‘In that case you have to talk to Ewald. He knows the ropes. He is our boss. He is also called Red.’ The homeless children of Paramaribo, the capital of Surinam, have respect for him. And they are afraid. The story goes that Ewald poked a little boy’s eye out with a pencil. He does as he pleases, Ewald doesn’t go to school, he wanders around and scrapes money together. With his hands he can do anything. Put together a bicycle in three minutes. Or, at an acquaintance’s neighbour, a sweet lady who offers him some food, he might sneakily steal a gold watch. That’s Ewald. He does what he must. Because if you end up on the street as child in Paramaribo you have to be creative. In the small capital, with barely 200.000 inhabitants, the older drifters already control the streets. Street kids who dare to show their face in the centre of Paramaribo are chased away by the elders. The little ones should set up trade elsehwere, is what the older drifters think. Ewald and the others who participate in the Home/Life photo project therefore hang around in the suburbs. They know their way around there. They come from the Uitvlugt district, the name of a former colonial plantation. At night they try to sleep behind the market place. Most of their parents have moved back into the countryside. Often the father has disappeared without a trace. An uncle or an aunt, might keep a look-out, but that isn’t enough.

And the Huize Emmaüs shelter only has room for 19 children. They come from families with eight children on average. ‘So they have to sort things out themselves,’ says project leader Raymond. Like Ewald, his mother is a maid and delivers newspapers to the rich of Paramaribo. They drive around in cars that are far too expensive and everybody knows that something is not quite right there. ‘The customs officer drives around in the latest model Mercedes,’ is the pub gossip. ‘That is wrong.’ And in the meantime the children of Uitvlugt look for a way out. Football and basketball and chasing girls. To dream of a better future is something they don’t really do. Sometimes they hear about distant relatives who have gone to the Netherlands. But otherwise there is very little to arouse their fantasy. ‘They see things around them that they can’t explain,’ says Raymond. ‘What is good or bad? They don’t have any frame of reference.’ One of the boys has got some money left to travel to Paramaribo city on the bus. He wants to take pictures there. Of a boy lying on a car wreck. ‘Taking a rest,’ he later writes as a photo caption.