COUNTING THE HOMELESS
Volunteers also ended up finding out a lot about themselves and their city
Weeks ago, I answered the online call for volunteers to participate in the city’s ambitious project to get as accurate a snapshot as possible of people living on Montreal’s streets.
It seemed like an arduous task to try to actually count such a transient — but growing — population in our city, and I was curious.
Would we brand them like cattle? Tag them like bears?
As it turned out, it wasn’t as intrusive or scientific as that. It was more like a very social treasure hunt.
After opting to be one of 170 team leaders, I arrived Tuesday night at the downtown YMCA where I joined a chaotic crowd of hundreds of other keen Montrealers. We’d all gladly answered a plea from the YMCAs of Quebec to help the Douglas Mental Health University Institute with their “I Count MTL” project — a first step in the city’s three-year action plan on homelessness announced in September.
Our diverse and enthusiastic gang was ushered into two exercise rooms on the second floor and given a lightning-speed briefing by Université de Montréal volunteer André Archambault, who, with his hands-free mic on his head, looked and acted like a stage director. “Showtime!” he announced. Groups of as many as five volunteer counters were paired with a team leader, quickly introduced themselves, then shuffled out with clipboards in hand and bundled up for a cold night, backpacks filled with granola bars and juice to keep our energy up.
Suddenly I was standing practically alone in the room, feeling a bit like that awkward moment in high school when you’re the last chosen to play a sport. Because some volunteers were no-shows, we’d run out of counters and I had no team.
For a brief moment I feared I was going to miss out on the experience until one of the project’s coordinators did some quick rearranging and paired me up with three other counter-less team leaders. Pronouncing each other’s names was our first challenge.
There was Hind Oukhija, a 21-year-old McGill University first-year political science student of Moroccan descent, and Zeina Althawabteh, a 24-year-old from Jordan doing her Masters in urban planning at McGill. Masoumeh Kheiri, 35, who arrived a year ago from Iran with her husband and four-year-old son, tried her best
to converse in French and English. Not able yet to find work in her adopted home, Kheiri said she volunteers a lot in order to immerse herself in life here.
Then there was me, the WASP originally from Brampton, Ont.
Our little group alone was a microcosm of our colourful city.
We began our mission to question everyone in our “sector.” We were assigned the area around Place des Arts and the Quartier des Spectacles, bordered by St-Laurent Blvd., de Maisonneuve Blvd., Balmoral St. (which I had never noticed before), and Ste-Catherine St. No one, regardless of what they looked or acted like, was to be left out of the survey.
The only rule, besides staying safe, was to not use the word “homeless” — an odd sidestepping of the elephant in the room and a tactic not lost on one of our interviewees.
“So it’s called ‘housing instability’ now?” asked the man, bundled up against the wind whipping up Jeanne Mance St. near Place des Arts. “That’s pretty politically correct.”
Yeah, well, we’re not allowed to use the H-word, we explained sheepishly.
We spoke to shivering and befuddled tourists from San Francisco and Vancouver, couples who owned their home, and a young woman with her own apartment lease who apologized for not being
homeless.
Finally, at the corner of SteCatherine and St-Laurent, we met a squeegee kid who was so sweet and polite that the mom in me wanted to take him home and give him a hot shower and meal.
He was 23 and from Granby, he told us in response to questions on our list. He lives in a squat here, makes money from cleaning car windshields and has issues with drugs. He’s used hospital emergency services, shelters and has had contact with police.
He and a 58-year-old Inuk, who proudly told us he made the front page of the Montreal Gazette last month for a story on homelessness, were the only two bona fide “residentially unstable” people who agreed to respond to our questions.
A woman underdressed for the frigid temperatures and carrying a large, overstuffed plastic bag backed away from us, muttering and shaking her finger.
A man in Place des Arts beckoned
us to his bench, but then stared off in the distance and shook his head when we tried speaking to him.
Another man, sitting upright on a bench with his eyes closed, was off-limits because he appeared to be asleep. (That was another rule — don’t wake anyone up).
Two scruffy looking guys, carrying bags of empty pop cans, scurried into the métro as we approached — the first said they were in too much of a hurry to talk, the second shrugged and apologized to us before following his buddy down the escalator.
There were a few logistical problems, including the phalanx of riot police on bicycles, foot and in cars scurrying around Place des Arts as a student demonstration made its way east on Ste-Catherine then turned up Jeanne Mance St.
There were small irritants, too, like frozen pens that made it difficult to check off answers on the survey. And the questionnaire was a bit cumbersome — it started on a white piece of paper and if the answer to one question was “yes,” then we jumped to a blue sheet of paper.
A third paper was used to keep a tally of the number that agreed to participate but weren’t homeless, the number of homeless who did participate and the number who refused to participate and could have been homeless.
We also had to keep a tally of men, women and aboriginals, as well as guess their age.
I’m sure our margin of error was huge.
Still, for the very first such undertaking in our city, it was pretty astounding, and heartwarming, considering organizers had only three months to pull the whole thing together.
And hopefully, the results — due in June — will provide the groundwork for real solutions to a very real problem.
But it may very well have brought other benefits.
After about three hours walking the streets, teams returned to the downtown Y, chatting, laughing, and swapping stories — no longer strangers, but citizens and perhaps even friends after bonding in a common cause to reach out to the less fortunate and try to make our city better.
And the misconceptions that many might have held about the homeless — that they are aggressive, dangerous losers — were replaced with the realization that they are human beings, wanting and needing the same as everyone: shelter, work, dignity.
It struck me that the same exercise could be played out with any group among us that is misunderstood and therefore discriminated against.
What if we were to “count” aboriginals, women in hijabs, or people of colour?
Imagine the walls that could be broken down if we could ask the questions we all keep inside that fester into preconceived ideas and keep us apart.
So it’s called ‘housing instability’ now? That’s pretty politically correct.