Most nights we stay with kind people, who invite us. Sometimes it happens that someone pays for a lodging, and occasionally we have paid for it ourselves, when we had the money for it. Once in a while we were put up in a hotel for free by the owner.
Many times in the course of explaining our way of life we are freely offered a place for the night, other times we ask.
Sometimes we sleep outside. In nature this can be very nice, but in a city it is not so easy to not have a safe place to sleep during the night. This happens only rarely. There were times in the middle of the night, when we had a very deep encounter with a person, who we would not have met otherwise.
We have come to understand, that everything that happens to us is for a purpose and for our learning. Wherever we are, God is right there with us, like when we slept in the street with the homeless in Buenos Aires, in Rio or in Rome.
God explained to us that our willingness to go through such experiences earned us the right to speak with the voice of the poor and despised.
We never had to sleep outside in the cold winter. We always had a place to sleep where it was warm.
One time, in December 2012, we arrived in Dnjepropetrovsk, in the Ukraine, at minus 20°Celsius with a stinging wind blowing. We did not know anyone and did not have any money. It was about 10 o'clock in the evening, and the streets were empty and the shops closed. After walking a bit we met a man, who, after just a short greeting, asked us to come with him to stay at his home for the night. It turned out, that he had already been in bed and was saying his nightly prayer, when God told him, "Get up, get dressed, go outside, there is someone out there, who needs you."