Those Who Wander: America's Lost Street Kids

by Vivian Ho

They run away to escape a life in which it was beaten into them that they were nothing, less than nothing, and then they are taken in by the streets, where the last of their humanity is ripped from them.

Because on the

streets, there is no black and white. There is no good and evil. There is only survival. You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you have no boots. You can’t persevere if the trauma you suffered as a child makes it impossible for you to look a person in the eye, i...

By categorizing homelessness as a choice for some, we declare them less worthy of our sympathy, already worn thin to the point of nonexistence when it comes to the indigent. We ignore how few choices they had that made them choose a life on the streets, and we place an impossible expectation upon them: if you chose to be homeless, then you can also choose to not be.

“Youth growing up in situations where there is violence, whether it’s witnessing it happen to someone they love or experiencing it themselves, it’s just too much,” said Doug Styles, the executive director of San Francisco’s Huckleberry Youth Programs. “Trauma and significant trauma alter the functioning of the brain, and the more instances there are and the more severe they are, you are actually changing the physiology of people.”

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Time moves in different ways when you live in and for the present, never looking back and never looking forward, and a year can seem like a lifetime when you’re a kid, let alone a street kid.

I went into these interviews with Haze hoping to shine a light on the precarious lives of street kids in hopes that they can get the help they need, so that nobody will again end up in the situation where Haze, Lila, and Sean found themselves in October 2015. That maybe with some compassion and awareness, we could end this cycle of hurt kids hurting others because that is all they know.

the fact is, too many of the systems we have in place now are broken. Even if we had the commitment and the compassion to fix them all, it would take several generations before we saw any sort of results. Beyond that, there are just some root causes of youth homelessness that we won’t ever be able to fix.

We can’t save everyone.

Not all wanderers are lost, but they are all searching for something. In the end, I realized that all so many of us are searching for, especially those who have been forced to wander for so long, is our proverbial cabin in Oregon. A place of our own. A place where we are safe. A place where we can be, where we can rest. A place that no one can take.