Nigerian “Shade Tree Theatre” with Street Children

Irene Salami
University of Jos
with Henk van Beers
Save the Children Sweden

Citation: Salami, Irene and Henk van Beers. “Nigerian ‘Shade Tree Theatre’ with Street Children.” Children, Youth and Environments 13(1), Spring 2003. pp. 23-47. Retrieved [date] from http://colorado.edu/journals/cye.

Abstract

Shade Tree Theatre is a project with working children in the streets of Jos, Nigeria. It aims at enabling children to analyze problems they encounter and to come up with practical solutions to deal with them. Based on approaches to popular education, the Shade Tree Theatre starts from the situation of children themselves, searching for their perspectives by using theatrical performance. This article presents the challenging process of reaching out to children working in the streets and building rapport with them. It describes the process of adult and peer facilitation through participation, dialogue and critical reflection. Although the Shade Tree Theatre is not part of existing interventions for working children, the approach empowers children through offering routes to the development of critical consciousness that will be of long-term benefit.

Keywords:

Introduction

The condition of children in developing nations is a source of great concern as the resources available for their development are limited. For any nation, children are its most important resources. However, these resources cannot yield dividends without appropriate investment to convert them into resourceful adults. Children’s optimum development and identity formation cannot be taken for granted.

UNICEF (1995) contends that the world will not solve her numerous problems unless she protects and invests in children as the center of any new development strategy. Without national programs that enable children to grow up to realize their full potential in health, peace and dignity, true national development is impossible (Salami 2000).

This is the background for this paper which details a participatory project initiated by the main author within the city of Jos, Nigeria. The project used theater as an avenue to generate new paths for street children to develop critical awareness about problems in their daily lives as well as possible solutions to those problems. Undergraduate Theatre Arts and Mass Communication students from the University of Jos took the role of facilitators after a period of intensive classroom and workshop training during which they also practiced the various methods among themselves.

Street Children

In Jos, hundreds of children are found on the streets. Very little information is available about them. According to UNICEF, the main reason that child merchants are found on the streets is a combination of economic and psychological deprivation. Anthropologist Pamela Reynolds who has worked with children in Africa and elsewhere, is in agreement with this (Swart 1990, Preface):

It is safe to say that very few children would choose to live or work on the streets if they were given security, protection, sufficient food and clothing, a supportive set of caring people, access to safe, good schools and time to play.

The above is certainly true about street children in Jos who, while on the streets, are exposed to multiple dangers. They are especially at risk of health hazards and of being knocked down by vehicles. Recently, Salami carried out a pilot study with university students at the Bauchi Road Motor Car Park in Jos which indicated that many street children, some as young as eight years old, are also victims of coercive sexual relationships.

Generally there are more girls on the street in Jos than boys. This is due to male child preference. Parents would rather send boys to school than girls. When families lack funds for basic domestic necessities, they would rather send daughters to the streets to sell wares to bring money home (cf. Ebigbo 1996). There are, however, many boys who come out onto the streets in large numbers as part of their religious injunction. They have not been studied in “Shade Tree Theatre” projects because they are a different category of children who are not active in the streets in the same way as street children. Ebigbo (1996, 245) refers to these boys as Almajeri, i.e. pupils from Islamic schools.

Regarding Nigerian children in difficult circumstances, UNICEF has found (Oloko 1992) that the factors that push children out of their homes include physical abuse (27 percent), emotional trauma (5 percent), family misunderstandings (8 percent), and family financial problems (24 percent). Children living and/or working on the streets experience harsh and hazardous conditions. They are exposed to the hot, scorching sun during the day and the bitingly cold harmattan wind at night. The harmattan wind is a Northwesterly wind which blows between October and February, making Jos the coldest city in Nigeria.

Street children have only recently gained recognition in Nigeria (UNICEF 1995; 2000). However, the national agenda has little or nothing to offer them. Census officials never manage to count them, and, as a result, government strategic plans for the nation’s children do not include them.

Children and Theater

“Shade Tree Theatre”

The “Shade Tree Theatre” experience is not mere exposure to, or participation in performance. Rather, building on Augusto Boal’s (2001) concepts of theater and on Paulo Freire’s approach to popular education (2000), “Shade Tree Theatre” is being used with street children to enable them to identify problems, analyze their causes and consequences, explore and rehearse solutions, and evaluate change (Salami 2002). In contrast to the individualistic nature of most western education which leads to personal advancement, popular education recognizes energy and potential within each person and each community. It aims to empower people and communities to contribute fully to the process of building a society in which all people are able to meet their basic needs (Hope and Timmel 1999, 16).

The principles of popular education are fundamental to the “Shade Tree Theatre” initiative which encourages participation, dialogue and critical consciousness. Working according to these principles helps to stimulate a process of community or group problem solving by bringing members of a community together, building community cohesiveness and enabling important issues to be raised and discussed (Salami 2002, 204).

In its projects with street children, “Shade Tree Theatre” starts from the situation of the children themselves, searching for their perspectives rather than prescribing ready made solutions. Researchers accept the children’s reality– that they have to make a living on the streets- and the purpose of work with the children is to enable them to deal better with their situation. This is in contrast to many projects which are initiated without any effort to assess children’s needs and whose main aim is to “rescue” children by taking them off the street and providing them with what adults consider to be their basic needs: food, shelter, education and spiritual guidance.

The emphasis during “Shade Tree Theatre” is on meaningful participation by the children (cf. Johnson et al. 1998; IIED 2001). The basic principles on which the theater operates reflect a respectful and ethical approach in working with street children. The children and the project team meet regularly at locations which are most convenient and comfortable for the children. The theater takes place under any big shady tree that is large enough to shade off the hot sun and give shelter to the children. The children choose the topics they want to discuss and they prioritize their problems. They also decide on how they want to present their problems.

The “Shade Tree Theatre” takes a process approach, steadily building rapport with a group of street children over an extended period of time without raising expectations to assist the children materially or in kind. From the start, objectives, process and expected outcome are made clear to the children. As a compensation for the time children spend on the project their wares are bought by the adults working with them. This prevents the children from losing out materially through their participation in the project.

The “Shade Tree Theatre” process ensures that children are drawn into a participatory process by setting guidelines for facilitators. They need to learn from the children, relate to them at their own level, build on what they know and encourage them to express themselves freely. Facilitators must be prepared to offer praise, love and patience, to introduce humor into activities, to acknowledge the unique nature of every child and to allow children to enter and leave the project freely. They must acknowledge the unique nature of every child and agree that no child is totally ignorant.

Methodology

Target Population, Time and Place of the Project
The children involved in this project were between 12 and 18 years old and of both genders. Thirty-two children took part; 23 were girls and nine were boys.

In “Shade Tree Theatre” projects, children are not approached individually, nor as a group, and asked to participate. Rather, their attention is drawn by project facilitators through clowning, drumming and dancing in the street. Children drawn by the revelry join in the singing and dancing and follow performers to the chosen shade tree. At the end of the performance the performers buy the children’s wares. This procedure is repeated in various streets for three days. On the fourth day, those children who remain are invited to spend time over the following months to share their street experiences and problems with the adult facilitators. When the children settled down, they were divided into three mixed gender groups of 10, 10 and 12 children. The children in each group sat in a semi-circle on mats with the main facilitator on the mat facing them.

The project was carried out over a period of eight months, starting in April 2002 and ending in November 2002. During the first three months, facilitators met with the children twice a week. The meetings then increased to three, and sometimes four times a week, if the children required the group to meet more often.

The project was located in the Gada Biu Market area in Jos. It was the first time that the theater project had been undertaken at this site, an area favored by street children. The Gada Biu site had recently seen a high increase in population after the main market in Jos burnt down and markets and parking facilities were relocated to that area. Each area has its own interest groups and gate keepers and these might change over relatively short periods of time.

Facilitation

The facilitators respected the children’s views and personal history and this put the children at ease. Hausa and Pidgin English were the languages used. They set the mood from the first, guiding, commenting and summarizing for the children. The empathetic role helped to develop sound interpersonal and inter-group relations, to draw in shy children and to prevent very vocal ones from dominating the discussions. This dynamic is common in participatory work with children (cf. Swart-Kruger 2002, 116).

Methods and Process

Traditional welfare approaches based on sentimentalizing children and Western models of childhood have given way to arguments about children’s central role in development, though couched mainly in terms of good economic sense (investing in a future workforce) rather than political participation. The next stage in the evolution of agency approaches is to incorporate the challenge of treating children as social actors (Johnson et al. 1998, 176).

Participatory engagement with the children included an activity profile, mobility map, focus group discussions, listening survey, role-playing (termed a code – of action) and dances. The children enjoyed these activities and used them comfortably to speak of, or portray, sensitive issues in their lives. The activities were also fruitful for the analysis of children’s needs and problems, and they fostered their sustained participation in the intervention. These activities promoted sound rapport. The triangulation of methods yielded evidence that the children were responding honestly.

Challenges in Work with the Children

A major challenge in most work with street children is to keep track of the project participants. In Jos, as in projects with other street children in Nigeria, there were problems with getting started each day since most of the children started hawking wares before six o’clock each morning. They would be scattered about; none of them had wristwatches and they had no idea of the time. Those who attended school were accessible only before half past seven in the morning or after noon. It is possible that, because facilitators took the trouble to search for them, the children understood better that their input had value and this may have influenced them to complete the project. No child was ever threatened, or coerced, to remain.

Absenteeism was frustrating but past experience with street children had led facilitators to agree that children’s places would be retained for them unless they gave notice that they wanted to withdraw voluntarily. Children who returned might feel inadequate if their place had been taken by someone else. However, facilitators would drop children from the project who were spotted out adventuring rather than attending project meetings. Children were not allowed to drift in halfway through the process or just for the play because the whole exercise was a learning process and such actions would disrupt the procedure for the other children. In this project none of the children dropped out completely.

Entry Process

In seeking their consent, the objectives, process and expected project outcome were explained, as well as the hopes for the ways the information might be used by the children. Gatekeepers were also reassured that the project was not run by a religious organization, as this is a very sensitive issue in Northern Nigeria. In one of the “Shade Tree Theatre” projects at Nasarawa Gwom in Jos, for instance, some parents raised false alarms that facilitators were out to convert their children from Islam to Christianity. This led to a crisis, which was quickly controlled, but team members were under arrest for six hours. At another location in the Moslem populated area of Angowan Rogo, facilitators were also accused of trying to convert the children. In 1998 too, an adult sweet (candy) seller, sitting close by during interactions with the children, called out to other Moslems who drove team members away. After these experiences, the “Shade Three Theatre” team took seriously the issue of seeking consent of all “gate keepers,” parents, and those in authority in the area.

Situation Analysis

Because a friendly atmosphere was set, the children were at ease to talk in a relaxed and honest way. The facilitation team listened to unstructured conversation on general issues. When the children had shown strong feelings about certain issues, the facilitators focused on these and asked questions around them. Sometimes new issues emerged during this process, ones which the children felt even more strongly about. There was no guidance on the topics to be discussed and the survey helped to expose the life of the group, without any bias.

The situation analysis revealed that:

• maltreatment of children by relatives with whom they resided was common;
• most parents lived below the poverty line; this led to street hawking by their children;
• some children were on the streets because they could not cope with pressure from school;
• street hawking was more evident after school;
• children on the street were often already victims of, or they became subjected to, sexual harassment and other abuse.

Identifying Themes for Performance

In each of the three groups, while one facilitator monitored the discussion the other recorded the unfolding event. Rapporteurs recorded events in writing in so far as possible. Tape recorded and video cameras were not used as facilitators have found that they are likely to affect the children’s performance. In between these sessions, the facilitators introduced games. These helped to release the children’s energy and to calm them down so that they became more attentive. Since facilitators knew that street children tend to have a very short attention span, songs and dances were introduced at any time that attention dwindled. These eased tensions and helped the children to concentrate better.

Since the discussion was geared towards helping the children develop critical awareness, all the facilitators did at this stage was to listen. This enabled them to detect the issues to which the children responded with intense feeling. Children are usually only willing to act on issues that they feel really strongly about.

In the three groups in this project, the generative themes derived from each were very similar. The children chose three themes in consultation with the facilitators. The first of these was particularly new to the team in their work with street children:

• Child kidnap
• The risk of been knocked down by cars.
• Education as the bedrock of development.

Child kidnapping is a form of human trafficking where kidnappers sell children to trafficking merchants for resale into domestic service, prostitution and child labor. The phenomenon has received wide media coverage in Nigeria but appeared to be relatively new at the time of this project and had yet to be researched. With regard to road accidents, many street children had been victims because they maneuvered their way between moving vehicles and crossed roads on impulse without checking for oncoming cars properly. The children believed education to be important, but difficult to attain, since some were on the street from morning until night while others attended school and resumed work on the street at midday. The children not in school could not afford to go to school because their parents needed the money yielded by their business deals.

The children discussed these three themes with great passion. The issue of child kidnapping brought nearly all of the groups to tears.

Once the children had decided on the themes, they discussed and decided on the most relevant aspects to be highlighted. Each group discussed how best to present their problem so that other children would be able to identify with it, develop a changed attitude towards it, and generate fruitful action to alleviate it.

After this, they brainstormed on the most powerful way to project the themes theatrically. They considered matters such as the circumstances, the feelings involved and the challenges to be presented. The facilitators had to step in by clapping their hands three times to generate order, as discussion led to arguments and the work sessions became rowdy.

Codes

A code is a concrete presentation of a familiar problem about which the group has strong feelings. A code could take the form of a poster, a play, a slide, film, poem, song, newspaper articles, picture, painting, story, proverb or riddle (Hope and Timmel 1999, 75). A code presents to children, in a familiar way, topics they might have discussed in a confused way (Hope and Timmel 1999, 76). In the “Shade Tree Theatre” projects, a play is the most commonly used code. However, stories, pictures, proverbs and newspaper articles are also used often to stimulate action and raise questions. Codes do not offer solutions. Solutions arise when actions taken lead to transformation or change in attitude. The essence of developing codes is to motivate children to see that “the way things are now is not the only way that they could be” so that they can take responsibility for shaping their lives and their community. This notion of transformation derives from Paulo Freire (2000).

As the children settled down to prepare their codes– this happened in the last five months of the project- their focus was on the three generative themes they had chosen earlier. While they discussed their themes the children became alive, became excited, showed deep concern, and at other times, expressed strong disagreement on issues or shouted at the tops of their voices. These responses showed how fully they were engaging with the themes because the purpose of the code is to stimulate discussion and to enable the children to analyze the situation they are in.

In preparing their codes the children were careful to deal with themes about which they felt strongly. They selected simple and comprehensible scenes that could raise awareness and stimulate questions about the children’s daily situation and they ensured that these scenes were also strong enough to arouse emotion.

When they were ready, the three groups settled down and started to put their plays together, discussing, shaping and rehearsing them. This, together with the analysis after the performance, took up the last three months of the project. Each group of street children was assisted by five facilitators.

Exploration

Discussion

Shaping

The children needed little encouragement from the facilitators to introduce dances, songs and drumming into all the codes; however, they had to ensure that these were inserted at the appropriate places. The boys decided to use puppets in their code for illiteracy and the girls who worked on the child kidnapping code decided to present a mime. The children found these ideas exciting.

Rehearsal

The rehearsal was an important aspect of the learning process. It helped the children to improve their skills. It became necessary to separate the girls from the boys, as they seemed to work better that way. The boys dominated, but did not bully, the girls. Despite the fact that there were many more girls than boys, they were far shyer and did not open up easily; some of them were also Moslem and it was immoral for them to interact too closely with the boys.

The boys’ group chose to act the code on illiteracy (generative theme: education as the bedrock of development). Through the listening survey, facilitators had discovered that almost two-thirds of the boys were out of school and about a third of them were on the streets to raise money to become an apprentice to a mechanic, welder, vulcanizer, etc. The two girls’ groups acted the themes of child kidnap and being knocked down by cars.

As the facilitators continued to help the boys and girls, a genuine relationship grew between the adults and children and a sense of comradeship developed between the children themselves. The constancy of this relationship bolstered the children’s self-esteem and helped them to overcome fear. Children on the African continent are firmly schooled in the importance of behaving courteously towards adults. Although the street children presented a brash front, they feared being considered rude by adults just as any other African child would. As a consequence, they reacted in an inhibited way until they felt accepted and able to open up. The strong rapport that was built helped to stimulate and encourage active participation by the children. It was further facilitated by the children’s involvement in the theatrical components of the project. As soon as their inhibitions were broken, the tension of fear disappeared and this made the children more relaxed and interactive. This process is recognized in theater and is consciously achieved through the use of games, songs and dances; it has been named Via Negativa by Jerzy Grotowski (1991).

Presentation

The young performers were free to use any language. Any costumes they used were items taken from their mates. No code took more than five minutes. At the conclusion of the performances the children were very pleased with themselves. The response from the crowd was fun for them.

As the performance ended, the children settled down for the analysis with their facilitators. Those who had acted discussed their roles in the plays, and those who had not acted discussed their observations of events. After this the children came together for the general analysis of each code (play); these had been titled:

• “The Kidnapping of Asabe”
• “How a Car Knocked Ngozi Down”
• “Education is Good”

These codes were based on situations experienced by children in Nigerian streets but they were not the true stories of any children in the project. When the discussions ended, facilitators led the children through a series of analytical discussions about the three plays. The purpose was to get to the root causes of their problems.

Analysis

Effect of the Plays
The facilitators asked each child to describe the play either as an observer or as a participant. The children were all anxious to be heard, stretching to raise their hands. The girls and boys also answered questions about what they felt as they acted their roles or, if they had been observers, what they had felt as they watched the plays.

Facilitators then introduced David Werner’s “But why?” method (Werner et al., 1992) in probing with the children, who were asked:

“What were you doing playing … [a particular role]?”
“Why did you do this?” or
“Why did you do that?”

This stage helped the children to move from observation into thinking about their actions.

Real Life Experiences
At the end of this session the children were fully involved in the process and did not allow any discussion to bypass them. Their attention by now was focused on the main issues. When the facilitator asked, “Does this happen in real life?” they all shouted: “Yes na” or “Yes ke.”1 Then six children were asked to relate life experiences of what had been portrayed in the plays; two examples were required for each of their plays. This was a lengthy process as they took time to narrate, in detail, life situations of challenges in the motor car park. When a girl of nine years narrated how she was nearly kidnapped,² the atmosphere became still. The children who were clamoring to be heard earlier suddenly became silent. At this stage it was obvious that the reality of their lives on the street had suddenly dawned on them.

Related Problems
Facilitators asked the children to relate other problems associated with the main problems they had depicted in the three plays. One boy mentioned blindness. As he was being shouted down, he quickly explained that an illiterate person is a blind person desiring someone else to show him the way, all the time. Everyone present found this to be an amazing insight. Others mentioned poverty, poor health and hygiene as problems associated with illiteracy. For the danger of being knocked down by cars, they mentioned the problems of poverty, accidents, and the necessity to sell wares on the street. For kidnapping they mentioned poverty, separation from family, death and rape as related problems. The children chose one outstanding problem for each play: poverty for the problem of illiteracy, car accidents for the risk of children being knocked down, and separation from other family members for child kidnapping.

Root Causes
The facilitators then challenged the children to find the root causes of illiteracy, child kidnap and risks of being knocked down by a car. They used the “But why?” method (Werner et al. 1992). For instance, for illiteracy, the children were asked why they were on the street and not in school. For example,

“Why are you not in school?”
“Because I have to sell bread for my mother.”
“But why?”
“She needs the money to feed us.”
“But why?”
“Because my father cannot afford to feed us.”
“But why?”
“He lost his job some years ago.”
“But why?”
“His employers said they could no longer pay him.”
“But why?”
“They had no raw materials to carry on with production.”

The children discovered that the bottom line for all of the problems was poverty, but for child kidnapping, it was both greed and poverty. At this stage the facilitators moved on to the action plan.

Action Planning
Finding that the children were ready for transformation (i.e., for thinking about solutions to their problems), the facilitators asked the children what they could do about the situation that they found themselves in. The children were asked to go back to their groups and discuss actions that could be taken to improve their lives on the streets. After the discussions, the groups came together and group leaders shared their group’s ideas about actions that might be taken to help alleviate the problems depicted in the codes.

The groups offered several suggestions: Facilitators could help organize school at the park for those who could not get to school at all. They could organize help with homework or extra lessons at the park. Facilitators could speak to the government on behalf of the children to get up a multipurpose school established at the park. The children suggested that such a school should have flexible timing so as to take their peak periods of business into consideration. They pleaded with facilitators to sensitize their parents and guardians to the importance of education for every child.

As regards child kidnapping, the children suggested ways of resisting advances from strangers. They warned that children should refuse prolonged interaction with them. They suggested ways of resisting molesters.

In discussing the situation of being knocked down by cars, they all agreed that running after cars and crossing roads between oncoming vehicles to sell wares was dangerous. They resolved to distance themselves from cars and only to call out to customers. They agreed that if they stayed away from car tracks, customers would park their cars to buy from them. All their suggestions were written down by the facilitators.

Follow-up Action

It was not easy to find out whether the project had made any impact on them. They regarded the facilitators only as friends who had stopped for a moment to greet them and they did not want to linger and take up business time in talking. Three of the children still had a strong desire to return to school. One girl had been forced to marry a man 35 years her senior. The children said mostly that they appreciated the tips they had gathered on how to work more safely. They mentioned the tips about kidnapping, especially.

Evaluation should, ideally, be carried out citywide on a single day. Large numbers of facilitators would be required to make this possible, however. If evaluation is not done concurrently it is possible for children who have already taken part in the evaluation to influence others by telling them in detail about the evaluation procedure.

After the study, facilitators spoke to the market and motor car park authorities, especially on the issue of children running to the road to sell to car passengers. There are now uniformed men who restrain the children from the road. It is difficult to say that children are more careful since the project because children from other parks also come to the Gada Biu to trade.

The “Shade Tree Theatre” director normally gives a written report of each project to the State Ministry of Education. The response has not been encouraging. This was also the case with those few parents whom facilitators managed to reach. They did not react positively to the information about the themes identified by the children. They claimed that they needed the money from the sales of their children and wards, and therefore it was not possible to keep them in school. Ebigbo (1996) has described how parents try to prepare their very young daughters, in a small way, to suffer less if they are sexually abused while out hawking wares, rather than to make an effort to get them into school.

The “Shade Tree Theatre” team has neither the funds nor the capacity to solve the problems of street children. It has become clear that to address the problems they raised, parents and guardians have to be personally empowered. However, the project team hopes to have given the children new techniques for thinking through problems in their lives.

Conclusion

Much of the engagement of children in “Shade Tree Theatre” can be categorized as participatory research with children. Although adults have designed the basic process, it is modified and shaped increasingly by the children. In preparing the plays, the children collect information which they analyze in further discussion; they verify the information and prioritize problems in their lives that they want to address. Subsequently the children decide on the content of their plays and the performance style. After their performances the children sit down and start discussing possible solutions to their problems.

During the whole “Shade Tree Theatre” process the children are seen as having the expertise and the primary knowledge necessary to address their own personal problems. The most important role of the facilitators in this project, as in any effective participatory learning process, is to “facilitate the learning process of participants through promoting exposure and sharing the analysis of participants’ experiences” (van Beers 2002, 36).

When doing research with children, analysis is the most difficult activity in which to involve them; it requires time, patience and creativity. Often a shortcut is taken: after identifying problems the focus is on solutions. This may be especially tempting when children present problems that appear, to adults, to be quite simple and straightforward. Analysis is often considered to be too complicated or too academic to undertake with children. “Shade Tree Theatre” enables street children to engage in data analysis with adults by combining a number of methods such as play, questions and answers (“But why?”), and discussion. In the “Shade Tree Theatre” process, children are found to be well capable of analyzing even complex information.

“Shade Tree Theatre” also stresses that any research that involves children should be in the interest of the children themselves. The project constitutes action research aimed at helping children to come up with practical solutions for the problems they encounter in everyday life. If it were possible to link the “Shade Tree Theatre” project with already existing programs to assist street children it might be possible to address more of the issues raised by the children. At present, parents and government agencies do not follow up on the findings of the “Shade Tree Theatre” project. As noted above, there appears to be a lack of interest by the authorities in child-focused development programs. Until this changes, it will be difficult to take matters forward.

It is possible that parents would find income-generation by their children less necessary if government, corporate organizations, multinationals and local banks could offer them micro-lending facilities and also expand the Nigerian Poverty Education Programme to include more people.

Even a sensitization program, however, would go a long way towards making all stake-holders more conscientious. Therefore, a difficult, but possibly the only way to move ahead, might be to take a process approach with the authorities, the children’s parents and other members of the community. This process would be similar to that used with the children in so far as the development of critical reasoning is facilitated and it would be problem oriented. Such a process might enable adults to understand and analyze their own problems which they encounter in executing their responsibilities in safeguarding the rights of children. Ideally, it would be a joint process which would involve the children as well, because all perspectives and priorities need to be taken into account and each actor has a role to play in dealing with the problems.

Endnotes
1."Yes na" or "yes ke" is Pidgin English. This is a way of emphasizing agreement, similar to: "Of course, yes."
2. The nine year-old-girl said that she had entered the motor car park at Gada Biu as early as 6 a.m. to sell bread when a man and a woman approached her asking to buy bread. They bought two loaves of bread for 40 Naira (about 30 cents) but gave her a two hundred Naira note. When she gave them change, they asked her to keep it and left. Shortly after, they returned and asked her where the public toilet was. She tried to give them directions but they persuaded her to take them there. When she did they said that they didn't like the place and asked her to take them to a bush nearby. When the girl hesitated they gave her a five hundred Naira note. She became suspicious. The woman held her hand and began to lead her on. As she got to the motor car park gate she raised the alarm by calling out and the couple took to their heels.

Irene Isoken Salami is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Jos in Nigeria, Director of the University of Jos’ American corner, and Coordinator of the university’s American Studies program. She is President of the National Association of Women in Academics (NAWACS), Vice President of the Society of Nigerian Theatre Artists (SONTA), Secretary General of the Nigerian PRA Network (NIPRANET), and a Member of the University of Jos Strategic Planning Committee. Her BAHons and MA degrees were in Theatre Arts and her Ph.D. was in Drama in Education. She has a strong commitment to the role that theatre can play in research, education and development programs with women and children.

Henk van Beers has been working on children's rights issues since the late eighties. He is currently working as an advisor on children’s participation for Save the Children Sweden and is based in Hanoi, Southeast Asia and the Pacific Regional Office. From 1995 to 2000 he was involved in capacity building on children's participation and organizational development for organizations assisting street and working children in Kenya. His background is in social work (Bachelor’s) and human rights (Masters) with a specialization in children's rights.

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