In the shelter of a kind word ~ Toronto Star, Dec. 6, 2003
December 6, 2003
In the shelter of a kind word
Maltreated teens – no one’s sure how many – eke out a bleak life on the margins. Calling them back takes rebuilding faith, one deed at a time, by Leslie Scrivener
On any given day, 22,000 cars sweep across the old iron bridge at the foot of Bathurst St. toward the railway corridor, never knowing they are driving above 18-year-old Chantal Gagnon’s home.It’s a shack, built into the bridge abutment with found lumber, sandwich boards and cardboard. It’s looking good so far – except for the rats.
How do you keep them out?
For a while, Gagnon and her friend Cyndi Thomas, whom she calls her street mom, mused about hauling in 100 pounds of soil to seal off the holes. But by the end of the week, they’d settled on some wooden pallets as a floor and were feeling house-proud. They even had a door with a lock.
Despite these efforts, the harsh reality is that they are living in the undercroft of a bridge, the walls are damp, the nights are cold and their shanty is surrounded by litter: bottle caps, needles, condoms, old shoes, blankets, plastic foam. They’ve been cleaning it up, sorting the garbage – Gagnon was picking up syringes the other day so their dog, Sally, wouldn’t step on them.
No one really knows how many young people live on Toronto’s streets. Some estimate there are at least 2,000 or 3,000 kids between 15 and 24, but not even the experts, the street workers who go out each night with clean socks, kind words and hot chocolate looking for the hidden homeless, know for sure.
Even by 9 or 10 p.m., some kids don’t know where they’ll end up at night.
“I’ll sleep wherever,” says a 20-year-old, looking the worse for wear on Queen St. W. “It always works out.”
‘Wherever’ can be a doorway, in a park, under a bridge, usually huddled with two or three others for warmth and safety.
With the constant traffic, it’s difficult to get a really good night’s sleep, says Gagnon.
“It’s bad in winter. I get cold.” She wears five or six layers of clothes during the day, fewer at night, but she’d rather sleep under the bridge than in a shelter.
“I don’t like people breathing down my neck, going through my stuff. I’ve had a sleeping bag stolen in a shelter, but here, I’ve never had stuff stolen, because we’re all looking out for each other.”
Less hardy street folk have found “sugar daddies and mommies” to look after them for the winter, says Thomas.
Gagnon is from Winnipeg and has lived on the streets for a few years; she calls home every week. “They like to know I’m still alive,” she says.
Why she left home – well, that’s a long story and left untold. “I have a street family down here.”
Gagnon and Thomas, who’s 44, have each other and a community of six others, mostly young people in their late teens or early 20s, living in tents or behind roughly constructed shacks.
A few blocks over, near Spadina Ave., a 24-year-old named Tu sleeps alone under a Gardiner Expressway on-ramp, perched on planks resting on the flanges of the bridges I-beams. You could almost miss his roost – though not the rumble of traffic, 25,000 cars a day overhead – until a flashlight’s beam captures the edge of a blue sleeping bag neatly folded over the boarding.
“Are you all right up there?” calls Tim Huff, who started a low-key Christian outreach last year called Light Patrol. Its street workers have a special interest, finding the young homeless hidden in out-of-the-way places, the kids who are turned off shelters, or too afraid to trust anyone in authority.
Tu says he’s just fine, but a little hungry With no food on hand, Huff gives Tu a fistful of coins, which he accepts in red mittened hands.
Tu beams and bids his visitors good night.
“How many people living in their big homes can even crack a smile like that?” asks Huff.
When former Lieutenant-Governor Hilary Weston came with him on a late-night tour, she watched a girl creep under the on-ramp. “Where can that sweet child be going?” Weston asked him.
“We have such beautiful kids,” Huff says. “Sometimes the media gives the sense that these kids are hardened, but they are like your own child, with beautiful hearts and minds, and they’ve had to do terrible things to survive – carry drugs, sell their bodies.”
Huff has seen kids in bad shape – gas sniffers who can’t string two sentences together, a kid who lost an eye sleeping out in the cold, kids he’s had to dig out of snowdrifts. In the 16 years he’s worked on Toronto’s streets, he’s lost 18 kids to suicide.
Huff’s career with young people started when Youth Unlimited and his Baptist church opened a drop-in centre called Frontlines in Weston, where he grew up. By the early 90s, skinheads in the area were beating up minorities moving into the neighbourhood. Huff took an interest in the troubled lives of the gang members and learned many were living in squats and under bridges. It led to his work downtown.
“I knew their lives needed to be changed,” he says.
Private donations cover the programs and salaries for Huff and a staff of five.
He often works from midnight to 3 am, when no one else is around and the teens may be coming down off drugs. He’s checking up on kids forgotten by others, looking the “sweet child” hidden behind the gruff exterior.
“It’s critical, it’s proof – if we are showing up it means they are still important, there are still people who care.”
His goal is simple: Get kids to the point where they will trust an adult again and believe that adults will not harm them. That trust may lead to accepting shelter, going back to school, getting a job.
“Our agenda is to show them God’s love. Kids will tell me God has screwed them over. ‘If there’s a God, why am I out here? If there is a God, why was I abused from 6 to 16 in my own home?’
“We’re not getting into grand theology, but they are really interested in the conversation. We try to love them as God wants us to.”
It’s important to get the kids off the streets, says Huff, before the bad habits and addictions destroy their lives and before mental illness sets in.
“I just love these kids,” he says. “There’s something amazing about helping a young person dream again, that they can be something when everything in their lives has worked against that.”
Life on the street, on the other hand, “eats people up. There’s nothing good on the street for anybody.”
The first step in those acts of love is hot food. The Light Patrol motorhome has a stove. One night, it serves a meaty stew made by street worker Ruth Heise’s mother; another night, soup. “Smells like Christmas in here,” says a young man stepping into the motorhome one night this week.
As the young people crowd into the van, you’d think for a moment they were sitting around a kitchen table at home. “Hey! Can I have a bun?” says one. “Do you have any clean socks?” asks another. “Black so they don’t look so dirty.”
They are frank and a little wry. They talk about police and drugs and their bad teeth.
“A cop isn’t allowed to do a lot of things, but they do them anyway. The same with us. Are we allowed to commit crimes? No! But we do anyway.”
While Light Patrol is a Christian program – part of Youth Unlimited, which in turn is part of Youth for Christ (founded in the ‘40s by Billy Graham) – its volunteers and street workers seem to spread the word by example rather than proselytizing.
“This organization is thoroughly Christian, but they don’t judge me if I don’t believe,” says Thomas. “I don’t have to accept Jesus into my heart before I step into this van. I feel like I’m walking into a cousin’s home. I can ask for seconds. Hey! Can I have a blanket? They fill in all the gaps.”
Outside Chantal Gagnon’s shack, an old, soiled teddy bear lies in the frozen earth. What’s it doing here amid the rubble and castoffs?
When young people run away from home, they move fast. They’re fleeing physical or sexual abuse, violent family breakups, adults with addictions, Huff says. He understands the teddy in the dirt.
“When they are racing from home, kids pack what they think they’ll need. I’ve seen abandoned suitcases with pink flannel pajamas with teddy bears. The little girl that owned that suitcase ended up on the street. Wherever she thought she was going, she thought she’d end up in a place where she could wear pink p.j.’s. No matter how harsh life is, they are still little girls.”
How do they spend their time? The Salvation Army brings breakfast; they panhandle for lunch or dinner. They rummage through dumpsters for building materials. They spend their money on batteries and duct tape, and once in a while, a couple of drinks.
They can wash their clothes, shower and cook in the community kitchen at The Meeting Place, the service run by St. Christopher House at Queen St. and Bathurst. This month, they’ll earn a bit of money selling Christmas trees for St. Christopher House.
Though young people 15 to 24 compose 12 per cent of the population, they make up 22 per cent of shelter clients, the Toronto Report Card on Housing and Homelessness reported this year. About 6,900 youth stayed in municipally funded shelters last year.
Most kids running from home gravitate downtown because more services are available there, but there are also homeless young people in the regions surrounding Toronto. Lennox Holdford, an outreach worker at Pathways Home Base Youth Drop-in Centre in
“It’s out there. Most communities live in denial that we don’t have that kind of thing.”
Huff says all the money in the world can’t really fix homelessness, because home is supposed to be a place where children and young people feel love.
“At some level, this rich country, beautiful country has decided that homelessness is acceptable. But until people stop hurting one another, we won’t stop homelessness.”