Read Online A Gift of Hope: Helping the Homeless by Danielle Steel - Free Book Online
Authors: Danielle Steel
Ads: Link
Francisco was listed as just over 7,000. At one time, the official count had dropped to just over 5,000. (Was it a cold night when they counted? Were most people off thestreets, or hiding? Had their disability checks just arrived, so many escaped to hotels for a single night? Or did fewer people do the count?)
The church that provides the most homeless services in the city, and serves over one million free meals a year, believes the more accurate homeless count on San Francisco’s streets at that time was closer to 20,000. The police who worked on the streets in the areas where most homeless people live agreed that there were more than 20,000 people living on the streets. My uneducated rough guess, just based on the population we served (about 3,000 people a year), was also 20,000. That’s a far cry from the official count of 5,000 to 7,000, which misleads citizens into believing that the problem is less severe than it is.
Misrepresenting the count lulls us into a false sense of security that the problem is being solved. The reality is very different. The growing population of homeless in all our cities is a strong indicator that whatever help we’re offering is missing its mark. However good our intentions, however many programs we have in place, the people in most dire need of them are getting lost, not benefiting from the system, and not getting the help they need. And without help they will not be able to get off the streets.
We need more programs, more money, more help, more workers, more people who care about the problem of homelessness,more citizens who are willing to see it and do whatever they can to help. Until then, ignoring the problem entirely, or harassing the homeless, is not the answer or the solution. The solution is greater awareness, more available funding, and more help.
One of the things that struck me once I began working on the streets was the variety of people I met there. Strangely, each trip was different, in the age and race of people we saw, and I was never quite sure why. Sometimes I saw mostly older (maybe forties and fifties) African American men, up to 75 percent on some nights. Other times we saw mostly Caucasians, the majority in their thirties, who looked functional, freshly on the streets, and as though they could be part of the normal workforce, although something had clearly gone wrong in their lives. Women were always in the minority, and if only recently arrived on the streets they sometimes seemed in better shape than the men. Newly arrived women appeared less unkempt. Sometimes we saw women who’d been there longer and were absolutely ravaged. I had the feeling that women don’t hold up long term. (Our ratio was usually ten men to one woman on any given night, except sometimes in warmer weather when there were a few more women out there. In cold winter weather, the women were more likely to go inside, despite the violence in the shelters, except the most hardcore who were too far gone to even get to shelter, so wewent to them.) A woman I had seen frequently died last year. I assumed she was somewhere in her sixties. I was shocked when I read her obituary to discover that she had once been a model, and was thirty-two or -three when she died.
One of the most moving examples I’ve seen was a young woman who must have been in her twenties. She was wearing a flowered silk dress on a summer night, her hair was combed, and she was wearing a string of fake pearls around her neck. She was one of the few people I continued to see regularly for eleven years. At first, I watched her deteriorate over the months, to a heartbreaking degree. The silk dress and pearls disappeared quickly. And ten years later, probably in her early thirties, she had lost all her teeth, had lost a leg, was in a wheelchair, wound up in jail from time to time, and had a look of devastation about her. Yet when I saw her—and I looked for her often—she was always courteous, kind, and smiling. We always stopped
The church that provides the most homeless services in the city, and serves over one million free meals a year, believes the more accurate homeless count on San Francisco’s streets at that time was closer to 20,000. The police who worked on the streets in the areas where most homeless people live agreed that there were more than 20,000 people living on the streets. My uneducated rough guess, just based on the population we served (about 3,000 people a year), was also 20,000. That’s a far cry from the official count of 5,000 to 7,000, which misleads citizens into believing that the problem is less severe than it is.
Misrepresenting the count lulls us into a false sense of security that the problem is being solved. The reality is very different. The growing population of homeless in all our cities is a strong indicator that whatever help we’re offering is missing its mark. However good our intentions, however many programs we have in place, the people in most dire need of them are getting lost, not benefiting from the system, and not getting the help they need. And without help they will not be able to get off the streets.
We need more programs, more money, more help, more workers, more people who care about the problem of homelessness,more citizens who are willing to see it and do whatever they can to help. Until then, ignoring the problem entirely, or harassing the homeless, is not the answer or the solution. The solution is greater awareness, more available funding, and more help.
One of the things that struck me once I began working on the streets was the variety of people I met there. Strangely, each trip was different, in the age and race of people we saw, and I was never quite sure why. Sometimes I saw mostly older (maybe forties and fifties) African American men, up to 75 percent on some nights. Other times we saw mostly Caucasians, the majority in their thirties, who looked functional, freshly on the streets, and as though they could be part of the normal workforce, although something had clearly gone wrong in their lives. Women were always in the minority, and if only recently arrived on the streets they sometimes seemed in better shape than the men. Newly arrived women appeared less unkempt. Sometimes we saw women who’d been there longer and were absolutely ravaged. I had the feeling that women don’t hold up long term. (Our ratio was usually ten men to one woman on any given night, except sometimes in warmer weather when there were a few more women out there. In cold winter weather, the women were more likely to go inside, despite the violence in the shelters, except the most hardcore who were too far gone to even get to shelter, so wewent to them.) A woman I had seen frequently died last year. I assumed she was somewhere in her sixties. I was shocked when I read her obituary to discover that she had once been a model, and was thirty-two or -three when she died.
One of the most moving examples I’ve seen was a young woman who must have been in her twenties. She was wearing a flowered silk dress on a summer night, her hair was combed, and she was wearing a string of fake pearls around her neck. She was one of the few people I continued to see regularly for eleven years. At first, I watched her deteriorate over the months, to a heartbreaking degree. The silk dress and pearls disappeared quickly. And ten years later, probably in her early thirties, she had lost all her teeth, had lost a leg, was in a wheelchair, wound up in jail from time to time, and had a look of devastation about her. Yet when I saw her—and I looked for her often—she was always courteous, kind, and smiling. We always stopped
Similar Books
