For any reasonable person what the articulate 17-year-old describes so matter of factly sitting on a park bench in a quiet part of Surrey is a nightmare.

She left home at 14 and survived on the streets of Surrey and Vancouver – a child among misfits and predators – until being brought in from the cold after two years by members of Surrey’s Safe Schools Wraparound team. They’d found her living in a tent outside a small interior town.

“Yeah, we were really worried,” said Jon Ross, a Wraparound program supervisor recalling the time she went missing. The RCMP put out a provincewide missing persons alert with her picture. “For a while no one knew where she was – her friends, nobody.”

Eventually, she called the Safe Schools team who went and retrieved her.

The Wraparound program involves school district personnel, City of Surrey staff and police officers whose mandate is to help the city’s most vulnerable, at-risk children and youth. Its caseload includes youth who have committed criminal offenses or are in danger of being recruited into criminal activities or being sexually exploited as a result of living in poverty or neglect.

The Vancouver Sun’s Adopt-A-School program helps. It provides the team with funds it would not otherwise have to feed, clothe and take care of these youth. This year, team is asking AAS for $25,000 to help the program – some of which will be used to continue supporting this teenager, who for her safety we are not identifying.

As a child, she and her brother, who is a few years older, were often left alone at home.

“Mom was always out late, never really home – working two jobs or she’d be in hospital because when she was younger she had this tumor on her brain.

“At times we didn’t know if she was working in the hospital or had been admitted to the hospital…so just me and my brother.”

“Sometimes the neighbours would call the cops because we were too young to be left alone.” They lived hand to mouth in a basement suite.

“At school we always signed up for programs where they’d give us donations of clothes, or for Christmas, when we’d get toys.”

At 14, she walked out and began living with a boyfriend on the streets in Vancouver.

“We’d just walk around, sometimes find an A&W or a McDonalds to sit in and use the washroom. Sometimes older people would have issues with us and we’d have to go and hide. We just wanted a place to sit where there’s people around so nothing bad will happen.”

At times, in desperation over the next two years, she accepted offers of a place to stay. Did she know the people she went to live with?

“At first no and it was a very bad environment – a bunch of older guys –  and I was very young and made it known I was young but they didn’t care and a bunch of really horrible things happened.

“I left that place and stayed with an ex-boyfriend and that was really bad, too, a lot of fighting and yelling. He was always sleeping with other girls and he’d sometimes get really aggressive with me.”

So, she moved on.

“I was always going from place to place asking if I could stay.”

For a time, she was sleeping in a car. In the end, she and a boyfriend took a car and drove to the Interior where they were stopped by police.

“They took the car and we hiked all the way to (town) and I got a job there. I was 15. But being there broke me. I was far away from home.”

After contacted the Wraparound program, Ross and two other team members drove out to find her.

“We were living in a tent in the mountains and it was freezing. We were sleeping on a single mattress on the floor,” she said.

“When they came, they brought me some clothes, socks, essentials we needed, jackets, hoodies and we talked about a plan to come back,” she said.

(The team was able to provide these items because of the money provided by AAS donors.).

Since that November when she moved back, she has been living with her family in a converted garage with support from the Wraparound program because her mother’s wages aren’t enough to cover their living expenses.

“More than 75 per cent goes to rent, so we help her with food and other necessities,” said Ross. That day, the teenager said her mother only had $50 in her account that day because she’d paid the rent. “If I asked her to buy me underwear or medication she couldn’t do it.”

And food?

“The only help we get is from the (Wraparound) program.”

Despite the poverty, her life is no longer as dark or dangerous. She’s working in a youth drop-in centre in Surrey for “kids who don’t want to go home or maybe don’t have a place to live,” she said. “It’s like a little village. I work there as a cook and a baker.”

Back in school, she’ll graduate from Grade 12 next year and Ross has arranged for her to do a practicum in an elementary school to give her experience working with children.

“In the future I would like to do that because I love seeing the joy in children just being children.

“I never got to be a kid. My childhood was lost to me.”

By Gerry Bellett (gbellett@gmail.com)