding of children, in particular their reaction to the everyday things that adults take for granted but seem really big problems if you are small - including reading.

'I integrated text into the pictures because it seemed more cartoon stripy. You are almost animating characters on the page, almost hearing their voices, because I give different typefaces to different characters,' she says. 'And I thought for children who are a bit scared of reading or find reading and words a bit intimidating, they make words become quite friendly, because you begin to see what the word might mean by the way the character is interacting with them.

'So in one picture the character is talking about balancing and I have got her balancing on the word. So reading starts to become more of a game. You can begin to understand a word by just looking.'

There is a parallel with Unesco's softly, softly approach in its education programmes in 92 countries for marginalised children. Mr Faccini says they start from the belief that cramming kids into traditional factory-style schools won't work.

'You can't just turn up in a refugee camp and create a school. Our idea is that each time there has to be a way in.'

For example, in the garbage dumps of Cairo there is a recycling project for street children they can use to get them into literacy. In Senegal there was a street corner school where they just set up on the side of the street and talk about things like polishing shoes and use that as the starting point.

In the slums of Forteleza, Brazil, children are invited to learn dance, even ballet, a discipline they might find forbidding, to get them off the streets, and as they get involved they begin to learn how to read and write.

Now the partnership with Child is being used to get children writing, storytelling and drawing.

'The project works by creating alliances with an NGO for three or four years, setting them up as Unesco projects with a local partner, then replicating them,' Mr Faccini said. 'It's for children who have given up on the whole idea of school, are not interested, see it as part of the system.

'Each time it uses slightly different approaches as the leverage to draw them in. And that's why with Lauren it works so perfectly, because the idea of storytelling is universal.'