Tears of the Street

Last week I had the opportunity to spend the week serving at Towers of Hope, a NGO that focuses on providing resources to the homeless, especially homeless youth.   Towers of Hope is located in the heart of Bloemfontein and serves three meals daily.  In addition to providing meals, clothes and food parcels to the homeless of the city, Towers concentrates on rehabilitating homeless youth, or “street kids.”  I spent most of my week meeting many of the homeless youth in the streets, as well as working with some of the teenage boys who are now off the streets.  The week was an eye opening, yet heartbreaking experience.

Every morning Steven, an employee of Towers and a former street kid himself, does his rounds around Bloem.  Over time, he has developed quite a rapport with many of the youth, and knows them all by name.  He would take me to all the usual spots where they spend their days, as well as where they sleep.  The two main areas where the homeless youth sleep are under a bridge in the center of town and in the “white house.”  Both locations are ironically placed and in unimaginably harsh conditions. 

The bridge location is directly down town and right next to a shopping area called ‘Central Park.’  The irony lies just 50 meters away where the Central Park police station is located.  The police used to allow the boys to bathe there until they deemed them “too old to bathe at the police station.”  So now the boys remain unclean, relying on the flow of water under the bridge.  Many of the boys sleep under this bridge, where running water flows from city run-off and drainage.  There are copious amounts of garbage heaps and the only way down or up is to climb the steep stone wall and jump over the palisade fence.  But for more than a dozen teenage boys, this is home.

The “White House” is a place that I will never forget.  Also in the center of the city, it is located in a large plot normally used for the Macufe Festival in September.  Once a large brick house, after an uncontrollable fire it was condemned and abandoned.  There is no roof, no windows and no doors.  But inside, young girls make it their home.  The girls living here, some as young as 13, prostitute themselves at night for survival.  In the waking hours of dawn they have to come back to a house of ruin.  Their rooms, if you could even call them that, are dark, damp and full of soot.  The mattresses are lumps of garbage, and their blankets are tattered and torn.  My heart ached upon seeing this and imagining the daily struggles these teenagers and children have to endure.  As I walked out the front entrance of the house, Steven pointed something out to me.  To our right across the street, loomed a tall and powerful building.  It is the government building for the Department of Social Development, starring down at this structure that embodies so much struggle and pain on the streets of this city.  How could these people go to work every day and peer out their office windows and not do something about this place?  This extreme irony and apathy from the general public sadly encompasses more than just this scene.

As my week continued and I met more and more of the boys of the streets, I started to see them in a more human way.  Unfortunately, the homeless have lost all dignity and humanity.  We don’t see homeless people as people, we simply don’t see them at all.  This is a universal problem, not just a South African one.  But despite the boys seeming to be dangerous, constantly huffing glue, wearing tattered clothes or sleeping under a bridge, I felt their youth.  I could see in their eyes and youthful smiles that they are just boys, many of whom have been abused.  They love playing soccer, dancing and creating art.  They are people.  I constantly thought back to my years as an adolescent, and how much I took for granted but also for how blessed I’ve been.  After experiencing this, I will never see a homeless person the same again. 

Every night since I’ve left Towers I pray for the comfort and peace for the children living on the streets in Bloemfontein.  When I hear the rain, I can feel it as it falls on the boys under the bridge and sweep away their only comforts.  As I huddle under my many blankets at night, I feel the bitter cold on the emaciated bodies of the girls in the White House.  I do not deserve anything I have.  I have been blessed by God’s grace, and I can only pray that His grace will befall the children on the street.  But until then my tears will continue to fall, and my fight for the hope of the poor and marginalized will rage on.