True Homeless Stories

The Story of Dutch, 48

Published: May 16, 2009

It was about 5 p.m. in late April when I saw Dutch sitting on a granite bench on the north side of Market Street. He was sitting up straight, unfazed by the bustle of the businessmen or the clamor of the city.

Dutch has a dignity to him that’s apparent the second you meet him. But it runs deeper than that. After a few minutes of talking to him, you realize how much character he has, how he’s a person who was raised with good values that just had the misfortune of growing up in the wrong neighborhood in Southwest Philly.

He’s been shot on four separate occasions - in his face, stomach, legs and back. He was shot in the face three blocks from his house when he was just 19, after running to his older brother’s aid when he saw him getting beat up by several men. You can still see the large scar on the right side of his face from the surgery. He lost his left kidney to a gunshot wound in 1996.

Before he was laid off from his construction job eight months ago, he had a beautiful apartment. His landlord liked him so much that he let him stay there three months rent-free. He noticed that Dutch would still wake up early every morning and look for work. He would keep his apartment so clean that his landlord once remarked that it looked like nobody even lived there. He’s had to sleep underground at different train stations for months now, but he still walks tall and greets you with a warm smile.

So I had to ask him: How in the world do you do it? He’s quick to answer: the values his father instilled in him and his faith in God.

He’s very concerned about the way kids are brought up these days. Parents don’t supervise their childrens’ activities enough, not thinking anything of leaving them in front of a T.V. all day. The result is a child who grows up gathering his values from commercial television, he explains. Children never learn how to think on their own and end up thinking like everyone else. “[B]e different from the next person,” he says.

Rampant consumerism and materialism clearly bother him. You can hear the mixture of disappointment and concern in his voice when he describes how our children are taught to worship material possessions and impress one another in the most superficial ways. “I never wanted to idolize nothin’ material,” he says.

As it turns out, the source of his values is immaterial, or God. When I ask him what he thinks about when he thinks about God, he says: “I think about nothing but joy. As we speak, he’s got angels that sit around and do nothing but praise me.” I think about how beautiful a picture of the world that is, yet struggle with the idea. “So it’s as if there were an entire world that’s invisible to us?,” I ask him. “Sure,” he says smiling with a nod. I frown slightly and look down in consideration. He can sense my struggling. He asks if I’d ever heard of a poem called “Footprints in the Sand.” I mention that I think I’ve heard it before, but can’t recall the details. He tells it like this. A man is walking along the beach. At the end of his journey, he turns around only to find one set of footprints. The man becomes confused and asks the Lord why he wasn’t walking beside him through all of the difficult times in his life. The Lord responds: “I was always with you, carrying you the entire time. That one set of footprints belonged to me.” “Even when you think he’s not there, he’s there,” Dutch explains. “Some superior being is carrying me, and it’s not me doin’ it, brother.”

I ask him if he goes to church. “I have a problem with preachers,” he says. “Church ain’t nothin’ but a building. I talked to God so many times today - I don’t need to go to church to see this man in a two-thousand dollar suit, living in a half-million dollar home telling me what I need to do. I say give a pastor minimum wage. How dare he stand up there and preach. I bet he didn’t hear it for nothin’.”

Our time is almost up, so I ask if he has any advice for kids growing up nowadays, and he’s happy to oblige: “Put God first, get to know him. Listen to your parents. Stay in school. And stay away from the crowd as much as possible, because when you run with the crowd, you begin to think like the crowd, act like the crowd.” “I see it every day man, people following one another: he gets a pair sneakers, you got to get ’em. I see guys in the shelter with cell phones and blue tooth - man, you’re priorities are backwards! They want to fit in - everybody wants to be accepted. I don’t want to fit in. I don’t want to be accepted. You can’t accept me like this, adios.”

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