16 February 2009
Happy Valentine’s Day (a little late!). Valentine’s day is celebrated over here, but it’s not as big as it is at home. Maybe that’s a lie, I don’t know – I’m not a huge fan of Valentine’s Day to begin with. Kevin and I celebrated by staying in bed reading and playing video games all day, then getting up at 7:15pm to go to one of my all-time favorite restaurants: Pizza Hut! One thing I’m looking forward to eating when I get home is bread sticks at Pizza Hut, they don’t serve them here and I love them.
Anyway, for those of you praying for us: our biggest prayer need at the minute is for our health. I have been sick with colds, etc. pretty much since the beginning of February and Kevin’s lying on the couch as I write this feeling pretty miserable himself.
Kevin thinks I should write about this experience I had a couple of weeks ago that I can’t get out of my mind. Maybe you all can pray about this too:
I was coming home from another volunteer’s house on a Friday night a few weeks ago. It was really cold and raining pretty hard. I had just missed a bus in the City Centre, and had to wait about a half hour for another one, so I decided to stop into a nearby Burger King to get out of the rain and to get something to eat. Inside Burger King there were loads of kids – probably in their early teens – dressed in black and neon meshy things that barely covered them up, lots of dark eyeliner, funky hair, chains, etc. I walked through a crowd of them smoking outside, trying to make sure they got their fag in before the cops came around again.
So, I’ll admit it, I was scared. I kept thinking ‘don’t make eye contact, they won’t bother you.’ I sat down in the middle the restaurant to eat my cheeseburger, and I kept noticing groups of kids going upstairs, which by the way, was closed and the toilets up there were closed as well. I don’t even want to guess what they were doing up there. My first thought was, “where in the world are these kids’ parents?!” (I know, I’m like a 70-year-old trapped in a 23-year-old’s body sometimes.)
It dawned on me though – I work with kids like these pretty often. They don’t scare me when they’re dressed in their nice school uniforms or coming to be on my terms. These kids are really crying out for help. Why are they all sitting around Burger King on a Friday night? Probably some if it is that they have nothing else better to do. But, most likely, they want to be accepted into some kind of group and running a muck in the BK is the easiest way to do it. I left BK just wishing there was something I could do. Wasn’t there somewhere these people could go? Somewhere that they could spend their time more constructively and safely? So, that’s something that’s been weighing on my heart over the past couple of weeks…
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