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Behind the marketplace in Kawangware, a slum west of Nairobi, Kenya, a group of homeless teenage boys often gathers at a vacant lot called Zion. The boys are called chokoras—scavengers—in Swahili, and even the poorest shack dwellers look down on them. Until five years ago, a teenager whom I will call Alex belonged to this group. Alex walks slowly and confidently, swaying slightly and puffing out his chest. He rarely stops smiling, and he has a wide face with large features. Friends call him jolara—destroyer—for his enthusiasm in a tussle. Now eighteen years old, Alex was a street child from age eight to age twelve, collecting bottles, running errands, and stealing purses for a living.

Alex's father died in 1998. In 2002, he moved out of his mother's house. He remembers the day he decided to leave home. "It was on Tuesday, it was market day," Alex said. "There was a guy who told me to carry some luggage for him. When I carried that luggage, he just gave me thirty shillings," about fifty cents. The easy money impressed him, he said, and he realized that what he earned on the street could help his mother. He left home quietly in the middle of the night, afraid that his mother might wake up and talk him out of it.

Alex found street life more difficult to relinquish than he had expected. He did not return home in the evening for fear that the stigma of street work would follow him. "I was addicted to the street life," he said. "I thought if I go home, it would be embarrassing." For much of his four years on the street, he slept on the floor of a market stand that was unused at night; for a lucky few months, a middle-aged woman allowed him to sleep on the floor of her shack.

Former street boys describe the street as an addiction, an immutable pattern for their lives. Some shelters and orphanages have space, but many are full, and few enticing. The street offers practical solutions to pressing problems. Carrying someone's luggage finances a meal; stealing a bag can provide a month of leisure. Money brings not only food, but independence.

Kawangware, the area of Nairobi that Alex calls home, is a maze of shacks pieced together from wood poles and sheets of corrugated iron. Open sewers run between the structures, and discarded plastic bags, corncobs, and condoms litter the mud paths. Fruit stands are everywhere, selling avocados, mangoes, tomatoes, and bananas. Street vendors roast maize and sausages over charcoal fires, and tiny stands sell pre-paid credit for cell phones.

The concentration of population—sixty percent of Nairobi's three million inhabitants, live in shantytowns like Kawangware, which together cover less than five percent of Nairobi's land area—means that the dirt paths of slums always buzz with crowds. There is a curious vitality in the startling juxtapositions of poverty and modernity. Sheep and goats wander past an internet café housed in a corrugated iron shack; a truck towing a billboard for the latest Harry Potter film overtakes a pushcart along one of the slum's few paved roads.

Off the roads, Kawangware looks like a campsite gone wrong. Temporary shacks and makeshift latrines have become permanent by necessity, and as people stay longer, ditches get deeper and piles of trash grow, with no solution in sight. Fires line the paths, mostly burning trash, which is not collected by the city. During the dry season, the smoke mixes with dust turned up by the vans and trucks that pass along the dirt roads, coating clothes and skin. When it rains, the dust quickly turns to putrid mud, churned by the constant flow of foot traffic and covering the shoes of pedestrians.

Nairobi's "estates"—non-slum areas—are made up of walled-in, guarded compounds. Street crime has created a garrison mentality among wealthy Kenyans and the foreigners who staff Nairobi's embassies, NGOs, and U.N. agencies. (Nairobi houses the United Nation's Africa headquarters, as well as the world headquarters of the United Nations Environmental Program.) Reliable crime statistics are difficult to come by, but one recent survey found that a third of all Kenyan firms fell victim to a crime in 2002 alone.

Demographic change has fueled the crisis. In 1948, Nairobi was home to only 120,000 people; today, it contains three million. High birth rates and low life expectancy coincide to create a median age of 18.6 years—in other words, nearly half of all Kenyans are minors. In the move from rural Kenya to Nairobi's slums, families often fall apart, leaving Kenya's growing population of children with an incentive to seek food and companionship on the street. The AIDS epidemic, which has created 650,000 orphans in Kenya, has exacerbated the problem. (Most AIDS orphans receive help from extended family or community, but those who are abandoned make up a particularly vulnerable subset of street children.)

No one knows how many street children there are in Nairobi. Estimates fall between 25,000 and 200,000, and systematic research faces serious counting problems: street children rarely attend school, and they come from broken families unlikely to fill out household surveys. Only about one quarter of all street children are girls; many girls are married off at an early age and others can earn money at home, washing clothes for a living. Those who do end up on the street suffer the worst abuses and often become prostitutes well before they are teenagers. Street boys are the face of child homelessness in Nairobi; girls are rarely visible during the day.

Following categories established by UNICEF, aid workers distinguish between children "on the street," who work outdoors but return home to sleep, and children "of the street," who are homeless. Few children, however, fit neatly into these categories.

* * *

When I met Charles, another former Kawangware street boy (I use pseudonyms for all current and former street boys), for a tour of his homes on the street, he was wearing new-looking jeans, a windbreaker, and a ski cap. Many young people living in slums are surprisingly well-dressed, assembling wardrobes from cheap second-hand European and American clothes. Distinguished by a wiry build and a quiet, serious manner, Charles spends his free time on the soccer field, where he has been successful enough to make a mid-level team, one step below the Kenyan Premier League. (Soccer is wildly popular in Kenya, and for about thirty cents, you can watch British soccer games on satellite TVs installed in shacks throughout Kawangware.)

Charles never met his father. He grew up with his mother, who barely made a living by washing clothes. At the age of five or six, Charles often went to school hungry, and when he passed the marketplace, he scavenged for discarded mangoes and bananas. He got to know the children who lived around the edges of the market and soon found himself doing odd jobs, cleaning fruit stands in exchange for food, and skipping school. "I was a bit small. Bad company. Ran away," he said.

He ran away, but not entirely; he became neither "of the street" nor "on the street." He slept at home maybe two nights a week, but then, fleeing hunger, spent the rest of the week sleeping in a plastic-fiber sack in a corner of the marketplace under the corrugated metal awning of a concrete storefront labeled "Fashion Center." He woke early to reach trash piles ahead of others, and between and six and eight a.m. he sorted enough charcoal from the trash to fill a bag that he could resell for fifty to seventy-five cents. On market days, Tuesday and Friday, he loitered at the market, offering to guard the cars of wealthy shoppers, normally in exchange for about thirty cents. That bought him one meal and half a bottle of glue.

Like nearly all street boys, Charles distracted himself with drugs. Some boys smoke marijuana, and others drink chang'aa, an illegally brewed "wine" that is sometimes toxic. (In 2005, a batch of chang'aa that was nearly 95% methanol killed fifty-one people in Machakos, a town in Kenya's Eastern Province.) But most street children, like Charles, sniff glue. Eight-ounce bottles go for about seven cents; you can recognize a street boy not only by his filthy clothes, but also by the glue bottle that remains stuck in place in the corner of his mouth, his eyes glazed over from the high.

Charles said he thought glue made him short of breath on the soccer field and Alex, along with Charles, said glue reduced his appetite. Some types of glue can, in the long term, damage the liver, brain, heart and kidneys. Though there is little evidence that glue is physically addictive, almost all former street children say they had trouble giving it up. Glue warms, fills, and distracts them. (In Zambia, where hungry street children cannot afford even glue, they sometimes sniff a noxious mixture of fermented sewage as a replacement.)

Glue vendors in Kawangware keep a low profile, but Alex led me to one former vendor, who agreed to speak about glue dealing, but did not give his name. He entered the business when he was nineteen, saving the money he earned by pushing a handcart to buy glue wholesale downtown and resell it to street boys in Kawangware. Along the way, he used his own product, inhaling five bottles of glue a day; at the age of twenty-three, his teeth are already dark yellow. Alex told me that the vendor had once been "the most dangerous man in Kawangware."

A brief stint in jail caused the vendor to rethink his line of work. He felt guilty about what he was doing, he said. "I come to realize my talent," he told me, eagerly waving a manila envelope and saying that he hoped to become a professional hip-hop musician. (He goes nowhere without the envelope, which contains a CD of his music.) At the same time that he gave up dealing, he stopped using glue himself. He said giving up glue was most difficult for its social, not physical, effects. "When my friends, when they see me without glue, they even don't talk to me because they think I have nothing to say when I'm not using the glue," he said.

Charles was seven when he met a social worker named Agasto Githaiga. He didn't quite trust Githaiga or his offers of a life off the street. He changed his mind, however, when he and his friends had an unpleasant encounter with the police. "We were sleeping at night when I felt someone touching me like this," Charles said, placing his hand on my shoulder. "Then I was like, 'Who is this?' I open my eyes and they told me, 'Shhh! Don't shout!' They don't want me to shout, because the others, they run away. Then they arrested us, and they put us in a police vehicle. Then they take us in Muthangare police station. They disciplined us—they beat us a lot. They said, 'If we see you again in the street, we'll arrest you." Charles knew that meant he would end up in a state-run children's home, and the threat made an impression on him. "Some people said that place is very, very bad," Charles said. "We are afraid of going there."

Following Githaiga's advice, Charles gradually gave up glue and moved into a dorm-like home run by a small NGO called "Light and Power." Githaiga told me that Charles was uncannily determined to improve his soccer game. "He doesn't talk too much, but he has what we call 'bigger mission,'" Githaiga said. Charles never agreed, however, to return to school. He said his heart was not in it. "They want to take me to school, but I say no, I'm not going to school." Githaiga could do little to influence him. "If they force, we run away," Charles said.

Charles's experience with the police is not unusual. The boys standing around Zion when I first visited in late July told me that they are regularly beaten by the police. Tom, a lanky 19-year-old with an easy smile and a prematurely wrinkled face, spoke for the younger boys, and said the police came by two or three nights a week simply to drive the boys out, beating stragglers. "What we need is love," he said. "We need to be treated like other people. People here treat us like outcasts."

Kenya Deputy Commissioner of Police Christine Mutua told me the boys must have been lying. "They don't want their secret to be known, how they are operating," she said. Now in her second year as Director of Child, Gender and Community Policing, Mutua enlisted as a police officer in 1971 and rose gradually through the ranks to her current position. We spoke in her office, where the walls are covered with posters on children's rights, with slogans like, "Smart girls say no to FGM" (Female Genital Mutilation). Behind me, a muted television was tuned to the Cartoon Network, and the conversation was frequently interrupted by visitors and phone calls, none of which disturbed Mutua's good humor. She insisted that policemen only use force if children resist arrest. "They are not beating them, but they are assisting them," she said. Some do not want to leave the street, she said, and they struggle when police round them up. "They resist, because they want that freedom," she added. "Some of them, they are spoiled children."

Indeed, many street boys are petty criminals. Alex admitted that he had once been a thief. On a gray afternoon in early August, he led to me to a corner along Arkwings Kodhek Road in Hurlingham, a business district. Two banks with guarded ATMs were nearby; across the street was a line of upscale shops, including a French bakery and a shop called Lady Myra Cosmetics. A group of three boys stood at the entrance to the shopping strip, waiting, Alex told me, for the opportunity to snatch a bag. A few years earlier he had stood in the same place with a few other boys, guiding shoppers into parking spots in exchange for tips, holding out for a good chance at a bag. They worked together; one grabbed the bag, then tossed it behind to his partner, confusing the victim. They then ran across the main road down a smaller, unpatrolled street. A subtle ethical code governed their conduct; if a victim gave up her bag without struggle (they mostly targeted women), they would not touch her. But if anyone resisted, they considered themselves justified in taking revenge: they beat the victim "thoroughly." They acted in daylight in the view of several private guards. Sometimes the boys gave the guards small kickbacks, but usually they simply assumed that guards wanted nothing to do with the law.

Mutua said police officers had orders to separate children "in need of care" from those "in conflict with the law." In practice, though, police sometimes take matters into their own hands. One Nairobi police officer, who spoke under the condition of anonymity, said he had never seen a street child beaten, but added that police need to use their best judgment when dealing with wayward children. Of the children, he said, "Sometimes you find these people doing wrong things." When the crime is small, he explained, police might resort to "slapping" instead of taking a child to a cell.

"Kenyan society," the policeman said, "they have a negative attitude towards the police." Transparency International reported in August that the police continue to be perceived as the most corrupt institution in the country, a distinction the force has earned for six years running. Kenya's other institutions are hardly free of corruption; according to Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index, only twenty of 179 countries are more corrupt than Kenya.

Abuse of street children is rarely reported and difficult to prove, but human rights advocates, as well as street children themselves, say that it has not disappeared. The U.S. State Department and the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child have seconded these reports. Alex once showed me a long and deep scar across his scalp, and said that a policeman had caused it. Despite official repudiation of violence toward children, "the security personnel of the City Council keep on arresting them, keep on beating them," said Kenneth Ambetsa, Deputy Director of the Kenya Alliance for Advancement of Children's Rights.

* * *

Only around fourteen percent of Nairobi street children are children "of the street." Most return to some sort of home at night. Following a flurry of concern about street children in the late 1980s and early nineties, sociologists have begun to argue that the distinction between children "on" and "of" the street does not adequately describe the variety of worlds that street children inhabit. It's hard, for example, to decide what kind of street child Alex was while the owner of a fruit stall allowed him to sleep on the ground under the stall's metal roof.

Leah Ambwaya, Executive Director of Childlife Trust, an umbrella organization that supports over 200 Children's Charitable Institutions in Kenya, said she categorizes children by their motives for entering the street. A few children are seduced by the freedom of the street, she said, but most are pushed there against their will, by abuse, orphanhood, or desperate poverty. Understanding those reasons, according to Ambwaya, is the first step toward rehabilitation.

Kenneth Ambetsa, of the Kenya Alliance for Advancement of Children's Rights, urges social workers to pay attention to the amount of time that children have spent on the street. Some children, he said, attend school throughout the year, and take to the streets during vacations. Others, like Alex and Charles, spend a few years at a time on the street. The most intractable cases are born on the street, the children of homeless parents. Most rehabilitation programs, according to Ambetsa, help "marginal cases"—children who have not spent much time on the street. Social workers tend to abandon long-term street children as a lost cause.

To help those children, and even children less badly off, Ambetsa recommends a battery of social programs. "You need a series of interventions," he said, counting off doctors, psychologists, teachers and social workers on his fingers. In Kenya, a country thirty-three times poorer than the Unites States, that's an unaffordable proposition. Ambetsa recognizes that the multi-step rehabilitation he calls for will not become available anytime soon, but he says that less thorough programs will do less good.

Ambwaya is more optimistic about small, under-funded programs, emphasizing the role of individuals. Tiny projects can be effective on a shoestring budget, she said. "The children get so much love that it replaces tangible resources."

In other words, successful rehabilitation programs not only improve boys' standard of living—most accomplish that—but also realign their social incentives. A few years ago, Agasto Githaiga, the Kawangware social worker, founded the Kawangware Street Children and Youth Project, where both Charles and Alex now work full time. The "project" is a paper-bag workshop staffed by thirty-two college-aged former street children. They assemble screen-printed bags from sturdy brown paper stock and paper glue, and share in the profits from the sale of bags, which are sold to hotels and tourist shops. The workshop runs on the good humor of its employees, several of whom told me that they see Githaiga and the other leader of the project, Morris Auka, as fathers.

Githaiga complained that Nairobi lacks "child-friendly" rehabilitation centers. "Most of the children's centers specialize in caging children," he said. Where children feel at ease, the right kind of rapport spreads through a rehabilitation center, and reformed boys rehabilitate newcomers. "If the group is friendly, they change automatically," Githaiga said.

* * *

To reach Umoja, an eastern suburb of Nairobi, I caught a van from the center of town. Public transportation in Nairobi exists in the form of a fleet of worn Nissan Caravans, most with tattered upholstery and grimy floors. Known as matatus, the minivans are privately owned, but run along numbered routes. A conductor operates the sliding door of the van, leaning out and displaying the number of available seats with the fingers of one hand. During the day, the vans come every minute or two, attracting riders with jerry-rigged speakers, often tuned to radio stations playing American hip-hop.

In Umoja, grey cinder-block apartment buildings, reachable by dirt roads, are surrounded by maize fields. The Daraja Rescue Project, a few hundred yards from the matatu stop, is a concrete building in a tiny compound accessible through a wooden gate. The walls are covered with the paintings of street children; the project hopes to help children by letting loose their creative potential. In the group's greatest success story, it helped train several former street children as acrobats; they are now on tour in Spain.

Felix Wanzala, the head of Daraja, is a tall man from Western Kenya, near the border with Uganda. He pauses before responding to questions, but speaks at length. He often invokes patience as the basis of his relationship with street children. Describing his work, he offered to show me a "base" in Umoja—an area where homeless boys and young men gather to sort plastics, socialize, and play soccer.

Wanzala led Holly Walker, a British volunteer at the project, and me to a nearby field. We walked single-file along a narrow path, with maize on either side, the ground covered by the plastic bags that seem to blanket Nairobi. As we continued, the smell of garbage became stronger; after a few minutes, we reached a clearing strewn with bottles, cans, and larger plastic containers, separated into piles by type of glass or plastic. In the middle of the clearing stood two poles, joined by a beam across the top, supporting a hanging scale. As decoration, ads for the Motorola Razr hung from both poles. A few yards away, two men sat preparing the afternoon meal. One held onto a discarded skin, rolled into a ball, as the other stretched it, cutting off small pieces, and dropping them into a cut-off plastic jug. Wanzala leaned in to squeeze a bit of cartilage and urge the men to discard it. They did, calling two small, thin dogs to fight over the scrap.

The men greeted us by extending their fists to be met by ours. One of the young men not cooking stood up and staggered over to meet us. His eyes were glazed over, and a small container of glue hung from his lips, stuck in place. The youth's stomach was swollen, and Wanzala playfully poked at it; he later said it might have been swollen from malnutrition, worms, or both.

A hundred yards away, in a second clearing, where the grass had been gradually worn away to form a dirt field, a group of fifteen boys played an energetic game of soccer. About half the boys had shoes; the others played in bare feet. All were coated in dirt from the field. Still, the contrast between the vigorous, attentive soccer players and their dazed glue-sniffing comrades could hardly have been sharper.

A few years ago, this field was a "no-go zone," Wanzala said. When he began the Daraja project, Wanzala was not sure how to approach the street children. They were widely known as criminals, he added, and for several years, no one dared to get off the matatu at the stop closest to Daraja. "I was informed by the perception of the community that these are thugs," Wanzala said. When he first ventured into the field, many of the children were aggressive. "They would cow you with accounts of exploits, their criminal life, what they'd done," he said. "They wanted to portray that picture of a tough guy."

At the beginning, though they shook hands with Wanzala, they spoke little. It was an insular community. "They were in these structured groups with a gang leader called 'Best Commander,'" Wanzala said. "There was a chain of command." Wanzala's deliberate and relaxed persona, his lack of need for immediate results, slowly wore them down. Of the children's mistrust, he said, "You need to get around that to get the story. It can take years, years of close contact."

The turning point, according to Wanzala, came when the boys allowed him to play soccer with them. It gave them something in common. As at the bag-making project in Kawangware, the decisive breakthrough was a social one. Desperation does not keep the boys from analyzing their condition and caring fiercely—perhaps irrationally—about symbols of social inclusion. "Systematically they were seeing for the first time themselves being appreciated," Wanzala said.

Street boys accept chronic humiliation, but retain a bitter pride; grim self-reliance is part of their identity. Rehabilitated boys say that the emotional traces of the street linger in their system, even when supported by a group like Daraja. Thomas, a curious and articulate twenty-year-old who recently graduated from high school, said his own rehabilitation was a struggle. The fifth of nine children, he grew up in poverty, and things fell apart when his father began to drink. "Because he was the breadwinner in the family," Thomas said, "now we had nothing left to eat." He first left home in the company of four brothers. "It was gradual," Thomas said of his initiation into street life. "We had spent a couple of days without food...we decided to go out and look for food and some money." The brothers collected scrap metal from the morning until the late afternoon, bringing it to a dealer who offered five cents per kilogram. On a good day, they found seven to ten kilograms of metal—and had thirty-five to fifty cents to spend on food. I asked Thomas how they survived. "We were hungry," he told me, saying that the food he could afford barely allowed him to go on collecting the next day. "Actually it was just something to push you," he said. (In Kenyan English, "to push" means to struggle through; a Kenyan staple food, sukuma wiki—shredded fried kale—literally means "push the week.")

In three or four years the boys discovered that they could collect and earn more in nearby Umoja, and while there, Wanzala found them through a local church. Thomas was an immediate candidate for rehabilitation. He had never used glue or marijuana, and at fourteen, he was still young. Thomas can't remember the moment when he decided to leave the street for good. "It's not a decision you can make immediately," he said. Wanzala described him as an eager student, looking through books and trying to decode them long before he had been taught to read. "Unlike other boys, he was consistent," Wanzala said. Given the choice between school and acrobatics training, Thomas chose school.

At boarding school, he found it difficult to adjust. He said he had not only internalized the hostility of the street, but had come to take his autonomy for granted. "When I was in the street, I depended upon myself," he said. Relying on someone else seemed dangerous, and he missed the small freedoms of street life. "In the street, if you have money, you can get anything you want to eat," he said.

It's not obvious to an outsider that a street child, addicted to glue, chronically hungry, and lacking shelter, cares whether he eats ugali (a ubiquitous kind of firm polenta) or matoke (boiled and mashed unripened plantains), but most do. Alex twice described to me in detail what he used to eat for each meal of the day. He cared about eating not only because he sometimes went hungry, but also because meals presented him with choices. Wealthy people define themselves by choosing cars and houses; street children, who devote nearly their entire income to food and drugs, define themselves with their choice of ugali and glue.

Pity—a natural reaction to the sight of street children—prevents outsiders from seeing the social details of their lives. Materially desperate as they are, street children care deeply about immaterial things.

When I asked street children what they needed most, the boys nearly always gave a familiar answer: "love." I realized gradually that this was not only an appeal for sympathy, but also a way of saying that destitution had made them care more, not less, about small symbols of independence and respect: ordering from a menu, shaking hands with adults, and deciding what patch of ground to settle down on for the night.