A THREE-YEAR-OLD crying child, barely able to make out words is just one of many children who end up under the missing children tents at Durban’s promenade over the peak holiday season. There are at least three tents across the promenade, one each in North, Front and South beach.
One worker who mans one of the tents said that they had over 150 children at their tent last Saturday.
“Some of the children we have had do not even speak IsiZulu or English and it gets a bit hard to communicate with them,” the worker said.
Despite initiating a bracelet policy where children are given tags to wear with their parents contact details, there are a lot of children who end up getting lost without them.
“To get a tag, you have to stand in a long line and some parents just end up not doing it,” said the worker.
Separated children who are not recovered by their parents at the tents are transferred to an overnight centre in Addington Hospital where parents are required to go through a short identification process to recover their children.
“We had two children who were left behind at the overnight centres. We later found out that they were street children so this was more of a social development matter,” he said.
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