TEHRAN — Atefeh is one of the younger members of Iran's merchant class. Her sales territory is the notorious traffic jams of north Tehran. She moves in on potential clients when the light turns red, pressing her face to car windows, cocking her head to one side and putting on a plaintive face.
At 12, she isn't as good at plaintive as some of her younger competitors, two boys who are hawking Koranic inscriptions and balloons just up the street. Sometimes her face looks more furious than sad. But she still can clear 55 cents a day selling her packages of pink-and-red strawberry chewing gum to bored and surly drivers.
A decade ago, street children were rare in Iran, with its long traditions of charity for the poor, government aid programs and strong family connections. No more.
Nongovernmental organizations estimate that the number of street children in Iran, officially listed at 60,000, has grown in recent years to 200,000 or more. Many of them are the offspring of Afghan refugees. Others come from Iranian families who have slipped, through unemployment, drug addiction or illness, into the populous ranks of the urban poor.
Social activists say high unemployment, ballooning inflation and misdirected government subsidies have left many families unable to support themselves without turning to their children to help with earnings. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, elected two years ago on a pledge to deliver Iran's oil wealth back to the nation's dining tables, has done little so far to improve the lot of Tehran's poorest families.
"In the early days of the revolution, I remember the slogan was, 'Welfare, food and health for everyone,' " said Bahram Rahimi, director of training at the Children's House of Shoosh, a school in south Tehran that provides part-time instruction to street children too busy working or too poor to attend normal schools. "Now everyone understands that privatization is the name of the game."
Although the government has generally made inroads in reducing the poverty rate, rapidly rising prices have reversed many of the gains, and sociologists estimate that 16 million Iranians live in poverty.
The Children's House stands in the middle of a commercial block in one of the most crowded districts of Tehran.
Inside, its corridors are lined with cheerful, hand-painted murals and its classroom chairs are arranged in haphazard clusters, testimony to a young clientele unaccustomed to sitting still in neat rows.
