Easy life on the street?

What makes someone prefer to stay on the street than at home or even in a shelter?

"They want the easy life," say some people who turn up their noses at homeless people, as we recently heard from the first lady of São Paulo in a video that went viral. But how easy is it to be totally exposed and vulnerable?

This judgment is even more emphatic when those who hold this opinion see people sleeping on the street during the day. "Vagabonds", many think. But they don't consider that, without a safe place to sleep, you can't rest when the fear of being robbed, stabbed or burned alive during the night is not an exaggeration, but a real concern.

Under this viaduct in central São Paulo, a group of homeless people take shelter. As a way of serving and alleviating this situation, we carry out cleaning sessions. Last week, while attending to the group there, we discovered that many of them had scabies. We bought medication, cleaned the place, changed their blankets and clothes.

"I'm tired, auntie. I used drugs all night to make the pain go away". That's not comfort. The boys tell us that they don't like hospitals because they are often mistreated when they seek help on their own. Some even report having been tied up when they were admitted.

When the system itself seems to do everything it can to put an end to your existence because it doesn't see you as a citizen, but as a problem, who do you turn to?

This is where we try to place ourselves: as a safe place, with people who want to be close to them in times of need and also in times of joy. To be close people.

We live with a lack of mercy in this world. The practice of empathy, such a fashionable word on social media, is still lacking.

We want to be the ones who see these "zombies" for what they really are: people with stories that we don't know individually, but whose ending God wants to change for the better.

We heard from a child recently that she thinks she's garbage. And it's quite clear that this thought is not the fruit of a fertile imagination, but a reflection of the treatment they are constantly given. Invisibility, fear and aggression are responsible for this. And it is precisely this thinking that we want to change.

As Edmund Burke rightly said: "For evil to triumph, it is enough for the good to do nothing". That's why we need to be a light in this world. Each of these people is precious to God. And they should be to us too.

When we post on social media about the situation of children on the streets, we not only receive comments asking what to do, but also people who say they already follow ABBA's work and are outraged by the reality of children on the streets that they didn't know about. A lot of people immediately want to mobilize, militate and awaken society or the authorities. All of this has value and a place, but not before a commitment to empathy, to being on the side of these people, to becoming people close to them. So here's an invitation to take the first step: get to know ABBA's work and get involved.