A night on the street
Thursday the 20th of May 2010
During the last 4 months I have been volunteering full time as a social educator at the TLC Outreach Project in Table View. I decided to spend a night on the street, to experience the life of the street boys...This is how it went.
Tuesday evening I went out with the other TLC street workers at 18.30 pm. We found about 15 of the boys behind Cubana, and after they have had a bible lesson and a pray, I turned from being a street worker to become a street boy, with only the clothes I was wearing, and the same sleeping bag as the other street boys got last week. The street workers gave us all some hot soup and brown bread, before I left with 5 street boys (the age 16 - 22 y.o.), to sleep next to one of the toilets at the beach front in Blaauwberg. Even though I know the guys pretty well, I suddenly felt very alone. I 'only' know them from the TLC-office and from the programmes we are running, where they follow our rules but now I was in their hands, and I have heard a lot of stories about, what's happening to the new boys on the street... I trusted the guys I was going to sleep together with, but I also knew that you're never 100% safe on the street. A lot of the other street boys found out, that I was going to sleep on the street that night, and they laughed and said they would come by. They are all very nice guys but I really didn't feel like all of them joining in...
As we got to the beach front, a minivan was parked just next to the toilet...We took out our sleeping bags and made our 'beds'. We spoke about the different gangs in Cape Town, they showed me their gang-tattoos, and explained how you get a number in prison (26, 27 or 28). Suddenly in the middle of our conversation, the minivan turned on its light on, and drove away. I must have looked pretty shocked, as I thought it was empty, because the boys laughed at me and told me it was a 'gay-car'. I don't need to know what the persons inside had been doing, but I'm pretty sure we disturbed them. During the evening 3 more cars came by, but as they turned their lights on us, they drove away again.
Probably just a few hundred meters to some of the next toilets at the beach front, where some of the other boys are prostituting in the night. Unpleasant thought!
Before we went to sleep, we putted the last food on the rooftop of the toilet, so the rats hopefully wouldn't come to disturb in the night. We crawled into our sleeping bags, and just before I felt asleep the boy next to me pointed at a small hill about 50 meters away, and told me that a guy they knew from the street, had been killed up there a few weeks ago. He had been discussing with his friend about the last wine in the bottle, and his friend took his knife and stabbed him 5 times in the heart...
I don't know if it was the fear for being raped by the people in the gay-cars or stabbed to death; the thought of the rats crawling on me when I were asleep, the hard ground beneath me, my extremely cold feet or just the fact that I was going to sleep on the street for the first time in my life, but I didn't get much sleep that night. I was thinking a lot about my girlfriend and my parents back in Denmark, and even though it was a great experience to me, I was so happy to go to my own bed Wednesday evening!
Thanks guys for letting me sleep at 'your place' and for taking care of me that night :-) Now it is my turn to take care of you, by helping you off the street!
Mads Klit Jensen, Socal Educator, TLC Outreach Project
