Streets of Pain... And Hope

It's Friday night on Queen Street, the road is bustling with taxis, cyclists and shoppers, the restaurants are full. We dip into the shelter doors, and get ready to spend the evening sharing a meal and giving the women who call this shelter home manicures. For three hours, we sit and chat, talking about our hometowns, the weather, and listening to sometimes schizophrenic conversations. As we drive back to the church where we will crash on the floor for the night, I ask the girls what impressions were left on them after the night. "They're just regular people" they tell me, struck by the face of humanity that is so often overlooked when we think of those who experience poverty and homelessness.

I (Danielle) just returned Sunday from another Project Serve experience with three of our young women from Collingwood, and fourteen other youth and leaders from the Huntsville and Shelburne satellites. This is my third Project Serve trip to Toronto, the first for the majority of participants. During our 48 hours in the city we partnered with the Salvation Army in their shelters and their vans that serve hot breakfasts and reach out to youth on the street, we joined a number of churches in the downtown core who house shelters in their halls and basements, joined a group of Sisters who offer subsidized housing, community gardens, and adult drop-in programs, and we handed out sandwiches throughout the downtown streets.

Many of the youth who joined us this past weekend come from rural towns. They come from different socioeconomic and family backgrounds. Some of them have what we sometimes refer to as the 'R.W.K.', or rich white kid syndrome, and for them, this trip blows their world wide open. It isn't an easy trip, we give up our ipods and cell phones, relinquishing our money and debit cards, and sleeping on a floor instead of our pillow-top mattresses. On Sunday, I had an opportunity to ask the girls who came with me how this trip had impact on them. They wondered how they would integrate what they had experienced into life at home, knowing that the things we complain about and take for granted (perhaps a better word would be 'exploit' sometimes) were in a new light after this trip. They felt a need to become active in the issues of poverty and homelessness. And they understood the depths pain and of joy that many on the street experience. Pain from unimaginable circumstances and issues in life, and joy from simple things that allow them to get through the day, or from lives that don't have so much peripheral junk that the important things in life are lost.

The challenge that we left them was with the words 'justice' and 'compassion', and those begin in the lives of an individual who allows their gut to be torn apart so that they are moved to action. We've had ten youth from The Door Youth Centre in Collingwood participate in the Project Serve trip to Toronto. That is a pretty good starting point to instill change in our centre and our community, I think.