Author: xaurav

Street life

Ten-year-old Nargis

Her day begins with a knock on the door. At 6am in Kabul, 10-year-old Nargis goes house to house begging for bread on the richest of streets in the Afghan capital.

The neighbourhood of Sherpur, famous for its ostentatious mansions, lies at the end of the hill where she and her family live in one room in a mud brick house.

On the day I meet her, everyone who answers her knock says they have no bread to give.

"Today, a little boy has been out ahead of me. He got it all," she explains in a whisper of a voice, before returning home without anything for her family to eat.

This waif, in a pink tunic trimmed with silver sparkles, is the breadwinner for a family of seven children.

In Afghan society sending Nargis’ teenage sisters onto the streets would bring dishonour, and her younger siblings are too small.

Her father cannot or will not work. He is a drug addict.

So it is down to Nargis.

Survival skills

Nargis is just one of tens of thousands of street children in Kabul.

Born into a country torn by three decades of war and an economy fuelled by the opium trade, they lose their fathers to violence or vice.

By day, street kids weave impishly through vehicles stuck in Kabul’s burgeoning traffic. They brandish everything from packets of gum, to tin cans wafting with incense, or a ragged bit of cloth to wipe your dusty windows.

By night, older teenagers are still hanging out at the main roundabouts, waving ribbons of cards for mobile telephones.

Kabul street children

Children who should be at school are learning skills to survive on rough streets.

With an arsenal of tricks, from grinning to grabbing, they hustle to try to earn enough Afghani notes or one dollar bills to put food on their family’s table.

And this army of children working on the streets is growing.

"Day by day, there are more and more street working children because refugees are still returning from Iran and Pakistan. And people are still being displaced by the war," says Engineer Mohammed Yousef, the founder and director of Aschiana, a refuge for street children.

With a reputation for peskiness, they are often ignored or shooed away. But kids grow up.

"When they become adults, they will learn more from the streets and they will not learn a lot of positive things," warns Engineer Yousef.

"The majority of children have talent, and if they have the opportunity to learn in a good environment they will use that talent in a positive way and become good people, otherwise they will use that talent in a negative way."

Vulnerable children can fall prey to older street boys who turn to crime. They are also targeted by criminal gangs who traffic people and drugs.

Underage drug addicts

In Afghanistan, the number of drug addicts is climbing. The latest figures show a steep rise to around 1.5 million people. A quarter are said to be women and children.

They include 13-year-old Omid. He tries to deny it, telling us he is no longer an addict, but his heavy-lidded eyes seem to give him away.

Then he admits that sniffing glue can make this hard life a little easier: "You feel as if you are a giant. You don’t feel the weight on your shoulders."

Nargis (right) and classmates at Aschiana

But a small percentage of street kids do get the chance to spend some time in school.

Aschiana, an Afghan charity, is one of the few centres where children can combine street work with a few hours in the classroom.

Older children can learn a trade, and all of the youngsters get a chance to play, and even dream.

Nargis is one of the lucky few, she sits eagerly in the front row on a long wooden bench, squeezed between other girls.

Bending over her notebook, pencilling neat lines of words in Dari, she escapes into a world of lessons with its promise of a better future.

For 14-year-old Mahfouz, who can cite the names of the world’s top footballers, Aschiana gives him the chance to put aside his cares and join the boys learning some ball handling tricks on a small fenced football pitch.

But all too soon he is back on the street, washing cars to support his family.

Absentee fathers

Mahfouz has been working since he was seven. His father left his mother for another woman, leaving him as the main earner.

"He ruined our lives. We were poor and I had to work to earn our bread and butter," he says.

The place he has staked out along the pavement is a short walk from the site of a recent suicide bombing.

Mahfouz

"Now I don’t feel any fear. I’ve been dealing with it most of my life," he says. "I’m not a scared little boy anymore."

But for all his adult airs, he is still only 14, something apparent when he speaks of his father’s absence: "We have been deprived of a father’s hug and this is a sad thing."

Nargis also regrets her father’s ways, as does her mother:

"If we had money, we would be able to treat her father so I wouldn’t have to send my daughter on to the streets." she says, a tear slipping down her cheek.

"When I see my mother crying, I get upset," says Nargis later, bravely adopting a tone that belies her young age. But it quickly gives way to a flood of tears.

At the end of each day, she climbs the last hill towards her home.

A torn cloth satchel with her notebook hangs over one shoulder. A large plastic bag of useful bits of rubbish which she has scavenged from a rubbish heap is slung over the other.

From birth, Afghan kids like Nargis shoulder all the worst legacies of war.

Watch Lyse Doucet’s film in full on Newsnight on Monday 24 May 2010 at 10.30pm on BBC Two, then afterwards on the and Newsnight website.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Dumbbell attack teacher sentenced

Peter Harvey

A teacher who attacked a 14-year-old pupil with a dumbbell has been given a two-year community order.

Peter Harvey, 50, who hit the boy at All Saints’ Roman Catholic School, Mansfield, in July 2009, pleaded guilty to grievous bodily harm without intent.

The boy, a known troublemaker at the school, suffered a fractured skull.

The science teacher, who was signed off with depression for several months, was found not guilty of attempted murder at a trial at Nottingham Crown Court.

‘Common sense’

The court heard he had been mocked by pupils moments before the attack and had shouted "die, die, die" as he bludgeoned the boy with the weight after the pupil swore at him.

It emerged during the four-day trial that pupils at the school were trying to wind up Harvey so his reaction could be caught on a camcorder being used secretly by a girl in the class.

The footage was then to be passed around the school as a way of "humiliating" the teacher.

His lawyer argued Harvey was in such a state when he battered the boy that he could not have possibly intended to kill or seriously harm him.

Harvey spent eight months on remand awaiting trial.

Judge Michael Stokes QC said after the trial: "Common sense has prevailed now we have heard all the evidence."

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

2012 Olympic budget cut by £27m

The Olympic Stadium (graphic)

The government has announced that £27m is to be cut from the 2012 London Olympic budget.

The decision is part of the £6.2bn of savings in public spending announced by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition on Monday.

The cutback affects the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA), which is the body building the venues.

The previous Labour government had said the £9.325bn budget for the 2012 Games in east London was ring-fenced.

Jeremy Hunt, the secretary of state for culture, media and sport, told the bodies the savings should not interrupt the Olympic programme and that "frontline services" should be protected.

Cost control

The main savings should come from cutting administration costs and restrictions on recruitment and pay.

ODA chairman John Armitt said he was sure the savings could be made without affecting the programme.

He said: "Due to strong financial management and cost control to date, the project is on a sound economic footing and I am confident that the ODA will be able to save £27m from our budget this year.

"This saving will be found by continuing to make efficiencies in the way the project is delivered as we have already done in the past.

"This is possible due to the efficient way that the project has been managed.

"Our regular budget updates have consistently shown that we are on schedule and within budget with savings of around £600m already delivered to keep us on track."

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Speechless

Yahoo

Instant messaging was once tipped to replace e-mail, but recent figures suggest that it has lost ground sharply. Why?

OMG. Instant messaging (IM), once the mainstay of teenage gossips, techie know-it-alls and office time-wasters everywhere, looks as though it is in trouble.

Just a few years ago, it was meant to be the future.

More immediate than e-mail, less fiddly than texting, sending an IM was widely expected by many technology pundits to become our preferred mode of online communication, whether socially or in the office – or socially in the office, for that matter.

But how times change.

In 2007, 14% of Britons’ online time was spent on IM, according to the UK Online Measurement company – but that has fallen to just 5%, the firm says, basing its findings on the habits of a panel of 40,000 computer users.

The study was released shortly after AOL sold its ICQ instant messaging service $187.5m (£124m) – less than half what the company paid for it in 1998.

And in September 2009, a survey of internet use by the New York-based Online Publishers Association found that the amount of time spent by surfers on traditional communications tools, including IM and e-mail, had declined by 8% since 2003.

It is a far cry from the early days of the decade when this very website anticipated that IM would overtake e-mail by 2004 [see internet links].

Cast your mind back to the early noughties – a time when dial-up was still widespread and the Apple G3s looked futuristic – and it becomes easier to recall why IM looked like it was about to conquer the world.

It was, after all, instant. It let users see if their friends and contacts were online and, if so, communicate with them in real time.

Tech-savvy office staff could chase up a query and expect an answer straight away, without having to pick up the phone. Teenagers in their bedrooms could exchange schoolyard tittle-tattle without the encumbrance of having to press "refresh" on the browser screen to their web-based e-mail account.

It also offered workers a handy means of circumventing their employers’ e-mail usage policies.

Chat’s all folks

Chris Green, a technology journalist turned industry analyst, recalls the heady days of IM’s ascendency.

"That was the way it was going," he remembers. "E-mail had peaked. And IM offered additional value over e-mail."

There were niggles, however. Initially, IM systems were "proprietary" and non-compatible, so those using Microsoft’s MSN Messenger were unable to reach friends on Aim, ICQ, or Yahoo! Messenger.

The firms would subsequently allow cross-pollenation of their systems, but, says Mr Green, the delay in "finding something that was ubiquitous across all platforms" – in the same way that sending an e-mail from a Yahoo! to a Hotmail account was seamless – cost the format dearly.

Google Talk

Into the vacuum stepped social networking sites.

Paul Armstrong, director of social media with the PR agency Kindred, believes that the rise of the likes of Facebook and Twitter – which allow users to do much more than just send messages – simply had more to offer.

"With instant messaging you have to stay at your computer," he says. "With social networking, you can use your phone’s web browser or SMS.

"Rather than shifting away from instant messaging, people are using the functions of instant messaging on different platforms."

Even though Facebook’s own instant messaging system – not covered in the UK Online Measurement habits – was widely-regarded as inferior to those provided by the established IM networks, users were tied into a one-stop shop for sharing thoughts, photos, and being re-introduced to long-forgotten former colleagues and classmates.

Return to sender

The effect on IM, says Chris Green, has been catastrophic.

Windows Live Messenger – formerly MSN Messenger – was no longer "bundled" with Vista and Windows 7, becoming instead an optional extra, he says. Google may be bullish about Google Talk, the search engine’s attempt to blend IM with e-mail, insisting that millions of its users "love the convenience and simplicity" of the service.

But Mr Green says its modest success represents a "flop" when put alongside the company’s dominance elsewhere on the web.

"People have moved on," he says. "The novelty value has worn off. If you look at teenagers today, they are using Twitter on their mobiles."

But has IM died out altogether? The figures would suggest that although its market share has fallen, its raw numbers have not.

California-based IT research firm The Radicati Group estimates that there are 2.4 billion IM accounts worldwide, rising to 3.5 billion by 2014.

Plenty of browers, it seems, still value the speed and simplicity of IM.

Technology journalist and BBC Click presenter LJ Rich notes that, in many countries where internet use is censored, BlackBerry Messenger is used to bypass state-sponsored snoops.

And she believes that the principles of IM survive – it is just that sites such as Facebook and Twitter let us talk to a wider audience via a wider range of platforms, including mobiles.

"With social networks, we’ve gone from instant messaging to something that’s more like conference calls," she says.

Maybe IM will have the last laugh after all. Or, rather, the last LOL.

Add your comments on this story, Click here to add comments..

I have been seeing this trend over the couple of years; with the growth of social networking (especially Facebook), people want to show off to all their hundreds of friends rather than have conversations with just one or a few people at a time. I still see IM as much easier, more reliable and faster but most people I know don’t even log into IM anymore.Dan Cottam, London, UK

Twitter is a novelty, a prime example of one. IM isn’t a novelty, it’s a basic tool of communication. It isn’t going anywhere.Steve Turner, Marlborough

I find social networks a pointless soul-sapping waste of time and still use IM to keep in touch with friends and family as it’s simple and (as the name suggests), instant.KH, Leicester

There’s something that’s been left out of this analysis, and that’s that corporate decisions to block IM in the workplace has effectively killed this method of communication. A shame, seeing as more progressive employers harness it to encourage global teamworking with incredible effect.Cath, Guildford, Surrey

Facebook has an IM program built into it’s webpage. That is the single reason IM has died, nothing else. Back in the days when Myspace was the dominant social network, people still used MSN and Yahoo.Adam Smith, Liverpool

Email, social networking and IM all have their place. They don’t compete with each other, they complement each other.Mike Cardwell, Nottingham, United Kingdom

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.