Chris Lockhart and Daniel Mulilo Chama - Walking the Bowl: A True Story of Murder and Survival Among the Street Children of Lusaka

[A] transcendent study of the street children of Lusaka, Zambia... Fans of Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Strength in What Remains will flock to this riveting and deeply reported portrait of life on the margins.

Publishers Weekly , starred review

A vivid, unforgettable account of life at the margins of the margins. This book will transport you to a world you didnt know existed but that you will never fully leave behind. Chris Lockhart and Daniel Mulilo Chama have achieved something extraordinary: reporting so deep that youll want to read passages again and again, combined with storytelling so propulsive that youll need to forge ahead to the last page.

Ty McCormick, senior editor of Foreign Affairs and author of Beyond the Sand and Sea: One Familys Quest for a Country to Call Home

An astonishingly beautiful book. Beautiful in its biting reality. Beautiful in its unearthing of lifes deepest, darkest voids. Beautiful in its depictions of land and cityscapes, great and small. Walking the Bowl is one of the most revealing and heart-rending books I have ever read.

Thomas Lockley, coauthor of African Samurai: The True Story of Yasuke, a Legendary Black Warrior in Feudal Japan

A powerful, beautiful book. Lockhart and Chama throw us into the whirlpool of cruelty, solidarity, triumph and resilient survival of street children in Zambia, Africa, telling the beautiful stories of these kids humanity and forcing us to recognize that most are dying much too soon and too hard.

Philippe Bourgois, author of In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio

Told like a picaresque adventure story, Walking the Bowl captures magnificently the spirit of a hard, hard world. An enviable feat of writing and of sympathy.

Jonny Steinberg, author of A Man of Good Hope

A book about the forgotten of the forgotten. A powerful book. No frills, just hard, spare prose. An intimate account of friendship, betrayal and salvation that requires no atlas to engage and enlighten us.

Wolfgang Bauer, author of Stolen Girls: Survivors of Boko Haram Tell Their Story

Walking the Bowl

A True Story of Murder and Survival Among the Street Children of Lusaka

Chris Lockhart
and
Daniel Mulilo Chama

Chris Lockharthas a PhD in medical anthropology from the University of California, San Francisco, and UC Berkeley and is the coauthor of Tupa Tjipombos I Am Not Your Slave: A Memoir. He has worked across Africa as an independent researcher and consultant on a variety of development projects in the areas of global health, human rights and journalism.

Daniel Mulilo Chamais a former street child from Lusaka, Zambia. He currently works as an outreach worker for a consortium of nonprofit organizations as he completes his degree in social work at the University of Zambia.

Table of Contents

If you cant pay it back, pay it forward.

Catherine Ryan Hyde

When we started out, our motivation for writing this book was straightforward enough: to call attention to the growing problem of street children around the world. The total number of children who live and survive directly on the streets is widely debated, but estimates range anywhere from the tens of millions to over one hundred and fifty million. These are staggering figures, so much so that it is difficult to wrap ones head around them in any kind of meaningful way. But therein lies the problem: whether intentionally or not, we have become adept at using numbers to mask the true extent and nature of the worst forms of social suffering, thrusting them forth again and again until, like a vaccine, we have become immune to them. Few issues underscore this problem more than street children.

When you read anything on street children, you are likely to walk away feeling a little conflicted, like you just swallowed a gob of information while still knowing exactly nothing about them.