Helping homeless should not be a guise for control

LAST week I provided my definition of what it means to be “homeless” and emphasised that it’s a state and not a trait.

However, I concur wi th the City of Cape Town’s social development directorate referring to homeless people as “people living on the street”.

Those living on the streets form homeless communities for a sense of belonging, safety and for survival, but it doesn’t change the reality that they are all individuals with different needs and patterns.

All communities – homeless or homed – consist of individuals and groups of individuals, and none are a homogeneous group.

We can’t accommodate all the people living on the street in one big shelter as “the homeless” and think we have achieved something good.

This is because we have been doing that unsuccessfully for 30 years at the Haven and other temporary shelters. This has taught us that is not the solution, and I hope the catastrophe and hell that was Strandfontein has proven that beyond any reasonable doubt.

We can also not judge people living on the streets as homeless, and therein lies my first direct answer to question posed by the woman who wrote me the letter.

Deciding who you help and who you don’t help your decision to make, not based on “helping the homeless” but on helping individuals and groups of individuals whom you feel comfortable with supporting.

We have to cater to the specific needs of the various groupings of people living on the streets if we are to have any impact at all.

Some merely need a roof over their head and access to work opportunities. They already possess the skills and will to rejoin their greater community.

These individuals deserve all the help you can give them.

It’s unfortunate that they often don’t receive assistance while being seen as a part of the greater homeless community, unfairly judged by ignorance, stigma and myths.

Then there are those whose defining trait is their age.

They should be in supported accommodation for long-term stays for the elderly.

These places have to restore dignity for the elderly who we have allowed to be housed like criminals on bunk beds in prison-style dormitories for years now. To make matters worse we force them to pay for this inhumane incarceration!

Faced with the dilemma this woman described in her letter, an individual has the right to help in any way they feel comfortable, but remember a large percentage of those living on the streets do eventually develop a substance or behavioural addiction.

This should not necessarily remove them from potential public support.

I believe support because your gut says you should, meaning you shouldn’t even spend time contemplating the possibility that they will go out and buy drugs, drink, sex or pills.

Once you have given your support, what the individual chooses to do with it is for his or her conscience; not yours.

Sometimes their desperation is such that should enough people reject or refuse them assistance while they are still ask for it, the next person they approach may become a victim of a desperate criminal act – with no request.

Comparing individuals living on the streets with others that as you put it in your message “are working hard – have families to feed, etc” would be unfair.

Those on the streets who upset you when you “see them sprawled out … the mess they leave … and the security risk they pose” didn’t choose to live on the streets, preventing comparison with individuals who although struggling, have a roof over their head.

Your being upset – and I fully understand and accept the reason why it upsets you to see people in that state and behaving in ways unacceptable to you – but take a moment to remind yourself that you are judging them for who and what they have become by living on the streets, but they were not always on the streets and it is not inherently who they are.

These are broken individuals who in most cases have had to live through situations you wouldn’t even want to imagine.

A lack of caring when they most needed it, ostracisation by family and/ or communities – slowly but surely, on the hard streets, their lives turned upside down and inside out.

Desperation and a desire to survive have turned them into the people who we wish not to be subjected to.

First, because it’s never pleasant to witness someone care so little for themselves, but most importantly they remind us of our own contribution to their state because we did not care enough for them at a stage when we could potentially have prevented them from landing up on the streets and then having to adapt to it.

I will next week make suggestions as to how the woman who wrote to me and others can really assist and how it can become a proactive contribution.

Don’t ever be charitable for selfish reasons. And remember, giving should never be conditional. Giving and sharing equates to loving, not controlling.