A 17-year-old boy with a speech impediment who has been at the centre for three years, said he had been sent to the centre because his parents divorced; and there was nobody at home to look after him. He gets bullied at the centre often by other boys who make fun of his speech impediment, and he often feels very sad. He is dreading his next birthday, when he turns eighteen when he would no longer be able to stay at the centre. He did not know where else he could go, and is hoping that he could get a job teaching Qur’an at the Centre once he is no longer a minor. Kudakudhinge Hiyaa Children’s Shelter The Children’s Shelter, Kudakudhinge Hiyaa on the island of Villingili currently houses 57 children aged between two months and twenty-one years. As a matter of policy, the Shelter is meant to host children until they are nine-years-old. The 21-year-old, a girl with special needs, is an exceptional case—she is there because there simply is nowhere else for her to go. This is not to say that all the rest of the children in the Shelter are under nine years of age—there are several children over the age of nine at the centre. As is the case with the centre in Maafushi, acute staff shortages and an extremely limited budget is making the proper functioning of the centre extremely difficult. Currently between 35-40 percent of the Shelter’s budget comes from charitable donations from individuals and businesses. Restricted resources also mean that a wide gap exists between the reality of the centre and the government’s Minimum Standards for Alternative Care Institutions discussed previously in the policy review section. The Minimum Standards demand that children of different age groups and different sexes be kept separate from each other. This is impossible at the Shelter, a four storey building where three floors comprise children’s accommodation areas and one floor is given over to administrative space. There are currently several adolescent children of both sexes being kept on the same floor, creating the very complications and problems that their separation is aimed to prevent. These problems are further compounded by the inadequate number of staff available to look after children. The Minimum Standards require that there be a caseworker assigned to each child, and that there be properly trained and dedicated carers to look after the children. There are currently 57 children and only 27 care-workers employed at the Shelter. At any given period of time, several of them are on annual leave or maternity leave. Thus, there are currently only three care-workers on each floor, and each floor is home to roughly 20 children. The ratio of three staff to every twenty children makes it extremely difficult to deliver proper daily care to the children let alone ensure that all children are provided with mechanisms for participation that are so progressively laid out in the Minimum Standards. Furthermore, none of the staff have had any proper training in childcare, except for short in-house or the job training programmes on childcare conducted by the children’s NGO ARC [Advocating the Rights of Children]42 42 Advocating the Rights of Children (ARC), http://www.arc.org.mv/ 54