Youth '98 Missions Trip
Youth Report

STREET WALK (by Lisa T.)

The streetwalk is an experience that every group with the Center for Student Missions does during their stay in Toronto. This walk usually lasts up to four hours, and in our case, we covered around five miles over the course of the night. We were told to pretend that we were suddenly 13 year olds who have just run away from an abusive household, and to try and figure out exactly how we're going to survive life alone on the streets.

Central was divided into two groups. From the subway, we walked to different districts, and at each place, Sheila, our leader for the week, would explain parts of the city that we had never even known about, much less seen before. Our learning experience began right at the subway station, where teen runaways start their life on the street. Sheila told us that normal looking, middle-aged men approach these kids who are feeling helpless and scared, and offer to give them a nice hotel room, new clothes, and food. Because these kids have no other choice, they accept their offer. Soon after however, the same men tell the runaways that they need to pay back the account they've run up. They are now forced to sell their bodies on the street in order to pay back these men. It's sad that these kids are introduced to prostitution so early on, but what's even more terrible is that the men who first approach these kids claim to be Christians. The runaways' first experience with "Christianity," is a man who makes them sleep with a number of people every night in order to stay alive.

Throughout the rest of the night, we saw things that left us speechless. We went to Boystown, where young boys prostitute themselves. We saw several cars of men drive slowly by, looking for a teenager to take to a hotel for the night. While we were going home to a bed and a hot shower, boys our age were getting into a strange car. We walked through the prostitution district, and witnessed a girl not much older than me get picked up right before our eyes. We went through Gayville, where rainbow flags were hung everywhere. We stood right across the street from a popular gay bar with three different floors, saw a hostel where AIDS patients go to die, several gay couples in a park that was also an AIDS memorial, and heard about a shelter nicknamed, "Satan's house."

Our night was extremely eventful. If I told you everything we learned, and everything we saw, I'd be talking for another hour. We saw things that really opened our eyes to the way some people live. We came back from this walk laughing, and ready to just put the day behind us and sleep, but I know that we were all affected. I realized how much God has given me, and how much I unconsciously take for granted at home. I have a loving family, a warm house, a good education, and plenty of friends who help me through my problems. But my problems are nothing compared to the ones people on the street have. They are forced to grow up so fast, or they die. The average life span for kids on the street is seven years. Our leader Sheila gave us a fact like this all through the night. Each time our loud youth group would be unusually silent, and I'd think to myself, "These people have no hope, what on earth does God expect us to do here?" But I know now that God is working. He has placed organizations on the street to reach out to these people, and it's no coincidence that youth groups walk there once a week, seeing the same things we saw. Because of this streetwalk, we all gained a compassion for the homeless, and learned to recognize them as human beings like us who are in need of a Saviour.