Our Thursday nights are different to yours, we don’t get time to watch our favorite series or tuck our kids into bed, we don’t get to just chill with our partner or read our book in peace and quite while the house sleeps quietly.
You see, our Thursday nights start around 4 pm, a 40-minute drive into Durban, and we are lucky if we get home by 10 pm.
We travel roads up and down, making U turns and stopping regularly to visit our friends let it be 30 mins in a shelter where people sleep 3 beds high, cuddling some babies, hug our long lost friends who we reunite with thinking they were possibly dead, to simply driving the roads and handing meals out of the window which feels like a Mc Donald’s drive through.
We see it all, old and new, high and low, happy and sad. We have moments of laughter and moments of silence and tears, but many moments of frustration and anger because we can’t help them all.
And then we are reminded why we do what we do, where we came from, those humble beginnings, when we had nothing to give but just us, and that was enough.
It’s the love we receive on the streets in the middle of the night that keeps calling us back, I’m sorry my friend we don’t have a space for you to heal but right now we have space in our hearts for you.