"God, Look at These People!"

Stauros conducted a Congress on the International Year of Shelter for the Homeless (IYSH) which was held at the United Nations Church Center in June.

Twenty speakers representing the broad spectrum of the issue of homelessness throughout the world documented the extent and the horrible consequences of this terrible evil. Those in the audience, mostly persons who are already engaged in working with homeless persons, or advocating on their behalf, also added precious insights as well as inspiration by their observations.

In this article we can only touch upon certain aspects of this issue, but the abbreviated verbatim testimony presented here graphically portrays the heart of the matter.

Homeless Persons Speak

A mother of five "I am here to educate and to agitate. I was living in the South Bronx with' five children in a basement flat, recently divorced and hospitalized. The rent and huge electric bills was more than I could afford; a wall collapsed on me and we lived with water bugs and mice. I took the landlord to court, but the last time I was to be in court, I could not go because my son had an asthma attack. Lo and behold, I had the Marshall sitting at my door."

A time of loss: "This is the hardest time of your life. You have suffered a great loss. You have lost everything, valuable papers, family pictures, cherished keepsakes, except your most valuable possession, your life. It's a hard time to understand and a hard time to accept with your feelings that things should be different. We mourn the death of a friend but no one comes to help us grieve and no one comes to help us mend. Our children are alone with us and our sadness. Babies, when they are afraid, cry and cling to us; children try to make themselves feel safer acting as they did when they were younger. The child may ask for the bottle again, wet his pants or suck his thumb. Doctors call this regression. It is normal behavior which can be expected when a child is under stress. When the child feels safe, he will give up this way of telling you he is afraid....

"This is what everyone feels coming into the hotel/shelter. Every parent has this experience with their children. It is very devastating. Children are the reward of life. That is what the struggle is about - the children! We are creating the next generation of emotional misfits by allowing shelters.... These are not places for children..'. They are not even places for adults to be in! We have to make the changes.

"People ask, why don't they move to permanent housing? They need to know that the system is geared to destroy families. When you come into the hotel/shelter you are confined to a jail of 18 months...Parents living in a hotel/shelter have to be better parents than those in their homes. Because of the drug situation, the prostitution situation, they have to be on top of everything. It is even much harder for a couple. They either make it or break it. We must make the politicians responsible! They are supposed to be working for us!"

A Vietnam Veteran "I was raised up in a country where I would have nothing to worry about. Went to high school down South, had two years of college... At 22 went to the hell hole in Vietnam. Came out of there as a wounded Vet, came back here with 236 dollars a month and a medical discharge, no job development for veterans, even got spit on. One third of the homeless in New York City are Vietnam Vets. You can't even count the families that have been abused by the Vietnam Veterans... We cannot count the families in shelters... Families broken up... Agent Orange has destroyed some of them... We are supposed to be mentally ill, drunks, drug addicts... having flashbacks... Which we do have... We was young men when we went to Vietnam...

"I came back to New York from Vietnam. No jobs here. I had to go all the way to Maryland. Got a job there at Maryland Drydock working sending Sea-trains back to Vietnam so that they could kill some more people.

"Lost that job; went to Atlanta. Worked at Lockheed. Got laid off in '74. Had a family. Broke up, lost the house on the G.I. Bill. A piece of shrapnel was in my head. It took from 1968 until '76 until they took it out. You walk around and don't know if you're going to fall down, and you go to the doctor and they tell you you have epilepsy. Nobody keeps you on a job... Once you become unemployed, in ninety days you lose your house....

"There are so many Veterans in the Shelter system. These are guys who went to World War II, Korea, Vietnam. You go in there and you almost cry to see how they are treated. It's not a crime to be homeless... Sometimes you go to a shelter, they never even ask you if you are a veteran....

"If the richest country in the world can't take care of its kids, we're going to see another Vietnam... Illinois has already sent units of the National Guard to Honduras. They're going to end up just like the Vietnam Vets. We got our asses kicked over there, and it's true... It was the people in the streets who stopped the war... We have been used and abused by the system.

"I hope the Mayor will try to live this life one day. I hope he don't live it with a key in his pocket, like that lady on Channel 4. She did a documentary. She couldn't play the role. When you got a key in your pocket and 5 detectives behind you, you should think of those little girls that are there, and don't have anybody with them. They be glad to take up with a man to watch their back at night... to have them sleep beside them in the movie, or the Port Authority or Grand Central Station. If you all look around you, you will see that the people are getting younger who are becoming homeless. They're not getting any older.

"You got to realize, we all want a home to live in, we don't want to live in the street. But I would rather live in the street than be living in any one of the entire shelter systems, 'cause I stayed there three months and I walked out of it, and never went back. And I stayed on the streets, and I know how it is to live on the street. It's a hard time to try to watch your back and sleep, too; it's being like in 'Nam again, 'cause that's what you did there.

"I am just back from Chicago for the Vietnam Veterans Against All Wars....We had a 20 year reunion this weekend. They invited us to come to Vietnam next year to build that wall with all the names on it that got killed in Vietnam -that wall will be that long because they did not put all the names on the wall in Washington that got killed in Vietnam. They were all young mens, too, but they did not know what they were fightin' for. We have lost 50,000 Vietnam veterans that have committed suicide since they have been back here... (He cries here).... 'Scuse me my brother was one of them.

"You know... we all have had a hard life since we been back here. Nobody knows what we went through. But I thank you all for being patient with me and I hope I haven't bored you with my feelings. Thank you very much."

A Young Man "I was 14 when I took to the streets and made 'an income in Times Square. As a teenager, I worked it every night and all afternoon, putting money in my pocket. The theatres there are open all night. That's where I slept. I discovered drugs and got into them. I discovered Crack... When you are 14, 15, or 16, you don't know what you think you know. I did not know that I was wounded, that I was lying to myself.

"When you are homeless and on drugs, you need a lot of help. But in the system, there is so much delay. You can't get in for 30 days. Besides, the Shelter system doesn't help, you need a community to get you out of the drugs.

"The welfare system doesn't help you. The people running it are paid for doing that work. They zip you through, they don't care about you at all. It's their livelihood.

"It was Emmaus House that found me and has helped me. Emmaus gets people to help themselves by helping others. It is a community, a way of life and of being. Without Emmaus, I would still be on the streets."

Dr. Martin Gittelman, representing Mentally Ill Persons.-...."There is a need to provide for those who cannot speak for themselves. The measure of a society is the way it cares for those who cannot care for themselves.

"In our country and around the world, we have seen inattention and cutbacks for those with mental illness unless, at times, they disturb the public order. Then they receive treatment and occasionally they receive incarceration. The mentally ill are a forgotten people. There are approximately 40 million mentally ill persons in the world. For centuries these people were homeless, cared for by the church, their families or left to be homeless, most often shunned, beaten or jailed. In the 18th and 19th centuries, asylums were established to house those in this condition.

"In America, there are estimates that range from 250,000 to 3 million individuals who are now homeless, depending on what figure one cares to look at since the government has cut back in research about data collection and epidemiology about homelessness. But Newsweek estimates that there are about three million homeless persons in the country, and one million of that number may be mentally ill persons.

"The mentally ill have special problems. Their problems are not easily discerned. Occasionally their problems follow a fluctuating course. Mental illness places an individual at great risk. If it happens that a person has to be hospitalized, very often he or she lose their housing."

On De-institutionalization: "In 1956 in the U.S., we had five hundred and fifty thousand individuals in mental hospitals in the country. Today there are one hundred and twenty thousand. The idea was to remove people from asylums where they received a poor but comprehensive range of care: housing, food, clothing, etc., to a very narrow spectrum of services. Nowadays, increasingly what people are receiving is treatment for the acute phases of their illness, but even that is being cut back.

"Most now are only getting acute care...15 days of hospitalization. This means that these people hardly enter and then are out on the streets again. Social Security has been cut; Section 8 Housing has been reduced... The Compensation Employment Act has been cut back. These cutbacks have been felt very heavily by the mentally ill.

"There are further problems: People who are disoriented do not know where to get their Social Security benefits. Sometimes that means a difference between life and death. One third were unable to get their benefits because they simply had no address. They didn't know, no one was there to tell them that they could get their mail at a post office, or church or synagogue, thereby getting or not getting their entitlement.

"We do not need asylums for the mentally ill men and women. But we do need the whole range of services and means which they need to survive. And their disabilities need to be recognized.

"We can try to prevent homelessness from happening. There is a drive for more institutionalization, but many doubt that that will happen. What is necessary is to prevent homelessness from happening by educating families on how to use the primary health care facilities. Psycho-Social International is helping to train families and others.

"Finally, I want to say that it's wonderful to have meetings of this sort on the needs of the homeless, and the homeless mentally ill. It is also fitting that we meet here in sight of the United Nations. I think that we need to make known to our leaders across the street if they spent only a fraction less, let's say, only 5% less of the billions of dollars that are spent each day on military expenditures, and that this money would be spent only on housing for the h6meless and the homeless mentally ill. Then our problems would be closer to solution."

Mitch Snyder, of the Community for Creative Non-Violence, was the keynote speaker at the Congress. He ended his magnificent presentation by posing this question: " What does it mean to us individually, each of us, to do our share, no more and no less, in the creation of a world in which people are not huddled in doorways or freezing in the streets or walking around with distended stomachs...what does it mean for us to do our share in the creation of a world in which our resources don't go into death and destruction, but go into life and the creation of community and the building of a world that can and should be and hopefully will be a decent, equitable place to live?

"That's a question that I can't answer for others... because the answer to that question only has value in meaning if it flows out of our own struggles and our own journey and our own lives... What I can offer is a personal reflection that I have found exceedingly helpful in understanding what some of that means. We operate a very large shelter in Washington... I have on many occasions stood on the front steps of that shelter and watched as literally hundreds of people came pouring into the building... I would simply stand there and watch, but invariably inside I would be raging and I would be screaming. And what I would be saying would always be the same: God, look at all these people. Take a look. What did they ever do wrong? What's their crime? They're old, they're broken, they're physically disabled, they're mentally disabled. They're innocent human beings and they're suffering. They're living like animals. Why don't You do something? Why don't You do whatever You need to do to make it better? Do it, because this kind of pain can't go on. It's just not fair... And then finally, one time, I understood... it is in the existence of these people that God is in fact screaming out at us: look at all these Innocent people! Look at them! What's their crime? What have they done wrong? Why don't you do something? Why don't you do whatever you have to do to bring them inside - because that's what it means to be a human being. That's what it means to be a creature of God."