I was so impressed to read about how you have been helping the homeless.My mom used to say there is no better way to serve people than give food to the poor.I live in the bay area and would like to volunteer and assist you for this good cause.My email is radhikafec@yahoo.com. Please let me know how I can help you.
Radhika
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A Secret Mission On the Streets
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It's easy to say "they should clean up and get a job." When was the last time you hired a homeless person, or even stopped to help one? Homelessness is primarily a mental-health issue, of mentally ill people not receiving adequate treatment, and there are not enough in-patient facilities to house and treat them.
I carry the people I met on the streets in my memory forever. I never ask how they got there; it's none of my business. They're already in distress and pain; they don't need to be humiliated, too. I remember the 21-year-old girl I met on my first night. She was sleeping on a piece of cardboard, under a thin tattered blanket, on a freezing cold night. She was undergoing chemotherapy for a brain tumor, and died a year later. I remember the woman who began life on the streets in a flowered silk dress and a string of fake pearls; she eventually lost all her teeth, one leg, and is now unrecognizable, but always kind and polite when I see her. There was the man in the pin-striped suit with shined shoes, who looked like your banker and was living in a sleeping bag on the library steps, while interviewing for jobs in Silicon Valley; he had lost his job as CFO, his marriage and his money. I remember the barefoot people on freezing nights, the ones in T shirts plastered to their bodies in the pouring rain, the pregnant girls suffering from malnutrition and the teenage boy I saw just before Christmas, sitting in a doorway in the driving rain. He was delirious from fever, with scabs all over his face, and had recently lost a leg. How can we turn away?
Dealing with homelessness feels like emptying the ocean with a thimble. But sometimes making a difference in the world, a big difference, happens one person at a time.
Steel’s “Rogue” arrives in bookstores June 24. It is her 75th book.
© 2008
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