Downtown

Today took me downtown to the homeless camp along the Olentangy River, located across the railway tracks on a piece of undeveloped ground. As you drive along the tracks, paths lead into the woods. If you follow these paths you come into encampments - shelters made of tents, or skids, or plywood with tarps for roofs.

Scattered over the ground you see spam tins or broken glass, or plastic bottles with the labels worn off. It's 100F if it's a degree, and there's little shelter from the heat. People nurse beer bottles and cans to escape, but dehydration must be an additional hurdle in the summer, along with food and hygeine and illness and fights.

I've always felt a connection to homeless people, and put an encampment in Motherhunt, my first novel. I guess in those early days in London when I was two steps away from the streets myself, being thousands of miles from home and dependent on the good wishes of my boyfriend and his family, it hit home how easily I could slide onto the streets. All it would take was a fierce fight and losing my job and I'd be under a bridge with my stuff in a backpack.

As young as I was I wouldn't have possessed the nous to present myself at a welfare office or the US Embassy, at least initially.

Later, as I moved into reporting the Hornsey and Tottenham beats, I met young girls who'd become pregnant to get onto the welfare housing lists. Their stories contained foster homes or parents who hated them and kicked them out of their homes at 16. With no network of established friends or willing relatives they literally had no-one to take them in, nourish them, and help them get an education.

In overcoming my own fears about going forward in life, I've often wondered about those people who have much less support in terms of education and childhood development. If I've had bundles of fears and anxieties which create hurdles for moving forward, with as much priviledge as I've been given in a first-world country with a college education, then what happens to people who don't have that? What happens when they face the same fears and anxieties but have race or poverty or bad government to contend with?

Today I picked up a friend from the encampment, a friend ready to rejoin society and get back on his feet. We ate fresh-picked broccoli from the garden (steamed, it turned day-glo green with energy) and fresh-picked beans and beets, and corn-on-the-cob from Kroger. He drank Pepsi and called people to let them know he'd emerged, laundered his clothes, showered and shaved, and then another friend showed up to take him home.

I hope he's out of the woods now - literally and figuratively - and feels the surrounding arms of the people who care about him, lifting him up, helping him to a place he can love, and feel is his own.