Alone in the street at midnight...

It´s almost midnight and I´m sitting on our usual internet-café El Cyber right across from the plaza. Outside there are a coupple of 6-7 year old kids playing. A normal monday night here in Iquitos. I´ve gotten used to seeing kids in the streets at any hour of the day (or night) , but it still moves me. These are kids who are outside because their parents don´t care, because it´s better than staying at home with drunk parents or maybe no parents in the house, or kids who can´t go home before they have earned enough money. Kids who need someone who cares, someone who worries, gives limitations and who loves them. I always tell "my kids" to go home and go to bed when I meet them late at night, sometimes they nod and say they´ll be going home soon, but then I´ll see them again an hour later. For me who only have known these little angels 6 months and allready love them, it´s impossible to understand how their parents can be so, well I can´t find a suitable word to cover it...but imagine that you have a 5 year old kid, and you don´t care if she is alone in the street at 2 o´clock in the morning, you don´t worrie what can happen to her or what see might see. I always thought that the love parents have for their kids is the strongest kind of love, and something universal, no matter where you are from, and if you are rich or poor. But what I have seen here makes me question it. Can it be so that the poverty and all the social problems that comes with it destroyes this love? That the everyday problems takes the focus, and that everything else becomes less important and makes love and sentiments a luxury you can´t afford? If that even partly true, that´s one of the sadest consequenses of the worldwide unjustice called poverty.