What do you feel people should know about the homeless?
There's a stereotype that they're lazy, dirty, mentally ill, or there because they want to be. It's a hard life. You can't be lazy and be homeless. You have to do so much just to survive, to get by from day to day. You don't always have transportation, money, or food. You have to worry about where it comes from. Yet get tired easily, and depressed more easily. It's not like you say, I don't feel like working any more so I'm going to go sleep on a park bench.
There's also a misconception about what "homeless" means. Do you have to be panhandling? Or sleeping on a park bench? A lot of people think it doesn't count if you're living out of a vehicle, but if they were living out of a vehicle, they might think otherwise.
What's it like living among homeless people?
I was raised to look down at homeless people with disgust. This challenged my perception. That's always a good thing. There are people who have experienced worse things than me. Way, way, way, way worse. I haven't had to sleep rough. So I'm lucky as far as that goes. I've always been safe. Not everyone has that luxury.
There are some homeless people struggling with mental illness or drug addiction, who can't pull themselves up by the bootstraps. They don't have bootstraps to pull. But the fastest growing subset of the homeless population are mobile homeless like me, those affected by the recession and living out of vehicles and just trying to blend in and boostrap their way out of it. I met a doctor. He and his wife were living in a car together, thinking of moving to another country and teaching English. I met a guy who speaks four languages and another guy who used to own three houses. There are a lot of people who lost their jobs and thought they'd be okay but were unable to find work. A lot of people who took unemployment as long as it would last. And a lot of others have been foreclosed on. That's pretty common. This recession has been completely indiscriminate. It's affecting everybody.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_sequence
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