Six or seven months ago we started a new project in La Resurrección parish in Bogotá: on the last Thursday of each month we prepare some sixty sandwiches, fill several thermoses with aguapanela (hot water sweetened with panela from sugar cane) and with a group of volunteers we go out at night to walk around the neighborhood. As we meet street dwellers and homeless people who are spending the night outdoors, we offer them a hot glass of aguapanela and a sandwich—and then we talk with them for a while. Most of the men and women we encounter are drug addicts who have fallen into the consumption of psychoactive substances, which is one of the reasons why they have ended up living on the streets. We call this initiative “la Ruta del Aguapanela”, the aguapanela route.
Our task is simply to meet the homeless, offer them the minimum consolation of a little food and, over time, perhaps in some cases where the friendship created allows for it, propose a rehabilitation itinerary for those who ask for it.
Most of the volunteers who participate in this activity are adolescents and young people from the parish, and there is no doubt that this initiative also has an educational and pedagogical component for them: they become aware of the reality of their neighborhoods, and they can see firsthand the devastating effects drugs have on those who fall under their spell.
Every first Thursday, when we finish the Route, we are tired: it has been two or three hours of going up and down the steep streets of these neighborhoods located in the hills in the South of Bogotá, carrying bags with food and thermos, and it is cold, and sometimes it rains. However, each month, when we finish “la Ruta”, the atmosphere among those of us who have shared the experience is fraternal and joyful: no one complains. On the contrary, there is a sincere satisfaction for having invested a little of our time getting closer to the most marginalized, to people who are invisible to many—and having tried to be for them a presence of the mercy of God, even if is through a simple plastic glass with hot aguapanela.
