Paul Calvert spoke with Derek Marshal

Derek: Yes, we have large issues, both with alcohol and drugs. They are some of the issues we are trying to educate about and that is the reason we work with younger kids.

Paul: What age are children and youth getting involved in drugs and alcohol?

Derek: I would think from early secondary school. They begin secondary school at the age of 12; so I would think by the age of 12-14 they are already getting into these behaviours that can become addictive.

Paul: So when you get these children coming into your skate park you are keeping them out of a bad environment.

Derek: Yeah we try to always use the phrase, diversionary youth engagement. We are trying to engage them with other activities that keep them away from these places. A lot of it is from the boredom factor, so keeping them actively engaged physically and mentally is part of the aim of what we are about.

Paul: Not only do you have a skate park you also have a couple of coffee shops. Tell us about them.

Derek: The coffee shops are businesses that we have set up to support our work. We have a number of projects in Uganda and another very poor country. We have had about 20 year's involvement with the local Ugandan people. We wanted to find a mechanism to be able to support some of their projects and so we have started two coffee shops near the city where I live and 100% of the profits from both these coffee shops once they are fully supported will all go towards our work. That work is through a charity called Capstone Projects and that will then feed into the work in Uganda.

Paul: You have a big work in Africa. What do you do there?

Derek: We started work in Africa in about 1989. We work with a church based project about 30 miles from the capital of Uganda. We are working in very poor areas and one of the issues we wanted to try and work with was how could we help resource the local community? What is the need in the local community? Out of the needs that have been identified by the Ugandans there are four current projects that we help finance. We have a small hospital and an orphanage for former street children, because that is a big issue with orphans in Uganda. We also have a skills training centre to help train up the older boys and give them something that could help them to be self sustainable in the future and our latest project has been micro-finance loans, aimed at the village women to allow them to start up their own businesses.

Paul: You mentioned that there are a lot of street children, have many of these children become orphans because of aids?

Derek: Yes, in Uganda at the moment the population is 32 million and approximately 16 million of them are young people and of that 16 million, two million are orphans. That has been a combination of the civil war and after the civil war finished we then moved on into the aids epidemic that ravished the country. There is a whole missing generation. Where the children would have been absorbed into the extended family, now they are finding that there is a section of the community that is not there.

Paul: Do you have children that have been born with aids as well?

Derek: Yes, there are many children born with aids. Currently in our little centre we have about 50 children and we have had about 27-28 others that we have managed to put into extended families.

We are working with about 80 former street children and frighteningly the average life expectancy in Uganda of a street child is 14. Therefore many of the children that we have worked with over the past six or seven years would be dead today.