“Live for your family; live for Jesus, and if you can help somebody, help them.”
Top, Derick Allen feeding the homeless on the street in
Georgetown, Guyana, 2010.
Above, Derick Allen as a youth in Georgetown, Guyana.
PHOTOS COURTESY DERICK ALLEN
to pay for his drug debt and recovery. It totaled $375,000. He told
Allen, “Live for your family; live for Jesus, and if you can help somebody,
help them.”
That message has stayed with Allen for nearly 14 years, and in all
likelihood, it will continue to stay with him.
Each year he travels back to the same streets he grew up in (in
Georgetown), passing out plates of hot rice and slip-slaps to addicts and
the homeless and carrying the message of Jesus along with his message of
hope: I came from these streets; with Jesus, friend, you can make it too.
“People in the street need the message more than people in the
church,” he says.
He plans to move back to Georgetown, Guyana, in four to five years
to run his own volunteer feeding program.
But for now Allen scans the dining room in a nondescript building
of Sunset Park, watching the group finish its meals.
As they start to leave, seemingly satisfied and grateful to have been
helped, Allen says, “I would like to do this for the rest of me life.”
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WBM october 2012