Wild Child

Tonight we went on an unofficial walking tour of Jerusalem--from Jaffa gate to the Golden gate, down the Via Dolorosa. It was my first time really going into the Arab Quarter of the Old City, and whoa, sights to see. What really caught me was the amount of young children, many under the age of 10, and a large amount under the age of 5 (!), wandering the streets in groups after dark.

There was a small confrontation between some Arab boys (around 10 years old) and a small, possibly Sudanese, girl and boy who looked around 6 or 7 with a child of about 2 or 3. The boys wanted to pet the fluff on the baby's head, and not in a nice way.
Then there were the slightly older boys running in front of cars with a blond baby in a buggy.

And the laffa maker. A man shaped the dough and the kids pulled the hot bread from a smoking dome over a fire. Maybe that was normal, but it looked like a scene of child slave labor from a movie like Slumdog Millionaire.

I should probably also mention that this was not a slum. There were no rags or lack of food. These were affluent potential hooligans.