Phone(s)
We collect phones on this side. Well, actually, we don’t do the collecting ourselves. Other people collect old phones and give them to us. And what do we do with them? We give them away. For free. Huh? Let me explain.
Last Thursday I was talking to a homeless man.
He was pretty(!) tense, because today or tomorrow he was supposed to find out whether he could “get” a room again.
The social services, debt counseling, housing association, homeless shelter and we are all somewhere in that whole process, trying to make it happen.
There is just one small problem: how are all those organizations supposed to reach him if they have a question?
During the day, he is not allowed into the homeless shelter. He can only be there at night. So they can’t reach him by phone there. During the day, he wanders from bench to pavement, from doorway to coffee place. So where is he when someone from social services wants to call him about x, y or z? No idea. You can’t exactly call “bench in the park number 12“.
And that slows the process down ENORMOUSLY. Because then everything has to be sent by mail to the homeless shelter. Wait a few days for the letter to arrive. Fill out a form. Send it back. Wait another few days. Even though these are often not complicated things at all. And because the process moves so slowly, there is a huge risk that the little room has already been given to someone else by then. Oops. Most of the time, these are the simplest questions that you and I would answer within two minutes: yes or no. By phone.
And he has had that phone again since last Thursday.
An old thing. You can make calls with it, read your email and not much else, really. But that’s all it needs to do. We put in a prepaid SIM card for one month with very little credit. Prepaid, because we don’t want to take out a long-term contract. And only a little credit, because otherwise the risk of misuse is simply too high.
And suddenly, he is reachable again. We immediately pass his number on to the organizations involved and, lo and behold: something that could otherwise have taken weeks because various organizations were waiting for each other was sorted out in two days.
He has a room. He is sleeping somewhere dry again. (Autumn has arrived, people!) Problem solved.
What did that cost? An old phone that someone gave us and a prepaid SIM card that we paid for him. And oh yeah, our time too. Because that is worth something as well, right?
And do we ever expect to get the phone back? No. We tell people that we are lending the phone to them, so officially it isn’t a gift. But honestly, we don’t expect a phone like that to ever come back. That’s simply not realistic. Either someone actually uses it and therefore can’t give it back anymore. Or it gets stolen. Yep, that’s another downside of being homeless. People in that world sometimes just steal each other’s stuff. And selling it? That doesn’t make much sense either. We have the codes, and the thing probably isn’t worth a cent at the average pawn shop. 🙂
Oh yeah, there is another story connected to lending the phones. When we hand over the phone, we say the following:
This phone isn’t given to you by us. God is lending it to you. God also expects you to give that phone back to us when you no longer need it. He arranged this phone for you, so take good care of it. You can fool us, but you can’t fool God, so take good care of it and don’t say thank you to us, but to God, because He arranged this specifically for you.
That gives the recipient something to think about, and we notice that they also tend to take better care of the things they have been given.
So yes, we collect old phones here. Not because we desperately wanted to start a phone project, but because an old phone can sometimes be exactly that one missing piece that makes someone reachable again.
And sometimes that means the difference between sleeping on the street for months longer and having a room within two days.
On behalf of the people we can help through this: a huge thank you for the phones and for the finances to pay for the SIM cards. Simple project. Big impact.
