Yara is on bail. She is waiting for the court to decide. She is also showing up, learning the menu, finding a routine, and dreaming, quietly, of becoming a social worker one day.
The hardest kind of stress isn't the stress of bad news. It is the stress of not knowing yet. Yara is nineteen, on bail for a housebreaking charge, and has been waiting for her sentencing date all year. She doesn't know if she will go inside. She doesn't know if she will stay out. She doesn't know what her own life will look like in a month's time.
And while the court takes its time deciding, she is taking herself to work.
The referral that opened the door
Yara came to us through her social worker. It was her first formal training programme. Within two weeks she had memorised parts of the menu and the recipes that, at the start, felt like a foreign language. She is, by her own admission, more comfortable handling difficult things quietly on her own — a self-reliance that has helped her hold composure through an awful season.
She has also, in her own careful way, started to lean on the team. She has learned to take feedback. She has learned to ask. She has learned that the colleagues around her are not waiting for her to fail.
What home is like
Home, for Yara, has been complicated. Unresolved family problems make the front door of her own house feel heavier than the front door of the cafe. The cafe has become, in the most literal sense, a refuge. A place where the morning rush gives her a sense of progress. A place where the rhythm of work pulls her out of her own head. A place where she belongs, on her own merit, while everything else in her life is uncertain.
What she wants to be when this is over
Here is the part that floored us. Yara, when asked about her dreams, didn't talk about money or fame or freedom. She talked about helping. She wants to become a social worker or counsellor. She wants to do for other young people what is, even now, being done for her — to be the steady voice on the phone, the patient listener, the one who shows up.
That is not the answer of a teenager who has given up. That is the answer of someone whose pain has already begun, secretly, to be re-purposed into purpose.
However the court decides
Whatever the court decides in August, the cafe will be here. If she goes inside, we will be the people on the outside writing her letters and counting down to her release. If she stays out, we will be the people pouring her coffee and walking her to the bus stop after closing. We are not in the business of waiting until the system has finished with someone. We start standing beside them now.
She wants to be recognised as someone who is trying to be better and improve herself. She is. We have watched it.— Matt, Founder
Soli Deo Gloria — to God alone be the glory.