Five years ago was a low point in my life. I won’t go into

the details of how I got there but basically I had been squatting in a block of flats for several months and after being forcibly evicted I found myself sleeping in a park. The flat wasn’t much better than the park to be honest, we had no beds so we slept on the floor (which had no carpet so was just bare concrete), and the seals around the windows were no longer there so cold air blew through the entire flat. There was a crack in the ceiling so water poured through which meant we would often wake up in a pool of water. The boiler didn’t work either so we had no hot water or heating. I can’t really paint an accurate picture of how bad it really was so you will just have to use your imagination. I ended up taking a whole array of drugs just to blot out how terrible it all was. Through this time I somehow managed to hold down a job as
a treasurer at a bingo hall. I don’t know how I managed it to be honest, I got hardly any sleep and I couldn’t even get a bath or anything.

 You would think that for me to get evicted from somewhere as bad as that would mean I had hit rock bottom. That was not the case, I still had a long way to fall.

I went to work on Sunday the 13^th of March just like every other day, the only difference being that I had slept in a park the night before and I had a future of rough sleeping ahead of me. But when I got into the cash office I found that the previous weeks takings hadn’t been collected, this meant that there was double the amount of cash there that night than I had seen at any other time. My drug addled mind quickly connected the
dots and came to the conclusion that this was surely an opportunity given to me by some higher power, for this to happen today of all days, it must mean something?

So obviously I took the money. It was an easy choice really.
I thought to myself, I can wait and hope that things got better or I could
actually do something about it, and besides, I didn’t really have much to lose.  So at the end of my shift I walked out with a duffel bag full of cash, the newspapers said it was £24,580 in total, although I swear I counted it as just under £28k, although guess that doesn’t matter really in the grand scheme of things. I met up with Leon, the person (I don’t
want to call him a friend) I had been living with at the time, and talked about what we should do with it. I suggested Amsterdam. There was only one problem with this plan, as Leon rightly pointed out, neither of us had passports.

This didn’t stop me though and we arrived in Amsterdam 4 days later. We quickly realised the seriousness of what we had done and that we
were now in a foreign country with no ID and with no knowledge of the language and after a bit of contemplation, we decided to spend up and hand ourselves in, knowing that by doing this we were forfeiting the next 10 years of our lives.

It took just short of 2 months to spend it all, and then after attempting to hand ourselves in to every police station we could find in Amsterdam (they wanted nothing to do with us), we came back to England to face
the consequences.

While waiting to be sentenced I prayed for the first time in my life. I prayed for cancer. I wanted to die but I didn’t have the guts to kill myself so my logic was that if there was a god, I would ask him to give me
cancer instead of somebody else.

The legal guidelines said that for my crime I should get a minimum of 5-7 years. By some kind of miracle I only got 15 months.

At this point I knew for a fact that I had no future. I won’t go into too much info about prison, but rest assured it was not a fun time. I was deeply depressed and prison was not helping my mental state at all.
I decided that I was going to kill myself, but I swore that I would wait until I got out of prison because I didn’t want people to think it was because I couldn’t cope with jail.

I was released and sent to live in a bail hostel in Leeds. This was the darkest time of my entire life. I was living with an alcoholic and
I ended up drinking with him every day. This pushed me further into depression and eventually on 25^th December 2011 I decided to finally end it.

I must have written at least 5 different suicide notes, desperately trying to explain how I had gotten to this point and trying to justify my actions to those left behind. I wasn’t happy with any of them though and eventually settled with one simple line: “Suicide notes are for pussys”.
Then I took every single pill I had, washed it down with cider and went to bed for the last time.

But then the next day I woke up. To this day I have no idea how, because I promise you, I took A LOT of pills. So I couldn’t even kill myself apparently, just another thing I had failed at.

After that I never attempted suicide again but I was still depressed. I moved on from Leeds and swore I would never go back because it had
too many bad memories for me. I moved back to Keighley and found myself squatting in a flat again, very similar to the one from before, and just like before I soon got kicked out.

This is when I ended up in Bradford living on the streets. I was found by a homeless charity called Inn Churches who gave me a warm meal and
somewhere safe to sleep every night. The organiser, Julie, introduced me to Paul and Steph Cribb who had recently set up a community living project. I was invited to go and live there.

At first this was difficult. I had a lot of baggage and I was a difficult person to be around. But the persevered, they gave me a home.
Most of all they gave me love, and even though sometime it may not seem like it, but I am eternally grateful and I don’t think I will ever be able to thank them enough for what they did.

I managed to secure work as a builder thanks to Paul and his some giving me a chance to get experience working for their company. I was sent to work at Bradford University and after seeing it I instantly decided I wanted to go.

I remember saying to people, “I will be in university next year”, and they probably all thought I was mad because I had no qualifications or anything.

I quickly found out that there was no chance I was going to be going to university just yet, but I wasn’t giving up on my dream so I applied to go to college. The woman at the interview said I couldn’t go to college because no university would let me in without a maths GCSE.

At this point I was in Leeds (the place I said I’d never come back to) building a new library for the university. So I walked inside and asked them to write me a letter telling the college that they would consider
letting me in after I had completed an access course.

After I had told them about myself, to my absolute surprise, they told me to forget about college and to just apply straight to them.

Which leads me to now. I’ve nearly completed my first year of university, achieving things that I never thought I would. I am sat in the library that I helped build, writing about myself and how far I have come in five short years. There are tears in my eyes as I write this because even though I am flawed in so many ways, I am so proud of myself and what I have achieved so far. I see all the things that have happened to me as the things that have made me who I am today. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for them. I know that there has being a hand guiding me my whole life, letting me make mistakes because I needed to learn from them, but ultimately protecting me. I should be dead so many times over but somehow I’m not. This to me is proof of god, I’m not sure if I believe in religion entirely, but I 100% know there is a god.

This is where I tell you about my next step in life. So many people have helped me in my life when I didn’t deserve it and now I want to give something back. In summer I will be going to Ghana for 12 weeks to work with children living in poverty. I don’t have all the details of exactly what I am doing yet but I will keep you all updated as and when I find out. This is a Government funded project called ICS and I don’t have to pay anything towards it. I do however have to raise £800 to show that I am committed to it. I would really appreciate your help in any way you can, whether it be by donation or just by simply sharing this to get the message to other people.

Or if you don’t want to help me personally then donate to Inn Churches, they are a deserving charity and they saved my life, or find a homeless person and talk to them. I was begging on the street and so many people passed me by and wrote me off, but I am a person with a story and so is every single other homeless person. Just try show them that somebody cares you know?

But most importantly remember that five years ago I had no future and no hope, but now I’m at university and I’m going to Africa. That is crazy to me, never in a million years could I ever have seen that coming, if
you went back and told me where I’d be I would have said you were insane because it would impossible for me to be where I am today. But here I am. The moral is to never give up, aim high and never doubt yourself because you never know what you are capable of

Thanks for your time, and please please please share this, or donate, or both. Whatever you want really, thanks again

Liam. K