Jokes Turn To Grief for the Street Kids

You wade through the streets with a
full stomach feeling like life is honkey dorey so why shouldn’t
theirs be, too. They smile at you and call you “friend,”
“rafiki.”
They joke with you. They ask you for ten bop (some guy
actually asked me for 5000 shillings today!), new shoes and to come
to America with you. You laugh. It’s funny.
 

And then something happens. One of the
beggars points out a baby sleeping under a small bush in the dump.
Her mother, 17 to 20 years old, has a bottle of glue permanently
affixed to her lips. “That’s your baby?” you ask. She nods.
“Sleeping! Haha!” says a man.

Then, you have one kid, John, follow
you around like a puppy for 45 minutes until you have to leave him at
the door of the internet cafe. It’s off limits to him and you know
it. You’re glad to be rid of him and sorry for him at the same time.
You think maybe I could help him even more if I just took him around
everywhere. But you don’t, you walk upstairs and leave him at the
door hoping he understands.

You get upstairs and pull out your
laptop and then see John waiting at the top of the stairs, his
shoulders slumped and a sad expression on his filthy face.

“No John,” you say. “You can’t
be up here. You need to go back.” And you turn your back to him,
wondering if he’ll still be happy to see you tomorrow, wondering if
the boy you’re trying to help will understand your leaving him.

Then, you’re on the way to bus stop to
take a mutatu home and you
see a boy you recognize from weeks ago. You smile and say, “Hi
Charles.” And put your arm around him. He smiles and asks you for
money. You say, “No, not today. Sorry,” because you planned to
be friends for now, not their benefactors He keeps at it until you
have to get in the mutatu.
He hugs you goodbye and you’re happy. Until people start shouting
at you, “Thief! Theif!”

“What?”
you say.

“Check
your bag,” they say. You do and it’s open.

“What
did they take? Who was it?” The mob of mutatu drivers
track down the thief and your camera, handing it back to you in
exchange for a small token of appreciation, 40 bop or something.

“Who
was it?” you ask.

“The
short one. When he was hugging you.”

Something happens
and that nice, fulfilled, full feeling you felt about the street and
about the Street Kids vanishes. Something breaks. Sorrow and pity
and grief fill the cracks and you yearn, really yearn for God’s
Kingdom.

You yearn for a
place where kids don’t have to steal to eat, where you don’t have to
turn your back on them, where mother’s don’t leave their babies under
bushes to sniff glue. You yearn for his Streets made of Gold.

You think, Maybe
this is why we are asked to draw near to the poor, to the thieves, to
the sick, to the mourning, to those in prison. So we can wake up and
realize the world is not Righteous and Just but miserable and wicked
and hungry and narcissistic and hopeless. Maybe it’s so that you can
realize that the way you live your own life leads to the same end,
that this world’s way leads to death.