I feel your pain little ones

I feel your pain little ones. Every time you stand out there your stomach growling, your lips chapped, hair unkempt and hands outstretched, every time they send you out to beg for your food, to earn your own living.

Just what did you do wrong to deserve this kind of life? Was it your crime that you were born? The strength you’ve been forced to show when your father knocks your mother down the floor, the weight of responsibility on the four year old who has been forced to become and adult because her mother’s too drunk, I feel your pain every time you stretch your hands to that uncaring motorist, when you look with your sad eyes at that woman selling fruits at her stall. Life has taught you to wonder if God is alive, if he cares for you. It has taken all the humanness out of you and turned you into ravaging animals, to overturn dustbins and rubbish cans out in the street while everyone sleeps. The streets have become your home, not because you don’t have a home, simply because the place reminds you of the sterile field your life is, it reminds you that you are not headed anywhere and your end just lies where your beginning starts. In the street there are lights that give you optimism, there is the fast-moving life that fixes in you the illusion of freedom and teaches you to absorb yourself and escape your problems, albeit for a while. Life has taught you to be lonely even when everybody is present. You have become worse than filth to the eyes of the people who stand back to see you scamper after a coin before it falls down the drain. They marvel at your grey bottom showing through your tattered shorts. Your grief has become their amusement, your pain their enjoyment. You have become used to growling tummies, either due to hunger or rotten refuse. I feel your pain little ones.

Each and every night you look at the stars and think about angels, are they real or just a fable your Sunday school teacher came up with? If they are there then why aren’t they singing to you little children? Nobody missed you when you go back to your shack in the evening, your mother has a ‘customer’ in the other room, your father’s passed out on the ancient sofa, oblivious of what is going on around him. You go to sleep hoping for each other that tomorrow will not be a false start, that tomorrow will be the big break in your life. I feel your pain little ones, know that every time you cry you bring tears to my eyes and every time you smile you bring laughter to my lips. I know I don’t have much to offer but I sure know that someday the sun will rise on you and you will never have to shiver in the cold again. do not cease to dream, even when nightmares are more pronounced than ever before. Don’t close your eyes lest you lose sight of the future. Just give it one more day and you’ll never have to wake up from your dream because it will have become your reality.