A commentary by a lifelong farmer, seed-stock breeder, naturalist, writer, illustrator, hunter, steam power engineer, curmudgeon and one-eyed elderly spinster.
A recent letter raking scorn over homeless people who choose not to stay at a shelter is sadly typical of the uninformed. The fact that many prefer life in a tent to life in a shelter should raise questions in one’s mind.
In at least two of the shelters in Victoria, there are no backflow preventers and the water is filthy as a result. Gastro-intestinal upsets and strange skin infections are rife, as I (and my G.P.) can attest from experience. Water in public fountains is clean.
Further, in at least two of the shelters, the heat in the dorms is so stifling that, were we dogs, there would have been (justified) legal action. With the huge windows and no circulation, the rooms heat up like ovens!
But of course we are only homeless people, on the trash-heap of society, and we don’t matter. The only cool areas are where the staff work.
At one shelter, the staff assume that if you are homeless, it is your own fault. You must be lazy, amoral, drug-addicted and entitled! Imagine what it feels like to have an arrogant woman barely out of her teens, young enough to be your own granddaughter, talking down to you as though you were a truant five-year-old.
Two-thirds of the best food donations miraculously vanish, never to reappear. If three fresh pizzas are donated, the homeless women are given one. The other two disappear.
My attempts to obtain parking for the few homeless who owned vehicles was foiled — not by Ismo Husu, the city’s head of parking, who was more than helpful, but by the shelter staff and the higher-ups, one of whom told me to my face that “XYZ is not in the business of providing parking, and XYZ will never be in the business of providing parking.”
(For my efforts, I was kicked out in reprisal, and sent to the most feared shelter in the city. I am a lifelong worker and farmer who has never used drugs and has no criminal record, but I was told I was “more suited” to the place with the thugs.)
Then there is the mandatory daily kick-out; at one shelter, this is for four hours every day, rain or shine, sick or well. At another shelter, it is three hours.
In 2019 I watched a homeless man, sick with cancer and suffering from the side effects of chemotherapy, lying outside on the filthy sidewalk for three hours every day. He was not an addict. He was homeless because he was too sick to work!
If you are in a tent, at least you can lie down if you are ill.
Lastly, a number of the homeless are actually ex-cons and some are truly antisocial. The bullying, the blackmail and sheer terrorism of the “weak” that goes on has to be seen to be believed.
If one of your own roommates is a thug, your mere existence becomes hellish. Fortunately, having lived alone for most of my life and knowing how to shoot my own dinner as well as deal with stroppy, horned bulls, the thugs did not intimidate me, but I saw others go through utter torment.
Complaining to the staff is, of course, out of the question; “rats” are severely beaten and even threatened with death.
The thugs form cliques and are careful to restrict any threats and physical punishment to areas where there are no surveillance cameras.
At one shelter, you were not allowed to have more than two bags of possessions, even though there was ample room in the dorms. Many of the rules are humiliating and infantilizing. Now, please allow me to state here that many of the staff are truly kind and compassionate (except at one place I could mention), but they have to enforce the rules or lose their jobs.
At one shelter, the maintenance staff would steal from the residents when the dorms were empty during the mandatory kick-outs. Earlier this year, one worker was fired for theft.
One youth who preferred to stay outside in his tent even during the bitterest weather, dreamed of becoming a horticulturalist.
On the streets since he “aged out” of foster care, he was addicted, no doubt to try and drown the despair; I watched him scrabbling in the polluted earth, trying to start a vegetable garden. He broke my heart.
This kid just wants to be a farmer. Last I checked, everybody eats. If I had a farm, I’d take him in in a minute; get him clean, get him his own cottage and his own garden. And veggies won’t bawl if you don’t milk them at 7 a.m.!
People might imagine that the shelters are wonderful, cool, leafy places with clean water, delicious food and “wraparound care”.
The truth is rather different. Please, inform yourself before you deride us.
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