A Day in the Life of a Homeless Person
One way to really understand how hard it must be is to put yourself in the place of a homeless person. Imagine having to find somewhere to sleep every night and not know if you were going to be attacked or mugged. Not only that but imagine it was winter and temperatures were going to drop to -15 degrees over night. Well one website to visit and check out is www.homelessnation.org. This is a web site that lets homeless people blog about their experiences and whats on their minds. I have taken a short paragraph from one of the blogs on the site. To see the full blog just click here.
“I got mugged by some guys with a hammer. There was a girl there to and she told them to hit me again. After the first hit I went down on one knee and told them “Its going to take more than that boys!!” Well they gave me more!!! I lost hearing in my left ear and and had a skull compressed fracture. I then stayed drunk for 4 more days to take the pain away and I wanted to rest so I went to a detox.“
May 27, 2009 at 11:12 pm
Interesting but very sad.
May 28, 2009 at 4:15 pm
Thanks Karen, yes it is alarming especially when you realize how fast this problem is growing! More and more people are having to experience things like this everyday!
Ryan
May 31, 2009 at 1:28 pm
The testimonial is really really sad. Too often we brush these sort of social problems aside because it saddens people. We look away when we pass by bums/homeless people on the street because we don’t want any trouble. Little do we know how much hardship they really go through.
I think people really need to understand this type of hardship before they will be willing to reach out and help. What do you think are some ways to increase awareness? I think blogging is an excellent idea/start but it limits reach as well.
May 31, 2009 at 10:26 pm
Yes i agree and I am guilty too sometimes of looking the other way when I see a homeless person, but that it what raising awareness helps with. I am gaining a better understand for my self by doing this blog of what homeless people have to go through and it really makes you think twice.
BC seems to be doing a pretty good job at raising awareness about the issue over the past few years as it has been the basis of many stores in the media. This is the best way to deliver a message to a wide number of people, if the issue remains to be in the media the government will be forced to step up their game and do somthing!
If you want to help raise awareness it could be doing something as simple as telling our firneds about the issue and educating them! Every little helps and together we can make a difference.
June 14, 2009 at 5:43 pm
I believe that we need to create a greater number of safe shelters that could meet the basic needs of these isolated, rejected, and marginalized people. I think a mental hospital at times allows these homeless people
to be hospitalized and treated them well with warm, caring and compassionate attitudes. Usually, the mental health team is the least prejudiced people who are very supportive, understanding, and compassionate as they are more willing to understand harsh life circumstances and traumatic experiences of their patients without holding judgemental attitude.
In order to build more shelters that could warmly welcome the homeless people, we definitely need to abandon our prejudiced and biased viewpoints towards the homeless people.
It is ironic and unacceptable that we quickly judge them when we don’t even know what these homeless people had to go through, what kind of sufferings they needed to endure, and how we would have survived if we were in that unfortunate and sad situation.
I believe that we as more privileged and educated citizens have greater responsibilities and duties to care about their miserable state and see them through the lense of compassion and understanding.
June 14, 2009 at 10:12 pm
Yes the idea of having more shelters is a great one, but first of all we have to finance these. This is not the only way we are going to reduce homelessness though. The next step is to educate these people and offer them enough support so they are able to get out of the situation that they are in.
June 15, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Have you ever heard of the project “Homeless for a Night”? It was a fundraiser held in Edmonton that brought awareness to homelessness. Those who participated spent a night sleeping on a field (however, because it is an event, they were provided with entertainment and food.) I am not sure if they have had a similar concept in Vancouver but it would be interesting to see it happen without including all the perks. It would really be a profound way to raise awareness, and although it is nothing close to actually being homeless, it gives people a taste of what it is like when all the staples we take for granted get taken away.
June 15, 2009 at 5:07 pm
Well actually SFU students have done a very similar thing where they spent 24 hours on the streets with no food or money. Their idea was to raise awairness of youth homelessness and it got a lot of attention in the media. It got covered by all the local newspapers, here is the link to what CBC had to say about it: