Homeless Education

On one of the first nights I went on outreach with Street Angels, I tagged along as the driver grabbed two hot dinners and lit out for a heap of blankets under the freeway overpass downtown. It was deep winter and very cold, although there was little snow on the ground, especially under the highway, where the ground was frozen dirt with rocks strewn here and there.

Under the blankets was a woman.

She took the meals but didn’t engage in conversation. There was just a quick exchange, did she need anything else. Would she like a tent? Apparently, it wasn’t the first time she had been asked. She always said no. No tent.

This baffled me. Who wouldn’t want more protection from the weather?

I decided that she must have some sort of mental illness. Why would someone who is homeless choose to sleep under just a few blankets in a completely exposed area during Wisconsin’s rough winter?

“She says she wants to see what’s coming,” the driver explained to me. “If she’s in a tent, she thinks that people could sneak up on her.”

That she had weighed the risks of being in a tent versus being out in the open had never occurred to me. In my world, being in a tent would be my only choice – the shelter, the warmth, the seeming sense of having an abode even if it was one that could be collapsed and rolled into a bag and slung over my shoulder – there would be no question for me.

But then, I’ve never been homeless.

What I have been is camping. Camping is cozy and picturesque.

Being homeless is dangerous.

I don’t remember the woman’s name. I didn’t even really talk to her. But this is what she taught me.

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Photo by Josh Hild on Unsplash