When all your life its into one garbage bag! – Andrew Azzopardi

We sat in a coffee shop facing each other. I wanted to listen to his story.

After ordering our Cappuccino and Espresso, I rested with my back against the velvet cushion and just listened to him for an hour and a half, hardly opening my mouth.

This is the incredible story of this young man, still not older than 25 years of age, who has gone down the bowels of hell and back, and back there and up again. It is a story of resilience, but also a narrative that surfaces the lacklustre of a social policy turned dreary. He has experienced going through, metaphorically speaking, the social-net.

This young man was overlooked, ignored and disregarded when he was shouting for help as a teenager. At 15 years, he was already incarcerated and yet our social services seemed to ignore his plight – ‘ ħeq ħaqqu hux, ħalli jitgħallem!’ This was the beginning of the end for him. Instead of a system which is healing, it exacerbates the maliciousness.

He was in pain. He was lonely – a text book ‘drop-out’ in the making. Then we wonder why he got himself caught up in the spiral of criminality, of drug trafficking and the worse problem of them all, drug addiction.

Now, before we go off in our orgasmic finger pointing, admit it, would you have expected anything better? Would you have done anything different? This is what happens when a person is left unaided to deal with his pain, unable to make heads or tails with his life. What other way is there to cope with the loneliness, the rejection and the low self-esteem? He had no option but to hit the road and we all know what that leads you to.

The biggest iniquity and debauchery from where I stand, is that no one ‘saw this coming’, no one; no teacher, no informal educator, no extended family member, no neighbour, no youth worker, no MUSEUM member, no scout leader, no parish priest listened to what was happening in his life – how despondently convenient!

He just couldn’t cope at home. His parents had their own issues to contend with. He was unaided and figuratively speaking struck a sandbar. He was wrecked by the pounding of the surf, the elements around him. He was left alone to his own devices, beatenup, shattered and cracked.

So even though still a teenager, he got himself tousled with a group of peers his age, all misfits in the community. This led to a cycle of petty theft and viciousness. He grew into a lad where the core of his being did not focus on aspirations of career development, sports or some other artistic ambition – he just dug himself a hole in the ground.

He started facing the courts of justice. Being sent to jail was as common as other teenagers going to the airport to catch a flight and enjoy their time abroad, discovering and exploring.

On the other hand, the only ‘time’ this boy got was in a prison cell.

The prison cell became his first home.

Detention and confinement were his only source of relief. At least he had some lunch he could look forward to and a space he could call ‘his own’. He told me all about hope – and the lack of it. His idea of family, society, neighbours, the Police Force were damaged (almost) beyond repair.

He was just intent on surviving, literally at times. His needs were not glutted. He was emotionally abandoned.

He was broken.

And our response to that was that he is made to suffer more. Incarceration became a custom for him – it was our only way of getting him out of sight. Instead of finding solutions we concocted riddance.

He was in and out of prison, often left in front of the facility with all his life belongings fitting into one black garbage bag. Can you even imagine that? All of his belongings could fit into one damn rubbish sack!

As he was telling me this, his eyes filled with tears and we just sat silently. I listened to him sobbing unable to react. It didn’t feel awkward, I felt angry.

He told me, as I slumped and wilted even further into my chair, with my Espresso gone cold, that the moment he was out of prison, his only way to survive was causing havoc; stealing from cars, shoplifting and pickpocketing.

He knew he was doing the wrong thing – he just couldn’t stop himself.

It’s all he knew.

As you can imagine, his addiction in the meantime kicked in. He would do everything to satiate his longing for drugs; blow, G, smack. ‘Sickness’ was way too hard. He just couldn’t find the oomph to bring about the muchawaited change he longed for. He sauntered until he couldn’t take it no more.

It was at that moment that he nervously showed me a photo of how he looked – inert, limp, soulless. His eyes dug deep into his face. He was wasted and lost all of his vitality. He told me how the pushers swarmed around him, ready to pick the flesh the moment he was out on the street – the drug pushers who would pounce trying just about to avoid another cadaver. The moment he tried to get his life back on track, the carpet was pulled from under his feet and he was back in Court probably answering to a crime committed years back. He fell and fell and fell again and continued to fall.

Our welfare services failed him – our mechanisms did nothing for him.

With all the money that is put into the system, he just couldn’t get back on his feet. He messed up his relationships, his son was taken away from him and his girlfriend, much as she tried, had had enough. His parents just couldn’t find a solution to any of what was happening. He kept going in front of one judge after another and the solution only seemed to be more prison time, incarceration, punishment – love in the form of respect and care were nowhere to be seen. (True it seems that we are witnessing some changes in this regard with the work that Caritas Malta and the Ministry for the Family, Children’s Rights and Social Solidarity are doing in setting up a specialized service for teenagers who are caught in the tentacles of drug addiction and behavioural issues).

Now this young man had his own moment of lucidity and is slowly and surely getting back on track. But he has lost so much on the way which can never be recovered. His soul is imploded and apart from the victims he has created with his behaviour we have one other victim – ‘the young man I had across the table’.