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03/24/2002 Entry: "Believing new things"
I just came back from a panel discussion hosted by the Red Rose School about the current state of homelessness. Now, with a lead-in sentence like that, one might not be tempted to read much further, but this meeting was far from a dry academic talk about homelessness. Firstly, everyone who talked had experienced or was experiencing homelessness right now. That alone was enough to bring the talk to a very basic level, free of the academic BS that would have been put forth if this talk had happened at a university.
The most moving story of the night came from a woman who was asked to speak about halfway through the meeting when one of the speakers hadn't showed up. The woman and her husband, who she sat by, had a lived a solid middle class life in California, where he worked as an electrician. His income was steady and good for a long time, until he had an accident where he fell off of a ladder, 25 feet to the ground. His injuries prevented him from working, and not long after, the workman's compensation money stopped.
Within a very short period of time, they went from living in a 5 bedroom house with 4 children, to sending their children to live with their mother, and living in a van. They traveled around quite a bit, and ended up in Portland. Not long after, they moved into Dignity Village.
The woman's voice wavered as she talked about her past 3 months living at the village. Her middle class background, and moreso, her living relatively comfortably for the first 50 years of her life made her unprepared for homelessness. The people at Dignity welcomed her and her husband, listened to their worries, and invite them to be part of the family of Dignity.
She is now part of the outreach committee at the village, spending some time talking to various neighborhood association meetings as Dignity continues to look for a new site for the village. At the meetings, she is often treated badly, as residents of the neighborhood express their strong feelings against having Dignity within their neighborhood.
She paused after she recounted this, then said, "These people treat me so poorly, and I think to myself... you'd better be careful.... you'd better be careful of how you treat homeless people like me, because you are not invulnerable to this... one day you may be sharing a tent with me... you're not invulnerable."
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