FEAR

"Fear is the reason you join a gang, but you don't realise until you're in it that there is much more fear inside the gang than out" 

- These are the words a student from the school where I work said to me this week.  A quiet, smartly-dressed Bangladeshi boy, he looked like the last person I would imagine to be in a gang such as the Blood Shedders.  But as he told me, he was one of the only Asian members of the gang until he decided he no longer wants to be involved with them and what they do.  "I'm still a blood though" he told me.  It seems that he has decided not to be involved with their activities, but is still connected with them through associations and people he knows.

To hear this student tell me about how when you join the gang you have to choose between killing or badly assaulting an IOD (abbreviation for Isle of Dogs in Tower Hamlets - so by this he explained he was talking about a member of the Crips gang who are based in the Isle of Dogs and seem to have chosen a name to associate their gang rivalries with the Bloods and Crips gangs of America) or committing a robbery, was shocking in the way he told it.  A normal student who could sit in the back of a class and the teacher would probably not notice him throughout the lesson, he knows much more than I could have imagined.  For a 15 year old boy to be able to differentiate between bullets used in 9mm hand guns and those used in other kinds of guns was too much for me to hear.  The fact that I know social services and the police are already involved with this boy's family means that at least I don't have the weight on my conscience of whether to report him for his own protection.  And as he said, he now wants to go to a college where there are "no Bloods" and do a course in carpentry, which is what he really loves.  Surely his hands were made by God for this kind of work, to build up and not to destroy.

photo from Flash & Difarent's myspace 

"Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labour, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need." (Eph. 4:28)