Saturday was such a beautiful day. Sunny with a nice breeze, but when the breeze stopped it was pretty warm. I was with my friend Luke Burton and his wife Courtney and their twins. They are part of Inner Changes Outer Circle. It was an honor to spend the day with them to get a feel for what they are up to. We also had a guide, Suzanne and her two dogs. We started in the panhandle not far from our old Oak Street House, we were about a block away when we started our talk. As Suzanne was talking I looked over and there was a water fountain for people's dogs. A dog was drinking out of the nice clean fountain designed for dogs at the right height with a catch basin so it would pool so the dog could lap it. It was a thing of beauty.
As we went walking Suzanne began to describe her life on the street. She is one of many street kids who live in the parks and on the streets of our city. She is twenty-two years old, Caucasian, with what sounds like a good education. She has family that she keeps in contact with, but she lives on the street spending most of her day drinking beer and hanging out with her friends and taking care of her two beautiful dogs. Suzanne takes a great deal of pride in the health of her dogs and to her they are her kids.
As she was walking, she was talking about some of the challenges of being on the street. How last night four guys came out of a bar and started to harass her when one of them finally started to beat her. She showed the bruise under her left eye where he had hit her. She went on to explain how her dog had run off last year for a week or two and how distressing that was. She talked about how she had to plan ahead where she was going to sleep and eat and clean up.
The thing that took me by surprise was when we were walking up the street in the Haight, she stopped by an apartment and there was a water spigot. She said that the owners were the best. They allowed the street kids to use their water whenever they wanted to. She said most people get a locking handle so no one can use the water, but these Greek guys (her words) let her and the others who lived on the street have their water for nothing in return. They also allowed them to store stuff in the crawl space under the building so she would store her dog food there because it was hard to carry around a forty pound bag of dog food everywhere you went.
Suzanne went on to explain that access to water, showers and toilets is a constant problem and that she was so thankful that these guys let her have water. I thought of that juxtaposed to the dog water fountain not a block away. It is interesting to think about it. Suzanne has made some choices that have kept her on the street and she continues to make choices that keep her there. That being said, I think that it is weird that she has to depend upon the charity of strangers to get water and society provides water for people's personal pets. Now don't get me wrong, I am happy to have a drinking fountain for my dog, Frisbee, when we go to the park, it just seems like maybe we could treat the other humans on our planet better than we treat our pets.
Mark 9:41
I tell you the truth, anyone who gives you a cup of water in my name because you belong to Christ will certainly not lose his reward.
NIV
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