The Streets Barber

Nasir Sobhani, with his barber kit and skateboard.

He's a guy with a big heart and a lot of compassion, but he's no stranger to hard luck and unfortunate circumstances. After his own struggle with heroin addiction, he decided to make a new start after months in rehab. Although he grew up in Canada, he moved halfway around the world to Melbourne, where he started over.

At the age of 26, Nasir Sobhani has been a barber for three years and he comes at his career with a passion for cutting hair. While working during his apprenticeship, he struck up a conversation with a young man who was washing the shop's windows. He learned that this person had been a heroin addict and was clean for an entire month and he wanted a haircut to mark the occasion. After Nas gave him the cut, his mother turned up with her camera and was in tears over the transformation. "It was at this point that I realized that if I could help encourage this change for a guy and all I'm doing is just what I love doing, then maybe I should just keep doing it. You already have a new-found confidence when you get a haircut, and now imagine what it's like for someone who's really been in a bad place in their life."



And that started Nas' street initiative with homeless people. After he spends most of his week giving haircuts to people as a professional barber, he donates his one day off to helping those without homes to get what he had just a few years before - a clean start. Every Monday, he sets off with his skateboard and barber's kit to the Footscray section of Melbourne, where he noticed that there were more people in need.

Why does Nasir spend so much time providing this service? "I remember the days of when I just used to just hate myself and not even look at the mirror without crying because I would just be so disgusted at who I was. And I find that embedded in a lot of my street clients. They feel so ashamed of who they are."

Now known as The Streets Barber, Nas provides the haircuts along with a caring ear, words of hope, and a touch of kindness. Nas talked about why he goes hands-on, "Something as meaningless as money is not going to do anything. A human interaction with them, companionship, from someone who just genuinely wants to know about them is going to really help them out. So letting them know that they are worthy of human interaction is actually the main thing here."

Ganesh's before and after photo.

Nasir has been documenting what he has been doing on his INSTAGRAM page, where he posts his clients' before and after pictures, along with other street scenes. It truly is a labor of love!

Nasir giving one of his street clients a haircut.

Thanks to this article from Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/07/02/clean-cut-clean-start_n_7705194.html?1435839005&utm_hp_ref=good-news; and this article from The Herald Sun: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/leader/west/barber-offers-free-haircuts-for-the-homeless-in-footscrays-nicholson-st-mall/story-fngnvmj7-1227389943489.

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