A good start

A new year may bring us both anticipation and anxiety for the unexpected. I hope your new year has started out with giving you inspiration and ideas for what's to come through you, your different human rights engagements and the people around you this year. I am very impressed by all the people and blogs I've come across this past year and I just wanna say, Keep up the good work! My new year's had a good start. Though 2007 ended with feeling quite tired from a hectic December it now makes me even more excited about being back in Stockholm with new strength and joy for 2008.

This new strength and joy really springs from something that happened this Thursday. I was on my way to rehearse some skits and presentations for a wedding between dear friends when I got on the subway at the central station and met Lasse. To make you understand what was so special about meeting him...here comes the background story.

In the beginning of September, I'm on my way from Vårberg to town when this guy Lasse boards the subway. He stands in the middle and with a gentle voice he starts explaining that he's homeless and would appreciate if anyone would like to buy a sample of "Situation Stockholm" (a paper which homeless people may sell in order to make some money - they get 50% of the profits) or if anyone would just like to give him some money for breakfast. I usually try to bring fruit with me when I'm on the subway to give away but I didn't have anything with me this time so when he got off at Slussen I asked him if we could go eat something. He gave me a warm smile and we sat down to have coffee and a bun. That's all he wanted. We talked for quite a while and it was the best conversation I'd had in a long time. We joked about his photo on his identification card where he looked just like a famous Swedish singer named Tåström (Sorry for making this not understandable to all the non-Swedes but I think it's fair to say he looks somewhat like Mick Jagger). Lasse laughed and said he gets that a lot. He told me about his everyday life, the difficulties him and his friends were having with the executives at "Situation Stockholm", and the worries about spending another winter in the cold. A homeless shelter near the central station had just been shut down in order for the city of Stockholm to expand their tourist market and build another luxurious hotel right there. It makes me so sick just typing it down for you here. It is sick. So we went on talking and decided I would give him a call at the "Situation Stockholm" office to see if we could meet again with his friends and talk about this.

I tried calling a couple of times but then time just went by with everything to do in Vårberg. As I went home for Christmas I was feeling so rotten about not having met Lasse during the entire fall. I felt like a hypocrite as I was thinking about him and his friends spending winter out in the cold. I had been thinking about him a lot during the fall. Hoping he was well and...alive.

So when I got on the subway this Thursday and passed Lasse to the right it was only because I barely recognized him at first and wasn't sure it was him I spotted in the corner seat. When I had met him in September he looked kinda worn out with a long beard and a tired look on his face. Now, he looked healthy, was without beard (not saying anything against having a beard, ha) and that worn out look. I went back, sat down next to him and asked him if his name was Lasse and he smiled and said yes. I asked him if he recognized me, that we'd met in the beginning of this fall at Slussen and that I had tried to get a hold of him a couple of times. His face lit up, smiling with suprise I guess, and said he remembered me and asked me to call him as he was just about to get off the subway. He smiled and waved to me as the subway rolled by.

I am sharing this here so that maybe our thoughts on the unexpected twists and turns of this new year will bring us a little bit of anticipation rather than anxiety. May it also give us new strength and joy.