March 2015
Our Homeless Neighbors
The slope to homelessness is not often apparent until it is too late to reverse.
The climb to recovery is often many years. “Pulling yourself up by your boot
straps,” may work for some but for many it is; regaining your health, learning a
trade, getting a job, saving enough to rent a place to live and a support system to
encourage you to survive the ordeal.
One day a homeless man helped me carry my bag. Just before we parted he
looked into my in the eyes and said, “don’t abandon me.” It took me two years to
figure it out. He wasn’t asking me to solve homelessness, he was asking each of us
to do what we are able to do to help.
In my case I asked my family to help keep people alive by preventing
hypothermia. We did this with the skills we already had. We made eight sleeping
bags on our kitchen table that first winter. Our goal is to keep people alive until they can be helped or healed by others in our society……How Can you help?
