Last Thursday I was on the streets, as I have been for the last 18 months, handling out food, clothes , toiletries, and just being someone to listen to them, and frankly each Thursday night as I leave to go home I thank my stars that I’m not homeless, thought it was something I experienced in my late teens. Imagine if you can, sitting on an icy pavement, begging for food, money or just something to blot out the reason that the street is better than a warm comfortable room in a house or hostel. I see a family that lost their whole life, when their home was burnt to the ground by thugs who didn’t like their life style. I see a couple of girls who were abused at home, and when moved to council care were again abused, so they left and moved to Bristol and a hostel and were abused there, they had next to nothing, and that was taken, a long with their childhood, by the people who were meant to love them and care for them.
I see ex-service men who live a life on the street and are constantly on the move, glad to be alive, sad that they lived and their mates, brothers really, died
They survive knowing that their pain and loss has killed the love and hope that their families had when they came back from the war alive. They cannot help but subject their families to the torment and pain of seeing the effects that war has done to them, all the fighting the drinking the drugs is to blot out the nightmares that most are torn apart by.
I can only image what it is like to see the parade of dead friends and enemies in the nightmares that destroy their home life and their minds. For you from the comfort of your house to say this is a life style choice is to miss the point. This life was not chosen by them, it was chosen by the underfunding of care homes, it was put in place by destruction of mental institutions, and the underfunding of national health care system by successive governments.
Next time you see a homeless person, remember that between him/her/them sits only three months pay, or a family death, a car accident that leaves you unable to cope with life, between you and them is a gap so tiny that one action or inaction by some other person, outside of your control, and you could, just be there alongside them, be out there now, cold, hungry, scared, desperate to blot out the pain loneliness the isolation.
Find a local soup-run, a local hostel, a local halfway house and give up one evening a week, or a month, or just give up a few hours a month, and see that they are just like you; they could be again given one helping hand. Or they could and will die unloved unnoticed, unmissed.
Right now in Bristol there are 70 people sleeping rough, no bed, no shelter, nothing but a blanket and if they are lucky a box or plastic bag between them and the weather.