The Foreign Service Journal, January 2004

that are well-known. Some of the lesser-known human tragedies that I covered occurred in Angola, when it, too, was torn by civil war. Sewer Boys One day, returning from the airport after a visit to one of Angola’s besieged provincial cities, I was riding to my hotel with some aid workers when I thought I saw a child crawling into a drain hole by the side of the road. One of the aid workers said she had heard of such “sewer boys,” and told me they often were seen emerging at dawn. So I returned the next day as the sun was rising and watched as a head popped up from the grimy drain along the curb, followed quickly by two arms. A young boy wearing a filthy T-shirt and tat- tered shorts hoisted himself out and stood on the sidewalk, stretch- ing and yawning. Thirteen-year- old Osvaldo Mingo was followed by several other sleepy-looking boys. Surrounded by flies, covered in sores and coughing, they were probably the most pathetic street children anywhere in Africa. They emerged by day to scrounge through garbage cans for food and scooped water from puddles to drink. People in nearby apartment buildings told me the boys sometimes stole but neighbors also occasional- ly gave them food. Aid workers said some had run away from their homes in the capital. Others, they said, fled the embattled countryside and their parents were prob- ably dead. F O C U S J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 33 But for every entertaining story I have written over the years, there have been far more disturbing ones — the Rwandan genocide, clan warfare in Somalia and the civil war in Sudan.