imagined-community

Street Painting on Shinjuku Homeless Cardboard House

Last week I posted some links for homeless shelters in the Boston / Cambridge area. If you live in the area and would like to do something for the homeless, you may want to check out
Solutions at Work, located in the historic Old Cambridge Baptist Church, at 1151 Massachusetts Avenue. The mission of Solutions at Work is to help “people transition out of homelessness.” You can donate clothing, computers, wheels, or your time.

Has anyone visited the new website street-people.com? The site is trying to use humor to raise awareness about homelessness in Tennessee. But not everyone is thrilled with the site, including advocates for the homeless, according to WMC-TV. Some critics object to the site because they claim it promotes stereotypes as as well as fuels fear about the homeless.

Just a reminder — in China the latest estimate is that 15 million people have lost their homes after a devastating summer of typhoons and floods. You can read more about what the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, along with the Red Cross Society of China are doing to help here.

A shout out to 18 Nantucket High School students and their 8 adult chaperones who left their island off the coast of Massachusetts to build houses for the homeless in Guatemala. The July volunteerism trip was planned in conjunction with an Antiguan humanitarian organization, La Asociacion de Nuestros Ahijados, or the God’s Child Project.

Wondering what happened with those folks in Florida…the homeless and the groups that want to continue offering them food in Orlando parks? Well, the battle continues… You can read a commentary about the situation by Jim Philips or watch Jim on video at Orlando’s local television station, WESH.

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Homeless, By Pat Doyle Mikrut

Here is a recap of news & blogs about the homeless. Some of this stuff is VERY recent, some not so recent, but still important.

France, with a homeless population of about 86,500, was shamed into action by Medecins du Monde’s “tent city” campaign this summer. The organization gave 300 homeless people tents, which they set up along the Seine and throughout Paris. The Boston Globe published a good article on the campaign. There is a a heated comments discussion about the tents at Postcards from Paris. Unfortunately, the blog author made a quip about the tents — and the comments flew! Imaginary Parisians took up the “tent city” topic in a blog about a man, Arthur, who lives in a tent under the Pont Marie in the 4th arrondissement.

In the UK, a homeless woman has been blogging about her life in a blog entitled WanderingScribe. After the BBC published a story on WanderingScribe in April, the publicity enabled the author, Anya Peters, to land a book deal. Fusion View writes that:

…readers who came to her via the BBC news story see her life and blog like just another reality TV show where they can give/ deduct points for her actions on some virtual scoreboard or vote her in or out of the game by calling/ writing in to her “show”.

When WanderingScribe put a paypal icon on her blog all hell broke loose. You can read more at Fusion View.

Seventeen homeless people in Japan are fighting back after the municipal government of Osaka removed their tents (!) and are filing a lawsuit demanding 1.1 million yen each (about $9,440). You can read more at The Daily Yomiuri. The evictions and Osaka’s homeless are discussed in depth in the Higo Blog.

In Canada, A SFU student/video game designer has created a game where the player is a homeless women in Vancouver. Raising awareness or exploitation? You can read the article here.

And this evening, several US based groups in Orlando have begun feeding the poor in front of city hall. Orlando recently banned groups from feeding the the poor in city parks. Lake Eola had been a favorite place for setting up outdoor soup kitchens for the homeless. As Regina told reporter April Hunt, “This is the safest place to be,” she said. “You don’t feel homeless here.” The Orlando Sentinel reports on the story here. For more on feeding the homeless in Florida please check out the the 13th Juror’s blog.

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The good news today is that the Lebanese government has approved the UN ceasefire plan and that Israel has agreed to cease airstrikes on Monday; the bad news is that the conflict has caused homelessness for a million people. How does a person deal with a figure like that? And if you add a million displaced Lebanese to the approximate worldwide homeless tally of 100 million people …?

When I think about homelessness, I usually think of it in the abstract (in terms of statistics), or I connect with it from a distance – through videos of people that I don’t know on CNN. However, I live in a city with a large homeless population, so I do see homelessness every day. This morning, I parked behind Walgreens so that I could walk to the library. Before walking to the library, I rifled through the stuff in my trunk for about 5 minutes, no doubt absent-mindedly muttering and sighing the whole time. For a moment I paused to consider whether I should move the folding chairs, which were taking up too much room next to the mini-snow shovel. I looked up through the tree-rimmed embankment surrounding the lot and found myself staring at a homeless man. He was sitting on top of a plastic crate, next to a pile of clothes and paper shopping bags. Bringing my mind into the moment and out of my trunk, I stared at him too intently and for too long. He looked away. I slammed the trunk shut and headed off to the library, wondering if he had been watching me the whole time. And if he had been, what he, an impersonal observer, must have thought of me. After the library, I went to Whole Foods, where a homeless man was selling Spare Change. He was friendly and I bought one.

Somewhere between reading Spare Change and starting this blog entry, I began thinking about homelessness AND all those people dumping truckloads of liquids, gels, beverages and lotions, into plastic tubs at Boston Logan Airport. Where is all that stuff going to go? And why can’t someone collect it up and give some of it to our local homeless shelters? And are we going to have some say in what our state agencies do with the money that they get from OUR lipsticks, perfumes, and hair products after they sell it on ebay?

But enough of that rant… On a more uplifting note…here is an audio slide show of a new initiative in Philadelphia for the chronically homeless called the Grace Café ,a safe haven in the basement of the Arch Street United Methodist Church, and which ran from December 2005 to April 2006.

Homeless Shelters in Boston & Cambridge

Friends of the Shattuck Shelter — www.friendsoftheshatuckshelter.org

Harvard Square Homeless Shelter — www.hcs.harvard.edu/~hshs

New England Shelter for Homeless Veterans — www.neshv.org

Pine Street Inn — www.pinestreetinn.org

Rosie’s Place — www.rosies.org

St. Francis House — www.stfrancishouse.org

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