Please do not walk on by

Life is not fair

As I passed through Manchester Piccadilly Station the other day, I saw an advertisement poster with the message, “Don’t fund the habit, fund the charities.”

There is a message there, but I do wonder if it is the true reflection of issues to do with many of the people I have encountered who beg on the streets in the many big cities I have been to.

In my own personal life, I have had plenty and very little, I have enjoyed extravagance and after illness I was reduced to penury, needing more help than my heretofore independence was able to ask for.

Doors slammed in my face

When I did ask for help, from a system into which during the good times I had paid all my dues and more, I encountered hurdles, bottlenecks, indifference and difficulty. [It took the hospital to unclog the system.]

Blog - Hospital eases bureaucratic stress

The things I was entitled to were denied me because I did not look vulnerable enough or did not tick all the boxes of desperate privation authored by some comfortable apparatchik oblivious of the realities on the street.

Blog - England: How Lewisham Single Homeless Intervention Prevention humiliated me

I cannot vouch for anyone in terms of whether they are struggling with drug or alcohol problems, but I can say that if the so-called charities were really doing the jobs they suggest they are doing with the funds people throw into their collecting buckets or the ones that can be transferred through the simplicity of Short Message Service (SMS) text messages, I should not be seeing beggars on our streets.

Who helps these people?

Yet, step out into Manchester City centre every evening and quite every major street corner has someone begging for spare change. Then there are others who would approach you with a story, long or short, their need is immediate and it makes no allowances for the smartness of seeking the nearest entrée to officialdom to get help.

In a few recent encounters, these were people who truthfully or otherwise on a cold damp night needed a place to sleep in shelters that would demand a payment before accepting them.

Where these people have fallen through the safety net with holes big enough to let elephants through without entanglement, they simply have nothing and sometimes not even a blanket to take shelter in an open street doorway.

No way out

They are usually in a catch-22 situation, for without an address you really cannot do anything, even if someone ignorantly and naively thinks the system and the welfare state is in overdrive, on anecdotal evidence alone, I can well assume that many who need that help cannot get beyond the first hurdle to get the help they need.

Blog - Thought Picnic: Returnee Woes

I cannot ignore such people, having lived so close to the edge, the people who were once invisible to me are too visible to walk past. Having been given a second chance of life after cancer, in the little and plenty that I have, I desire to have an open hand.

Prepare to give

An open hand is one that can give and it is also open to receive, the former being more impactful. Much that we donate goes to child welfare or animal welfare in faraway lands and that is good, but we stand in rank hypocrisy if at our doorsteps there be many who are needy and we in response to those advertisements decide not to do the needful.

These people are our neighbours, the ones on the furthest spectrum of our diverse humanity who have for all sorts of reasons happened upon hard times. Times we may never and I hope many never come to experience.

However, I know what a very little gift can do for someone desperately in need, and if we challenge ourselves to address that need generously, for some, we would have become angels.

In the words of Mahatma Gandhi, “There are people in this world so hungry, that God cannot appear them except in the form of bread.”

Where charities cannot bring bread to the hungry, I will do my bit, I hope the help I offer is helpful, but I would not agonise over what is done with the help I have offered.

I feel like I've been raped

Feeding the great database

They come with forms or sit behind computers, pens to hand or fingers oscillating between keyboard and mouse, they record my words for that great database beyond my reach.

The many times, I have told my story, I could have staged a play and put it in a theatre for entertainment, but this is not entertainment, it is my life and at present, it not fun.

Maybe they were listening with rapt attention, they feigned enough sympathy to appear concerned, and I was deluded into thinking something was afoot, the great database will lay out tables for food, build huts for shelter, hold my hand over unsteady bridges from uncertainty to stability, but no such luck.

They have harvested each meaningful part of my tale into statistics that show they are doing something, but I am seeing nothing.

Used and abused

The psychologist knew the urgency, too many papers were filled and signed, we need to deal with the immediate issue, she said, but nothing came of it, and yet I return today to be raped once more in the hope the abuse would get to the point that I cannot be refused.

Thought Picnic: Hard Times

The business

A family having dinner, the banquet set before them as they expressed a unity and a togetherness rarely seen, the tradition of seating together for meals.

Then with determination and purpose, they find commonality and join in a great enterprise, one that we too easily take for granted, they are friends, loyal and true, meeting at the same time in the same place to dream.

There was an opportunity that presented itself each time that I was unable to realise, to invest in their enterprise that could make a whole world of difference to many, but for the means, too meagre to stretch.

The times

All with bags filled to the brim in front of businesses that define the city, they could be taken for you and I, but they are not, they are in sleeping bags, with no shelter and have become the sign of the times.

I can see them because I have been there, when illness struck, I lost everything but friends who ensured that I did not go without shelter, food and sustenance; it was hard.

Then we assume the system is there help such people, but the one-size-fits-all package rarely fits all, it is a net with holes so large it is surprising it holds anything. The exception these people once represented in the images we once had of the homeless has changed to become a new rule - the people are well-dressed, they are families, they are clean and all they have is there in bags and suitcases, on the street.

The rut

They all have their stories that could make a trail of misfortune to the ends of the earth – unemployment, illness, divorce, debt or just pure luck – none would have deliberately charted the course of their lives to what things have become, it is called life and people live it.

I know the decisions I could not take, choices I could not make, places I could not go, ideas I could not have, opportunities that escaped me, responsibilities I could not assume, I was stuck in a rut, and it looked like there was no end to this rampaging storm.

It is never easy, there is no stop button, but if our society must have a heart that feels and the conscience to perceive, then it is duty-bound to rethink the way hard times affects people and puts them out on the streets.

The thought

As our leaders find political capital to assail the poor defining them as lazy and scrounging, we must be careful not to be fed the wrong image of realities that are so readily oblivious to us. Much that we are quick to see but fail to observe is our preoccupation with the things that concern us taking us away from appreciating what the other is going through.

I do not know the solutions to many of these problems that tug at my heartstrings, but it is not beyond the realm of human ingenuity and the extents of our humanity to find ways to ensure that sleeping bags are mainly used on camping sites under tents for leisure – homes matter to all.

Amidst all the wealth and profligacy that surrounds us, much of which we revel in; there must be means to ensure that hard times do not hit people so hard that there seems to be no other option at all.