Mati Gali, a native Samoan, who together with his wife Julie is in charge of the YWAM base in Recife, Brazil, shared with us some of his experiences in being called to a new country and working with street children. Mati appears in a book called A Cry from the Streets, which is written by Jeannette Lukasse. The entire first chapter is available online. In reference to his experience described in the excerpt, Mati told us: “For me, I felt what the kids feel. It happened to me once, it happens to them every day, even today…”
There are tens of millions, if not a hundred million, street children in the world. According to some sources there are eight million in Brazil alone. Mati explained that typically street children will sleep during the day because it’s too dangerous for them to sleep at night. When they’re awake they will almost constantly be sniffing glue to numb their anxiety. Since the effect of the cheap shoe glue they use lasts five minutes, you often see a bag of glue hanging from their mouth. Some of the children Mati knows like to hang on the sides of buses and sometimes an irritated driver will deliberately drive past a post so close it will hit a child. The children eat and drink what they can and steal to survive. They’re violent and impulsive and for self-protection usually sleep with a knife. The little children are sexually abused and the older ones seek acceptance by being sexually active. Consequently, there’s an entire new category of street children, street babies, who have actually been born into the street life.
“You’re working with kids who have been completely destroyed, since they have been babies, some of them,” Mati explained. He said we like to see the fruit of our labour immediately, but need to be able to accept the brokenness in the children we’re working with, “to be wise and slow”. Our consistency in showing God’s love and grace cannot depend on immediate or even visible results. Mati told us that people are often interested to know how many children there are in a restoration house, not how the children are doing. But we need to be people who value quality over quantity. Firstly, a high adult child ratio is not healthy for the children, and secondly, staff working with a relatively high number of children is likely to burn out.
During Mati’s week we had the privilege of hearing one of the discipleship training school students, a former street kid, give us his testimony. At the tender age of seven he had decided to live on the streets, where he started using hard drugs. He survived and eventually rose in the street hierarchy by delivering drugs and robbing people. After years of the street lifestyle he came into contact with a Christian ministry, which over a period of time, led him to leave his street life behind. He now shares his testimony in prisons, has since completed high school and will be going on to university. My heart longs to hear more stories like his, but his story is rare. Most street children die in the streets or end up in jail. I don’t know about other parts of the world, but from what I’ve heard from our teachers, in some Latin American countries the police treat street children extremely brutally and can go as far as executing them. Having glimpsed just a tiny bit into this grim reality through the eyewitness accounts of some our teachers, one comment in the testimony we heard especially stood out for me: “Love in one heart can change a life”.
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