Far From Home:

The decision to leave home involves both elements of “need to leave” and “desire to be elsewhere”. The economic boom has drawn people from far and wide with the promise of jobs in the industries and other sectors. It is a migration that often takes the heart out of communities, disrupting family life and stable relationships and loosening traditional controls on behavior. Men and women try to reconstruct their lives far from home, taking new sex partners during their long absences. Further more many who leave their homes in search of work find that prostitution offers the best and sometimes the only, way of earning a living. Children Caught in the Trap: Children too are being pushed out of their homes by poverty and institutions where they are at increased risk of concentrating HIV. Street children are extremely vulnerable to HIV infection, both because they are outside all formal structures of society such as school, and hence are difficult to reach with health education and health care; and because risk taking is part and parcel of existence on the knife edge of the survival. Many use drugs to escape from the pain- a habit that ranges from sniffing glue to injecting heroin or cocaine. Hard drugs are usually way beyond the means of destitute children, and their biggest risk of contracting HIV comes from sex. Some are at risk of HIV infection through sexual relationships that they get from other youngsters in the street.