Children rescued from trafficking wait with their nightmares to go home

The wisp of a girl sits silently to one side, staring at the scarred tips of her fingers. Probably no more than five years old, Enyonam has just arrived at a centre for trafficked children in the Togolese capital, Lome. She doesn't remember the day her parents handed her over to work for her "patron". But she does recall the moment when her new master accused her of stealing eggs and burnt the ends of her fingers with a match as punishment. The 'Centre of Hope' will be home for Enyonam until authorities can locate her family and piece together exactly what happened to her. That could take anything from days to months. In the meantime there's a psychologist and a nurse on hand to try to heal the mental and physical wounds. "Most of the children that come here spend the first day crying," Odette Houedakor, the matronly woman who runs the centre, told IRIN. "But the idea is that here they can learn to be children again and regain some sense of normality." Child trafficking is a pervasive problem in this tiny West African nation, which lies in the middle of the trucking highway that links Abidjan in Cote d'Ivoire with Lagos in Nigeria Just last week, immigration authorities in Nigeria stopped a truck transporting more than 52 children from Togo to work as vendors, home help or quarry labourers. An estimated 70 percent of Togo's five million people live on less than a dollar a day but campaigners say that although poverty may create fertile conditions for child trafficking, parents' motivations are more complex than simply getting cash. "Very few parents actually receive money," explained Houedakor. "Some parents do think that it's one less mouth to feed but others think that they're doing their kids a favour by setting them up with a better-off family." A 2002 study by Plan, the largest international aid agency working in Togo, found that the promise of an education was the main factor in under 15s leaving their parents, many of whom were illiterate and wanted better for their children. And in about half the cases, the people recruiting children for jobs as domestic servants or agricultural labourers are not strangers but family or friends. Given to aunt, ended up in Gabon Fifteen-year-old Alice recalls how her mother handed her over to her aunt so she could continue her education. But the aunt packed her off to Gabon to sell ice water on the streets of the capital, Libreville.

Children playing at the 'Centre of Hope'

"I wasn't allowed to keep any of the money for myself," said Alice, a short stocky girl whose nine months working the streets have given her a tough air. "On the days when I sold lots of water, everything was fine. When I didn't sell enough, they would beat me. Usually it was the husband with an electric cable." Alice managed to escape and Gabonese authorities forced her 'employers' to pay for her return ticket to Lome. Now she spends her days playing backgammon or hopscotch with the 20 or so other girls at the centre, waiting to go home. "They are trying to find my real parents," Alice told IRIN. "I want to go back to my mother. She probably thinks I'm still living with my aunt and going to school." Up-to-date, reliable statistics are hard to come by but a 1997 study by local group WAO-Afrique estimated that there were at least 313,000 Togolese children aged between five and 15 working in urban centres at home or abroad in conditions of near or actual slavery. Trafficking in children is not a separate offence under Togolese law, and some campaigners believe this lies at the heart of the problem. "There is a judicial void, there's no specific law forbidding the practice," said Cleophas Mally, the director of WAO-Afrique in Lome. "We need to lobby the government to push through the law," he added, explaining that ministerial squabbles had meant that a draft law had never been put before parliament. Aside from the legal problems, preventing trafficking at the grassroots level is difficult in Togo, a country that has lived through almost four decades of poor governance under recently-deceased president Gnassingbe Eyadema, and a 12-year aid freeze by the European Union. Money tight to fight trafficking Plan's country director, Stefanie Conrad, says although Togo's Ministry of Social Affairs is committed to tackling the problem, there are no funds to pay people properly on the ground who could help in the fight, be they border guards, social workers or teachers. "Border police who do not receive their salaries are more open to bribes. With a 1,000 CFA note (US $2) you can get children across the border," she told IRIN. Education is another key battleground. Plan is running a "Stop Child Slavery" campaign to raise awareness at the grassroots level. CARE, another international aid group, has its own anti-trafficking education initiative called Combat. In the village of Hangoume-Akolisse, tucked away in the southeastern corner of Togo some 60 km from the capital, teacher Topeagno Agbessi-Anake rams home the importance of making sure kids have schools to go to even when the government cannot provide them. The village's two classrooms were built last year, thanks to donations of sand and straw from various local families and all three teachers at the school are paid with community donations "Education is the building block for any kind of development," Agbessi-Anake said. "Leaving children with nothing to do is risky. Child trafficking is a problem in Togo and they become vulnerable to that." One pupil among the 90 at his school has had first hand experience of that exploitation. Mama, now 13, told IRIN how she was taken to the capital Lome and forced to work as a street vendor selling onions. But she was rescued and taken in by the Ministry of Social Affairs and is now thrilled to be back in class, learning how to read and write, and playing football in her freetime. The 20 or so children currently sleeping on bunk beds in the dormitories of the 'Centre of Hope' are longing for the day when they too can go home. "I didn't like having to leave school and give up lessons," said 16-year-old Bella, shaking her head and rattling the beads in her braided hair. "I just want to go home and learn to be a hairdresser."