Homeless

Posted by John Streicker on 15 October 2009 | 0 Comments

Living on the street is hard. Very hard. I figured that out after just 5 days.

And I didn’t have to cope with an addiction, mental illness, other health challenges, limited employment prospects, a young baby / kids to take care of nor the history or threat of abuse.

I was also secure in the knowledge that after 5 days of being homeless, I had a cozy home and a nice life to return to. Still the five days were challenging.

Last week, I was one of several people invited by the Yukon Anti-Poverty Coalition to couch surf to help raise awareness around the issue of homelessness. Our rules were not to go home, not to sleep in a bed and not to spend more than $20 a day.

Rather than couch surf, I decided to live on the streets and to try and spend no money for the week. I knew it would be more challenging this way, but I saw it as an opportunity to learn about homelessness, to meet and get to know the people who were living on the edge.

I never pretended that I was homeless, and I never kidded myself that I could fully appreciate the realities facing people who live on the margin.

I slept in the back of a pickup truck, on the chairs at the Salvation Army and one night down by the river. On that night I hunted through dumpsters to try and find cardboard and plastic to make a small camp. It was cold and wet out.

Every night I was exhausted from cold hard sleeps and also from feeling exposed and uncertain of my security. The night on the chairs at the Salvation Army wasn’t cold, but it was still tiring.

All night long there were disruptions from people coming and going, people who had been using, people trying to keep the peace, people trying to sleep complaining about the noise and others eventually complaining about the noisy complaints!

My biggest shock came early in the morning. Someone came in off the street for a cup of coffee and asked the fellow who had been working the night shift about the evening. “Oh, it was pretty quiet,” he said. I would have laughed if I wasn’t so tired.

On my last day, I was discussing the level of my experience with a man from the street. He paid me a compliment: “You learned something and that’s more than nothing.” Now I want to try and share what I learned with you.

For whatever reason, the people I met were extremely open with me. When I say ‘people’ I mean street people or those people living on the margins. One of the first things I learned was to think of them as people first.

I encountered humour, compassion, strength and weakness. There were caregivers and leaders, as well as assholes. Like any group of people, they formed a social network supporting each other, a community.

People that I met who are homeless or at threat of being homeless had a range of problems which contribute to their situation.

For example I met one woman, a single mom with an 18 month old baby. She is earning $1500 per month. Although she has worked often in the Yukon, she hasn’t lived here long enough to be eligible for social assistance.

30% of an income is a fair percentage to allocate to rent. For her that’s $450 / month and that’s not enough. So she has been couch surfing, moving several times in the last couple of months. I saw that her baby has eczema. She thinks that it is due to the stress of moving.

I did see and hear about substance use/abuse especially with the more visible people I met on the street. At one point, a group was pooling money to buy some Listerine. “I have 35 cents.” (I was careful not to have money on me, not wanting to face the moral dilemma of contributing to the situation - instead I kept extra fruit in my pocket to give out.)

It was rough: rough on the body and mind, rough on people’s health and tough to watch this slow-motion tragedy unfolding. But the situation is complex and I would be careful to caution us from drawing conclusions about cause and effect.

Of course everyone has to take responsibility for their own well being. But there is a shared responsibility too. No-one choses to have a mental illness. Kids don’t chose to suffer the trauma of abuse. Any of us could fall behind on payments or lose our job. Many of us drink too much.

What can we as individuals do? As a start, we could treat people on the margin with more respect and dignity. Find out a little about their situation, eat a lunch at the soup kitchen sometime, say hi, give a damn.

Through our collective concern and interest, we will eventually create the political will to turn the issue around. I am not advocating that we just throw money at the problem.

The situation is complex and deep, yet there are many creative solutions that reduce harm, foster wellness and enable people who are otherwise marginalized to be self-reliant and productive.

In this way, providing a secure place to sleep and food to eat is also a means of prevention. By ensuring that people are contributing members of our community, we can reduce many costs for health, social, police and judicial services.

There is a great deal of human capacity which is being wasted in our community. It doesn’t need to be this way. Let’s create a richer more inclusive society.

Many thanks to the people that I met who shared their experience and history with me.