Five Went Home

“Five youth went home choosing not to live on the streets any longer.”

I sat for a long time this morning pondering these words, lifted from the pages of the Youth Projects Annual Report.

Five. The number, so small, reminded me of the little boy returning the starfish to the ocean one by one, observed by an older person who said he was wasting his time. “There are simply too many”. The little boy, as he threw the next one in, says, “not a waste of time for this one”. Yet numbers bear a heavy weight in this modern world of performance related donor thinking. These five returned home.

Home. They once chose the streets rather than remain at home. The teachers, the social workers, the outreach team, the project staff all know why. Home for them was a place of pain, rejection, violence and poverty. In today’s Cape Times it is reported that a two year old child was raped and murdered at home. For many kids home is a risky place. But five went home, choosing home over the streets.

Choosing. Something happened to them here at the city end of Somerset Road. As I write I hear Eddy Lennitch speaking in the room next door to a group of 56 young people. “Life is full of choices”, he says to them. To this new intake, on only their 4th day of an 8 week course, these words may seem unreal. By the end, they will have learned they no longer have to be swept along like so much rubbish before a brush. They will have learned something of their dignity as people, their great worth; that they are loved and cherished in this temporary home. They will have learned something that gives them a choice. To leave the streets. And go home.

The streets. There is nothing romantic about life on the street. It, too, is a risky place. The Project report says “Drugs and prostitution remain our biggest problems on the street”. On the next line we read, “One young woman, Carmen, died tragically when she was beaten to death by her boyfriend”. Risky indeed.

1,145 is the number of kids the project staff have worked with in the past year. This is a big number, but each one of them is one, lifted up and cherished. Approximately 80 come in off the street with only the clothing they wear on their backs. Around 20 return to the streets, the only place they know as family and community. Some street kids are just too damaged to adjust and so return to what they know and feel comfortable with. Some time later they may have a further go.

But, “Five youth went home choosing not to live on the streets any longer.”