FREE DOWNLOAD: Hope - Stories from the road

Stories from the road

I have mixed feelings about Christmas. On one hand I love the deep meaning, the celebration, colour, fun (especially the parties!) and family dimension. On the other hand I know that for many people it seems to be a time when their loneliness, problems, pain or grief can seem amplified by the festivities going on around them. I guess the reality of the original Christmas story, which includes; life in an occupied nation, forced travel to satisfy government bureaucracy, teenage pregnancy, lack of accommodation, child birth in grim surroundings and forced emigration in fear of your life might resonate just as much with the darker side of life as it does with the lighter side. For me it remains an amazing story that connects with so many elements of life and never ceases to cause me a degree of wonder – God is one of us!

Stories are powerful and with this in mind FYT is trying to provide a platform for young people to tell their positive stories as a counter balance to the many negative stories that we hear about them. With this in mind, as I mentioned in a letter to you, we have joined forces with Worth Unlimited to create a youth led fund (Talent – youth in Action) that is dedicated to enabling young people to act on their concerns so that we can use their positive stories in the media. To raise funds for this we have raised and given away £1,000 to youth groups in £10 notes to practice the parable of the talents - multiplication in action!

To launch Talent – youth in Action Tim Evans (Worth Unlimited) and I met with £10.00 in our pocket to spend the week on the road together. No plans, no hotels, no transport just a desire to travel between Bristol, Cardiff, Birmingham and Liverpool to collect stories from young people on the way, I wanted to share some of that story with you …

“We walked from the station praying that God would be in our journey and that we would be able to make a small contribution to challenging what we perceive to be a ‘dominant narrative’ about young people, that is rooted in suspicion, fear, generalisations and stereotypes. Neither of us are naïve about young people’s potential to behave ‘badly’, however bad behaviour is not the full story…

… A young man who was drunk came to ask us for money. One of the things about surviving on limited resources is that in all honesty you don’t have a lot to give away! We had an extra £1.00 that my daughter had given us to buy a lighter, in case we need warmth on the road (!!) so we gave the young man this. This led us into a conversation about him and his dogs as he had wanted the money to buy them food he assured us. His wife had just left him for the third time, he hadn’t eaten all day and he was in a part of Bristol that he was banned (by ASBO) from being in. It seemed like a daft question to ask him about hope – but then, we were pretty daft! “I have no hope,” was his reply, “there is no hope.” Of all our meetings during the day this one got to me most. We talked about the hope we felt that he was demonstrating in showing such concern for his dogs, however, philosophical reflections on the nature of hope was not for him. We talked some more and then he spotted another target for cash and was gone. Perhaps a story about the stark reality of someone who has lost hope should feature here as a reminder that this is where some people are really at… a few days later in Birmingham…

… Tim and I let our hair down (well, what we have of it!) by playing pool, table tennis and football with the local young people. It wasn’t long before we were sharing our adventures from the road and the young people began to open up about their experience. Gangs are ‘order of the day’ in Handsworth and they are divided by postcode. The young people we were honoured to meet (including Joseph, Niko and Marisha) were part of one such gang. I asked them how they saw the gangs on the basis that many adults would be fearful of them and newspapers would be very negative – guns, hoodies, fights, knives etc. The young people were neither naïve nor defensive about their image – they were aware of bad things that happened but stressed that adults needed to talk to them rather than ‘write them off’ – they felt the gangs offered them safety and a sense of belonging and that they were close friends.

Perhaps the most moving element of their story is that the young people were very interested to hear about my involvement in gangs and my reflections on the dangers of separation between gangs and the separation that I had come across in South Africa during the years of apartheid. They were also very interested in ‘Talent – youth in Action’ and Joseph became the ring leader in ensuring that all the young people gathered to listen to our plans to raise money and give it away!
The youth workers said that nothing like this had happened before as the young people had sat, listened and started to plan! We were thrilled at their interest and commitment to the idea. The icing on the cake (quite literally!) came when the young people presented to us what they had been cooking that night - a huge bag of cakes for the journey! Chocolate ones! Tim and I were moved to tears...”

If you would like to read the full account of our stories from the road please order one by calling 0121 687 3505, it costs £5 (+ £1 p&p) and all proceeds will go to the Talent – youth in Action fund. Thank you for your interest and support. Shalom - Dave Wiles

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