Everyone has done it.
Can you see me?
Everyone has.
But I’m not a bad person, please…
Everyone.
I’m just like you, can’t you see? I just need some help. Can’t you see me?
It is all too common to rush pass a homeless person on the street, head bent down as you shuffle on your way. Once you pass, you look up and breathe. It is behind you.
I’m guilty, too. But I’m learning to change.
My first real encounter with the homeless was when I was in Wisconsin for a writing competition, in seventh grade. Mom was driving my sister and me down Main Street, and we saw them, huddled in the doorway of an old store, wrapped numbly in each other’s arms. A boy and a girl. Probably only a few years older than I was.
At first, we kept driving. But then, Mom pulled into a grocery store parking lot and disappeared. She returned with a huge deli sub. She told me I was going to give it to them.
I was scared. Was this safe? Was it the right thing to do? Would they be mad? How should I act? What should I say? Maybe I shouldn’t.
Mom circled until we passed them again and pushed me out of the car. I could never forget the brightness the blazed in the boy’s eyes as he saw me coming, the excitement with which he shook the girl on his lap awake, her wide brown eyes and breathless “Thank you.”
Those words changed me.
Last week, I went on my second homeless retreat. With my church, I explored New York City at one in the morning, finding the crouched figures crumbled in the shadow and leaving a bag of food and toiletries by their heads. We set up eight stations around Manhattan with trunks of donated t-shirts, underwear, and packed lunches alongside soup and coffee stations. This was a part of a program called the Midnight Run, I struggled to explain to a Spanish-speaking immigrant, in which different organizations bring food and necessities to the homeless every night. My biggest regret came when I later realized I should have told him where the other stops are so that he could return.
People forget. People forget that the homeless are people too. On the streets I met a doctor, a writer, a diabetic man with an amputated leg who was too scared to go into a shelter. It’s a hard concept for most to grasp, I think, that sometimes shelters are sites of violence and abuse as much as alleys are. And fearing for their safety among strangers, many homeless choose to sleep shivering on the hard cement of church steps while sirens and pedestrians blare into the night.
Life isn’t always kind. People make mistakes. Sometimes things go wrong. No one can stop that. But everyone is capable of giving dignity to another human being.
Everyone.