A plastic bag in hand, Alain walks the streets of the Yassa neighbourhood in Douala every morning, looking for scraps of metal to sell. He is 8 years old. This is not a game: it has been his daily routine since his father died three years ago.
The family lives crammed into one run-down wooden room. His mother, weakened by a difficult childbirth, raises four children alone: an 11-year-old, Alain, 8, a 5-year-old sister, and a three-week-old baby. The rent is ten months overdue.
Alain stopped going to school when his father died. Each kilo of scrap metal he sells earns a few dozen to a few hundred CFA francs — enough, he hopes, to buy nappies for his little sister and peanut paste for the evening meal.
His video changed scale within days. Relayed by Canal 2 International, it was shared thousands of times and has racked up millions of views on Cameroonian social media, sparking outrage and calls to help.
In its wake, internet users and public figures announced plans to organise aid. As these lines are written, however, no donation or concrete assistance has been officially documented yet — only the scale of the emotion it stirred is, so far, measurable.
That leaves the simplest, and hardest, question: whether Alain will find his way back to a classroom. For now, it is still on the street, a bag of scrap metal in hand, that he keeps feeding his family.
