Street cred

THE little girl in the photograph is a Filipino called Genevieve. She’s six, has a serious sexual infection transmitted directly by her father, is fearfully traumatised and – among many other problems – had to have all her teeth removed.

The not-much-bigger girl is Naomi Tomlinson. She’s 19, just five feet tall and perhaps the most remarkable young lady it has ever been my great good fortune to meet.

Today’s column will have little of the usual frippery, or flippery, or whatever. Readers are urged nonetheless to persevere or, if unable to do so, at least to fast forward to the end to see if there’s a way in which they may be able to help.

Alternatively, they might look at her website. “My name is Naomi, I’m just an ordinary girl,” it begins. “I like the colour purple, baking cakes and shopping. I also love God, love justice, love making a difference.”

There are 85,000 street children like Genevieve, wholly homeless and generally helpless, in Manila alone.

Already Naomi has spent more than a year among them, plans a much longer-term commitment, talks of changing the world one life at a time.

Vulnerable? “I have my phone and my credit card,” she says. It is the bright armour of the young.

SHE was born in Darlington, raised way out on a Scottish limb, spent a couple of months in New Zealand, worked as a chef at the acclaimed (and expensive) Gourmet Spot restaurant in Durham and has acquired an accent that seems almost American.

Her parents now live in Newton Aycliffe, the Reverend David Tomlinson working at St John’s church in Shildon. We drink from mugs with the motif “More tea, vicar?”. He’s a curate; it’s coffee.

As well as having two children of their own, David and Davina have long been foster parents. “I think I would say that our emotions were very mixed when she first went to the Philippines on her own,” says David.

“We wanted to encourage Naomi, of course, but one side of me was extremely scared. I was really worried until she texted to say she’d arrived safely.”

When Naomi was three, the family moved to Campbelltown, that 100- mile cul-de-sac, three-and-a-half hours from Glasgow – and, truth to tell, from almost anywhere else – where her parents ran a refuge for those, says Naomi, needing to escape.

Until high school, she and her brother were educated at home. “I absolutely loved it growing up, we had a freedom we’d never have had in a big place. When we got to high school, I started to think ‘My God, I want to go to the city’.”

They did. Durham. Four years ago, David began training for the Anglican priesthood. Naomi started a cookery course at New College, was named student of the year, withstood the heat at Gourmet Spot.

“Durham just seemed massive to me,” she recalls. “I remember walking down the street with my dad, saying it was so big that I was going to get lost.”

She’d seen nothing. In 2008, having been bored the previous summer, she flew for five weeks to the Philippines to help in a street children’s shelter run by the Reverend Craig Burrows, a friend of her father’s.

Craig’s from Richmond, North Yorkshire, and was recently awarded the MBE.

“I was terrified,” Naomi admits. “I was 17, completely by myself, but they were the most amazing, lifechanging five weeks that ever you could imagine.

“It made me realise how shocking it was, and how unjust. They’d just been born in the wrong place, at the wrong time. I knew I couldn’t go home and do nothing about it. It seems to me that bad stuff happens because people feel they can’t make a difference.”

It still wasn’t as terrifying as having to speak about it all in front of an audience at the Gala Theatre in Durham – but that was to come a little later.

IN the home she helped with everything, from cleaning to nursing. “They asked me to hold a street baby, six weeks old, no clothes. She was a very pretty little baby but looking into her eyes and then looking around at what would be her future – hunger, drugs, most likely some kind of abuse – changed me completely.

“I was shocked from the moment I got there, but it was probably the end of the second week when I knew that it had to be my life.

“There were other babies with no clothes in 40-degree heat, then sleeping on cardboard at night because the pavements were so cold. If the homeless give birth in hospital, they take the baby away.

“One girl grabbed my arm and asked why we were there, because they were second-rate people. I told her they weren’t, they were just unlucky.”

At the end of the five weeks she hired an upstairs room in a McDonald’s, invited around 40 street children to a party – “my gift to thank them for changing my life”. Around 150 turned up.

“Afterwards they were back on the streets, sniffing glue, begging. It just broke my heart.”

Naomi returned, started A-levels, abandoned the course after two months, took a job at McDonald’s and committed herself to raising money and awareness. It was mid- 2009 when, unpaid and unaccompanied, she went back to the Philippines.

THERE are 7,017 islands, 90 million people, 80 dialects. A year ago she began work in a home for sexually abused girls in the Mindanao province.

Mostly the abuse is from family members – fathers, uncles, brothers – like the 13-year-old so seriously assaulted by her uncle that she couldn’t tell anyone for a year.

“I spent a lot of time with her, was with her through all her operations, just tried to show that someone cared,” says Naomi. Her internal injuries were so severe that the girl must now wear a colostomy bag.

Then there was Genevieve. “We just totally bonded. She called me mummy. I tried to tell her that I wasn’t her mummy.

“The girls are remarkably resilient.

They’re usually very scared when they arrive, but within two or three months they’re smiling again.”

Despite it all, she herself – five feet tall, about seven stones wet through – has never felt in danger. “Maybe it helps being small because the Filipinos are a small people.

“When I go into the city on my day off, they point and call out all the time because I’m white, but I’ve never felt threatened.

“Someone said that a teenager should be having fun, but I’ve never been one for going out drinking and partying. I can have fun and make friends in the Philippines, too.”

Twice in the past year, however, she suffered dehydration so badly that she had to spend a week in hospital.

On the second occasion she was so ill that her mum had to fly out to bring her home.

“Those were the only times I was really homesick, that and Christmas.

People say I’m courageous, but the country is beautiful and the people are beautiful. There’s nowhere on earth I’d rather be.”

THE plan’s changed a little.

Without A-levels, she’s now begun an access to nursing college course before starting a nursing degree next year. Nursing skills, she says, are where the need is greatest.

“I can do academics, I enjoy writing, but this is just a means to an end.”

In the meantime, she’s fund-raising, again talking – cogently, captivatingly – to any group who’ll listen.

Once graduated, she’ll head back to the street children of the Philippines, perhaps eventually to run her own home.

Last weekend she also started the Triple E Trust – it stands for Encouraging, Empowering, Enabling – so that money could be paid directly into that account.

Naomi would greatly welcome donations, invitations to give talks or to provide further information. The email address below is another reference to her diminutive stature. Her street cred’s colossal.

■ Naomi Tomlinson can be contacted by email at lilnaomi03:gmail.com. Her website is childrensmile.co.uk