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Street sweeper Paul Spiers will be getting a summer break in Portugal after all. Hundreds of residents of Beckenham in South London had donated £3,000 to send him on a holiday he couldn’t afford. He’s said to keep his patch immaculate, often lifting spirits as Elvis tracks played from his cart. Much dismay, then, when his bosses said reluctantly that he couldn’t take it, citing a clause in their contract with the council; though they did promise to match the amount raised with a donation to charity. Now a local travel agent has launched a competition with rules so tight that only Mr Spiers could win the prize holiday; and everybody seems happy.

Like many other jobs which help to prevent disease, deal with sickness, keep us safe from unpleasantness we’d prefer not to think about, sweeping streets is rarely the most attractive career option. But it’s good to consider the people who perform such tasks, and to value them.
The day before he was assassinated, the civil rights leader Martin Luther King was in Memphis, Tennessee supporting a strike by sanitation workers. Many of his listeners carried signs reading, ‘I Am A Man’ – a fundamental assertion of their right to equality, dignity and respect.
For King, that statement was rooted in his understanding of God revealed in Jesus Christ - stooping to wash the feet of his quarrelling disciples; telling them, ‘I come among you as one who serves’. As Paul writes,‘ He humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.’ It’s often in the lowest, most desperate of places, that God is to be discovered.

I remember well a priest I met in a shanty town in Rio de Janeiro, a ramshackle collection of homes assembled from scavenged rubbish. It sat alongside a motorway beneath two railway bridges with trains clattering every few minutes. The noise was deafening, the smell of sewagel oppressive. Five hundred men, women and children from one of Brazil’s poorest regions - discovering that the streets of the city were indeed not paved with gold, and that hunger and disease could catch up with them however hard they worked.

‘And yet they don’t give up hope,’ said the priest. ‘They’ve got more hope than I have. Sometimes when I’m down and out and depressed, I take a walk around these places, and I come back energised, because that’s the one thing they have. It blows your mind.’
No romantic notions of the glories of poverty, the dignity of suffering – but maybe an echo of the Christian hope which began with an execution on a municipal rubbish dump called Golgotha.

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