Last night our team headed out at 9:00pm to go to Children’s Garden, a boy’s ministry that helps kids get off the streets and educate them. We arrived in a dark alley and began playing with the kids that trickled by.
Preparing the food for the feeding
Bowls of food
I plopped myself down on a curve next to a group of teenagers chatting and playing guitar. One of the women smiled at me and asked my name in perfect English. “Maggie” I said, “Hi I’m Grace”; her beauty immediately mesmerized me. I asked how old she was, “23” she said and told me excitedly that she had a seven month old baby. I asked her his name and her eyes lit up—Noah Gabriel!
We began talking about the U.S.A and she giggled as she told me how she would LOVE to go to Hollywood someday and meet Jennifer Lopez.
“I guess that will only be in my dreams” she laughed.
I asked her what she did and she told me; “I’m a call girl, I walk these streets at night." She stopped to judge my face not knowing if she should continue, I smiled at her and she went on. “You know I don’t like my job but I have to for my son, not for silly things,” she said as she jingled her earrings and laughed, “but I need to feed my son.”
She told me how she dreams of having a job and family that her son would be proud of, “he doesn’t want a mother who sleeps with different men every night so I have been praying that God helps me get out–I’m saving money you know.”
I asked her about her parents and she told me she ran away at the age of 12. “I am embarrassed of what I have become, I could never go back now.”
She told me about her father who brought back Mickey Mouse statues from the U.S. “I had the best Mickey collection, you should have seen it.”
I later found her standing next to a young man who was sniffing glue and looked incredibly high. “This is my husband Sherman, well babies dad” she giggled embarrassed. “He is drunk and high already, look at him, I HATE him but he says if I leave him he will take Noah." Sherman was standing next to her swaying back and forth with a blank stare. My heart broke as I looked into both their eyes.
With a heavy heart, we left. Driving back, I couldn’t get the image of her as a child gazing at her Mickey Mouse collection and all her lost dreams out of my head. I began to wish I could see past the lost dreams of a child and picture her the way God does—beyond who she has become, but as an innocent young girl filled with dreams.
Group of street girls
Grace and I
