When Dayne Marlow was 15 and homeless on the streets of Griffith, he says all he ever wanted was to one day have a job and a place to come home to.
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This Wednesday, April 5, will mark ‘Youth Homelessness Matters Day’, an opportunity for many to reflect on the troubling statistics of youth homelessness in Australia, numbers that for many years included Dayne.
For Dayne it all began when at just 15 and after getting into trouble one time too many he found himself kicked out of home, standing on the doorstep with nowhere to go.
So he turned to couch surfing, drifting between friends homes.
It is a sad story, but one Deb Longhurst from the Linking Communities Network (LCN) is familiar with, with 26,000 young Australians between 12 and 25 experiencing homelessness every single night.
“And the first and most common way young people experience homelessness is couch surfing,” she said on Monday.
For Dayne couch surfing was an experience of unbearable loneliness, as he lived on the outskirts of other peoples lives.
“It would come to dinner time and they would say ‘do you want to stay for dinner?’ And of course I wanted to stay for dinner, I haven't had a cooked meal in a week, two weeks,” he said.
“But I would always say no I'm right, I'm going this way or I'm ducking up here and you just go somewhere else.
“You don’t want to be a burden to your friends, you don’t have a sense of belonging, because you don’t belong.”
Even more terrifying for the teenager though were those nights when the “Russian roulette” of looking for a place to stay didn’t work out and he had to find shelter in local parks.
“When you have to sleep in parks, you don’t sleep. . . that was scary man,” he said.
But looking back over the past five years where he was homeless twice Dayne easily identified the moments where it all changed, when friends told him of Langunyah House and then later of the LCN.
“They sat me down and I wasn’t just a number, they treated me like a person,” he said.
“It was like a light had just been turned on, like I had been walking through the dark and then someone has gone ‘here mate’,” he whistles “and they have turned the light on.” Today Dayne is “kicking a brick”, finishing his first year in an apprenticeship and living in his own home. “I had made such a big deal out of someone helping me I couldn’t see it wasn’t such a big deal,” he said. That’s why I love these guys [LCN] and I’m really proud when they asked me to tell my story, out of all the kids that come through here, and there is a million of them.
“For those kids just don't give up, because just around the corner it’s going to change, there is always someone willing to help you just have to look for the proper services in your area.”