Turning to kids ... before they turn to drugs.

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For young people in supportive family and social environments, childhood and adolescence are ordinarily times of exploration, experimentation, growth and a healthy search for identity. But for those from "marginalized" environments, where emotional, physical and educational support is lacking, those times are all too often characterized by vulnerability, abuse and destructive risk-taking.

Within this already marginalized group are the exceptionally vulnerable: street children, refugee and displaced children, indigenous or minority youth, and children of conflict. Too many of these survive under the most oppressive of circumstances: abject poverty, homelessness, family disintegration, hard labour, forced relocation, violence, or worse. The common denominator for all of these children is that they are young and powerless against adult predators.

Any one or any combination of these factors can lure them to abuse illicit drugs and other psychoactive substances. In fact, in stressful environments, the use of drugs by young people often serves a treacherous purpose: to dull abiding physical and emotional pain; to keep awake during long days at work; to relieve gnawing hunger; to allow for sleep on cold ground. Yet, the false comfort of drugs also increases the exposure of these children to major health risks and introduces other equally devastating consequences, including exploitation or sexual and physical abuse.

The phenomenon of street children is not new, but it is on the increase throughout the world as a result of poverty, conflict and turbulent social change. Their total number has been conservatively estimated at between 10 million and 30 million worldwide, depending on how they are defined. Groups of homeless children have been found in large urban areas of developed as well as developing countries: Toronto, New York, Sao Paolo, Cape Town, Bangkok, Manila, Nairobi, Moscow. In fact, almost every country and every city has been affected.

Street children are at the highest risk of developing substance abuse problems and therefore deserve special attention. Different studies have found that between 25 and 90 per cent of street youth abuse substances of one kind or another. In South Africa, 9 out of 10 street children are thought to be dependent on glue - an inhalant that produces vapours with psychoactive properties. The figures - from the World Health Organization (WHO) - are daunting, even staggering, but they don't tell the real story.

Moses Ndongi is now 12, but when he was plucked off the streets of Kisumu in western Kenya at the age of eight, he was already a chronic glue sniffer and so emaciated that the adult who found him was convinced the boy had full-blown AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome). That adult, a supervisor with a Kenyan non-governmental organization (NGO) called "Overcomers Children's Home", took him back to the Home, fed, clothed and nursed him away from glue sniffing and back to health. Hidden in that skeletal frame, his rescuer found, was a bright, caring child who, rather than being sick with AIDS, had instead been slowly dying of substance abuse, hunger and neglect.

With Moses showing natural promise, the Home decided to shift some of its limited resources and send him to a government school. He flourished there, quickly rising to the top of his class. One visitor was so impressed that he made Moses a promise: if the boy kept up with his studies and stayed at the top of his class, then the visitor would buy him a bicycle - a generous deal for a boy yanked from the streets and the hunger-stilling stupor of glue. Moses kept his end of the bargain and then some, and when the visitor presented him with the bicycle, Moses volunteered to help out the Home by doing errands on the bike that on foot would have taken too much time away from the studies of the other children.

According to Chris van der Burgh of the United Nations International Drug Control Programme (UNDCP), Moses has become a guardian and "elder brother" - at the ripe age of 12 - of the newer children who have been taken into the Home's programme. The Home accepts children as young as toddlers and as old as those beginning secondary education. From the streets to role model, rather than doomed, Moses was given a brighter future and, in leading the younger children, has kept the promise of his namesake.

Starting out with a small grant to open up a carpentry shop that would take kids in and equip them with marketable skills, the Overcomers Children's Home, thanks to a second grant from Norway, built its own four-room schoolhouse on land provided by the Kenyan Government. There, they learn the "3 R's" (Reading, Writing and Arithmetic), as well as carpentry, cabinetry and dressmaking, and, using profits...