Zain used drugs for six years before he was caught. He once tried out for the Singapore football team and didn't make it. One month into the cafe he is acting second-in-charge of an outlet, engaged to be married, and pulling shots like a man who has finally found his game.
If you asked Zain, two years ago, what kind of life he expected to be living at twenty, he would not have described this one. He had been using since he was fourteen. He had been working as a delivery rider for the wrong sort of cargo. He was sentenced to a year. Because he was underage, he was given the privilege of serving part of that sentence at the Community Rehabilitation Centre.
Before all of that, his dream had been to play football for Singapore. He went for a trial. He didn't make it — partly, he says now, because his temper made him unreliable. The dream closed. The drugs widened.
The interviews that wouldn't take him
After he started looking for legitimate work, the mainstream coffee chains — Starbucks, Coffee Bean — turned him away. He doesn't say this with bitterness. He says it as a man reporting facts. He understands why an employer might be cautious. He has just learned, painfully, that caution and write-off look identical to the person on the receiving end.
Then he walked through our door. Matt, on the first day, told him plainly: “Everyone here has been through something. You're not different. You're a team-mate.” Zain said the workplace immediately began to feel like home.
The leap from 'normal barista' to 2IC
He was honest with us. When he first started, he felt “stupid.” He had done a restaurant operations course inside but standing behind a real espresso machine, in a real cafe, with real customers, was a different kind of pressure. Two weeks in, the shape of the work clicked. By the end of his first month, we trusted him to support Adrian as second-in-charge.
One month. Six years of drug use behind him. Second-in-charge. One month.
This is not a metric. This is mercy doing what mercy does: building, faster than fear can keep up.
The fiancée and the future
Zain is preparing to get engaged next year. He talks about his future family with the kind of seriousness you usually hear from much older men. He wants to be reliable. He wants to be approachable. He wants to be the kind of husband and father he himself didn't always have. His mother — his anchor through every relapse — has told him, again and again, to keep trying. He has.
He told us he wants people to see him as dependable, capable, willing to step in when needed. He doesn't realise he's already become that man. We see it. The customers feel it. The team relies on it.
If a twenty-year-old can come out of six years of drug use and become a leader on a cafe floor inside thirty days — then please, the next time someone tells you that people don't change, you can hand them this story.
In one month he has been entrusted with helping Adrian manage the outlet, effectively serving as second-in-charge when needed. This is what trust does. It builds, faster than fear can keep up.— Matt, Founder
Soli Deo Gloria — to God alone be the glory.