I only want a second chance now
Asked to describe herself, Faghma Petersen, a member of the unhoused community living on a street corner outside Parliament, said, with a chuckle: “I’m now, I think, almost 50.”
Petersen, who lives on the street with her two small dogs, volunteers at the Hope Exchange, a non-profit organisation that aims to help the unhoused. Its offices are just up the road from the corner she calls home.
She brings hot water to the corner for people who can’t travel to the station. She also obtained a proof of address through a social worker, to help her find employment and security, and helps her community by making copies of their IDs with the copy machine at the station.
“I don’t know what I’m really doing on the street, because I don’t do drugs, I don’t smoke and things,” claimed Petersen, who lost two of her children when they were three months and seven months old after social workers removed them from her care on suspicion of drug abuse.
Petersen said she has six children, one of whom will soon be 28 years old. She said she missed out on raising him after she was sentenced to five years in prison for murder.
“And then your children start to be a gangster and stuff, and now, my friend, I can’t win that back for the five years I was in jail,” she said, explaining that this is why she helps other people in her community.
“I know I was unfair… I was selfish,” she said, thinking back. “Sometimes, when I sleep, I just cry.”
After landing up on the streets, Petersen began engaging in sex work to support herself, but said she realised that, in the long term, the work was not sustainable or fitting for her.
Petersen’s mother put her into foster care at a young age, where she came to feel that she had no real family. “Foster care people also have children, and when the children is big, the children say, ‘You not our sister’,” she said.
“So now, my friend, I find my real family is people on the street”, adding that she spends the holidays with the community on the corner.
Petersen said she hoped her children would have better opportunities than she had. “I don’t want them to be the same like me. I never goes to school. I can’t write and read.”
She added that she could not be a good parent to her children: “I was a confusing mother, man. You can’t make your children on the road.”
Looking to her future, Petersen said: “I only want a second chance now.” Petersen said her community needed more secure shelters.
She pleaded for unoccupied spaces and buildings to be used as recreational centres for the unhoused during the day, where they could wash themselves, watch television and create handmade products to sell.
Petersen, who said she has been on the waiting list for a RDP house for 19 years, did not believe that the shelter system was sufficient, and cited the costly prices, scarce occupancy and time-bound limits on one’s stay as a hindrance.
“It’s not about me, it’s about the community,” she said. “Here, on this road, we share. If we have something, we share.”