Homeless youth exist. Teenagers living on the streets, under bridges, in abandoned buildings; with pimps, with babies, with the scars of abuse, sexual molestation, mental illness; without a family, without an education, without an identity other than surviving.
I work with these kids each week, either on the street or in the StandUp for Kids center in downtown Atlanta. I try to reverse a loveless lifetime of disappointment and tragedy. I share my experiences with my friends and family, if only because I have to unload, decompress, complain, get angry, educate and explain why I am exhausted.
Affluent people (to me, anyone with a loving family, stable housing, steady income and solid opportunities is affluent) are curious about homeless youth. Don’t we have social services? Foster homes? Public education? I am constantly informing those I meet about the massive, gaping hole in these services. Basically, poverty swallows millions of faceless teens and spits them out as prison-bound statistics only to become grey bearded men in food lines and barefoot women in public transportation stations.
They are not horror stories, or rare, tragic oddities far removed from us. These are the lives of millions of people who brush by us on the sidewalk, make small talk on the train or catch our eye in a park. These people laugh, dream, care and try to love just as we do. They offer perspective, heart, experience and spirit that has deeply enriched my life. I share it in hopes that you, the reader, can get over your guilt, queasiness and judgment and soak in the lessons of the street.
This is a quote by Booker T. Washington that motivates me to keep doing the work, practice the patience, drop my assumptions, and hope:
Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.
