September 20, 2012
Year 12 students from St Mary’s Catholic College in Kingaroy recently took part in a voluntary Street Retreat in which they spent two days working and learning about the struggles faced by some of the most poor and marginalised within the Australian community.
The students joined the Claver Cares Street Van which has been serving a barbecue dinner to street people every Monday night for the past four years. The Claver Cares van was an initiative of St Peter Claver College at Riverview.
The St Mary’s students helped to prepare and cook the barbecue and mingled with the street people to hear their stories.
“I really enjoyed helping out with the Claver Cares van because I was actually able to directly help less fortunate people instead of just giving charity,” senior student Sarah Undery said.
On the second day, the students went to the Salvation Army’s Moonya Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation Centre and listened to stories from recovering drug, alcohol and gambling addicts.
Students were surprised that the recovering addicts were very normal people from good families who had just made poor choices.
“The most challenging part of the Street Retreat was realising that the people we were meeting came from lives and backgrounds such as ours, and seeing that it was possible for any of us to slip into that kind of situation,” student Tayla Benson said.
The final activity of the Street Retreat was to visit the Ozcare Homeless Men’s Shelter in South Brisbane. The students were taken through the centre to look at the accommodation and rehabilitation programs.
St Mary’s principal Mr Michael Nayler said he believed that the Street Retreat was a life changing experience for many students.
Back in 1981 Mr Nayler was taken on a Street Retreat by former Kingaroy parish priest Fr Kevin Ryan and this had been influential in Mr Nayler’s decision to pursue a career with Catholic Education and to run Street Retreats for students himself across the past 16 years.
Senior student Haylee Schloss summed up her classmates’ experience: “The Street Retreat is an amazing opportunity that changes the way you think and see the world.”
