It's home to the loveliest kids and luckily, the Friendship House. The children of Sandy Row are absolutely incredible. Most of the families here are huge and complicated. I guess Sandy Row is considered a safety net of economic standards for citizens of Northern Ireland. People who are living there are receiving at least one form of aid from the government. The kids roam the streets day and night at as young as five years old and are often in charge of feeding themselves. This usually consists of sweets and slushies for breakfast, nothing for lunch, and KFC for dinner. It's not that parents in Sandy Row don't care about their kids or that they're bad parents, they just grew up that way too. The trend in Sandy Row is to stay there. We were told that it is not at all uncommon for 16-18 year old girls to try and get pregnant so that they can receive their own house in Sandy Row. On top of all that, Sandy Row is an extremely loyalist estate and home to its own branch of paramilitary organizations.
These kids grow up quickly. They have parents who don't know how to be parents, they usually have about 8 siblings, and they don't think they are smart or beautiful. But they are some of the most clever and sweet kids I have ever met. Yet in a moment they can turn into little monsters. That's how survival in Sandy Row works. You stay alive by picking on others, by impressing them with your reckless antics, by being fearless and never showing vulnerability. I'm not going to pretend to understand what these kids go through, this is just what I have seen/been told.
It's a rough time. Because you want to love these kids, but they don't know how to receive it. They can be disrespectful, impolite and downright mean, but it's not their fault, and you can't be mad at them. That is the struggle. You can only keep loving them when they hit you, curse at you, call you names and even make you cry. Now you guys know me, I don't cry easily, I have pretty thick skin and I can usually roll with the punches, but three kids under the age of 12 managed to make me cry on Thursday. I was guarding the door and blocking them out amidst 10 minutes of words they shouldn't even know, hair pulling, kicking, tackling. Everything and anything. And I didn't cry because they said those things. I cried because they knew to say those things and because a girl who I thought I was friends with could turn so quickly and scream profanities at me. This is Sandy Row.
But the kids here are incredible. I had been working on a level in flow for about a week and could not beat it. One of the ten year old girls sits down and with the most concentration I've ever seen, beats the level in 10 minutes.
They don't seem like they are paying even a bit of attention, but then can tell you the entire story, know the words to all the songs and recite the memory verse. They act too cool but in the end, they are listening and they do care that we are here. They fight to get in the doors, hide in bathrooms when it's time to go and have to be forcibly removed from the house. They know about Jesus and they want to accept his love, but in the end they don't how how to be loved. They have been told they are bad kids again and again and at some point they start to believe it. My heart breaks for every single one of them.
The four of us have left Belfast and headed to Dublin to start our new team in Lucan. It was hard to leave, but it's important to remember that our work here is just as important as Sandy Row. Lucan is unlike any of our other teams. It's run like VBS in the states where kids pre-register and there are different stations the kids go to each day. This is the biggest camp we have done with 142 kids expected in the morning. The team is about 50 people from Bangor in Northern Ireland and locally. We are staying in the manse (minister's house) and get to sleep in real beds so that's pretty great. I will be a crew leader which means there are 7 kids in my group that I take from station to station. It's going to be a fun final week.
I am both sad and excited to be coming home next Monday. On one hand, this has been a long trip and I'm ready to sleep on my own bed, have consistent showers, see my friends, drive a car and stop wearing my raincoat everywhere. On the other hand, this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience and I'm sad it's coming to an end. I have learned a lot about myself, God and the world. I'm so happy I came on World Deputation. It had changed my life.
See you all soon!
