A Secret Mission On the Streets

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