Bess's Story
Starting Over
"Reality hit me...I was 15 and a runaway...When I ran to the streets, I made friends with a guy who was my age. He told me that he'd survived on the streets by turning tricks. I was so naive, I thought he was talking about juggling, like in the circus or something...I had a lot to learn." — Bess, 15
"I was from this middle-class family. I had every material thing I wanted." said Bess. "But I wasn't going back home. I didn't care if I lived or died. My father was a drunk and he beat me, and my mother didn't want to get my father mad, so she just chose to let the beatings happen. I wasn't going back. I just couldn't."
Bess ran to the streets, where she found it only took a couple of days of being all alone and utterly homeless and lost to come to terms with the fact that life on the streets is a dead end. And that she could very well end up dead.
"I found Covenant House, and when I first got to your shelter, I was really lost," Bess remembers. "I was standing in this room I'd been assigned and the reality hit me: I'm a runaway. I'm 15 and I'm a good person. What's going on?"
There really isn't a "profile" of the typical Covenant House kid. But they've all got one sure thing in common, whether they are a boy or a girl or from the suburbs or the city: They don't have anywhere else to go.
Covenant House is it, the last stop, the end of the line, their last and only hope. They come in with black eyes and broken hearts, bleeding and torn. Some come in with a swagger and a cold stare — others shaking non-stop and unable to speak or look you in the eye.
When the nights are cold and, no matter what they do, they can't get out of the rain, they come in sick as dogs, burning up with fever, so weak they can barely stand.
Some kids have been through such horror on the streets at the hands of pimps who beat them into submission and terror or johns who think that for a few bucks the kid they've just "purchased" is theirs to violate and denigrate and slap around, too.
After a while, the kids lose all sense of self...never mind any feeling of worth or ability or value.
They know they're just a commodity.
They feel that they are like the living dead. They wish they were dead for real, until even that is gone and they're just utterly empty inside.
That's what the streets do to our kids.
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All kids make mistakes or exercise poor judgment from time to time, and ones like Bess who become runners are the most vulnerable in some ways. They don't have the street smarts of chronically abused kids, usually.
Today, Bess knows how lucky she was that she'd somehow managed to escape a pimp's reach, that she hadn't been abducted like thousands of girls are every day, disappearing into an underworld of sexual slavery and an inevitable violent death or a death sentence in the form of disease.
Where is the light for these kids? — It is in us, here at Covenant House, as we show and share and shine God's love just as bright and strong as we can.
One day at a time, one encouraging smile at a time, day by day they rise. Like Bess. It wasn't easy, but she followed the rules (You bet, just like families everywhere, we have them and they're enforced!), she pitched in to do chores, and she got up at the crack of dawn every day to catch the bus to school. She did her homework when she got back, and she got a job at McDonald's when she turned 16.
Thankfully, an aunt and uncle agreed to have Bess come live with them. We gave her a bus ticket and packed her off with our love and our fingers crossed. Bess struggled, but ultimately managed to finish high school and her future looks bright.
But truthfully, every day is a struggle for us to keep up with the financial realities of keeping our doors open every day of the year, 24 hours a day.
That's why we are so profoundly grateful to you. Your generous gifts put food on our table, gas in our Outreach Vans, and you keep this roof over our heads.
Do you know what a miracle that is?
You are our miracle-maker, the source of our ability to mend broken hearts and battered bodies and souls...to give kids the new beginnings they deserve, and the knowledge in hearts that God wants so much for them.
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