Reading “Almost Home: Helping Kids Move from Homelessness to Hope” by Kevin Ryan and Tina Kelley has showed me that homeless people are not just adults, but kids as well. This book shows you six youth who went through poverty and homelessness. I learned that these kids all come from different backgrounds and all had different themes to their lives on what was going on. The six major themes in this book were not having a good education, trafficking, turning eighteen and no longer in the system, becoming pregnant, becoming addicted to drugs, and having different sexualities. A lot of these stories came from lives that these kids could not control. Especially, reading about the kids who were abused or watched their own parents being abused by each other. These teens are not getting the help they need and they are getting sent to the wrong path causing them to become homeless. We need to have more programs available for homeless youth to be financially independent, educated, and help them find homes to get them off the streets. One of the statistics that really surprised me was that “Sexual minority youth account for up to 40% of homeless shelter residents. An estimated 24,000 to 400,000 LGBTQ minors become homeless (Almost Home).” This is astonishing to me, because it is outrageous to believe that many teens are becoming homeless merely because of their sexuality. Every person should be equal, and your sexuality should not be costing you a roof over your head. Learning one more thing from the book, not only are programs a great help for homelessness but so is mentorship. Having a simple mentor can do as much of boosting someone’s self-esteem and hope in themselves. But in the end, young kids should not be living or trying to survive on the streets.
All posts by Deandra
Homeless People vs. Human Beings
Watching “Taylor’s Campaign” in class was a big eye opener for me. This documentary was released in 1998 and showed how a homeless man wanted to run for city council in Santa Monica. Ron Taylor was an ex-truck driver who showed us the stories of just a few homeless people in Santa Monica whom are potentially representing the rest of the country. Even though Ron Taylor was unsuccessful with his campaign, it was astonishing how much knowledge I have gained through watching this video and getting a better perspective of how the homeless live. These hard working homeless people live their lives in a way that I never imagined they would. Questions came up such as “Are homeless people human beings?” However, with this video it made me question if “we” the society/government/cops are human beings. The way that these homeless people are being treated is not fair. The video showed us how these people would find an area where they could stay and live and they would basically set up their camp but it wouldn’t be long before they were asked to leave by the police and potentially be cited for something. From the video, I did not see any harm that these people were causing for staying in the places they were, and for cops to come in and make them leave is a question that sits in my mind. It is as if our society makes these homeless people feel like they are a burden to the society as if they are a waste, however, I believe that society needs to remind themselves that they are human beings too.
Here is a quick video clip from the documentary:
Homelessness
There have been a lot of interesting facts I have learned throughout this first week of class by lecture and the materials we have read. Starting off with “The Book of the Poor”, I found it interesting that poor people will share with others whatever they find, such as food. I was also shocked that a lot of these homeless people are depressed and the fact that their depression got in the way of them obtaining a job. For example, there was one man in the book, who wouldn’t even walk into the building to try and find work due to his depression. There was a quote that said, “Still so many are lots poorer than we are; but yes, I am-we are poor”. This made me think how everyone is poor in this world, even if you are rich because you are poor when you want something that you don’t have. There are things that even rich people want but they can’t have. Moving on to Ehrenreich’s book, I personally didn’t like all of the ways she went about through her experiment. For example, she stated “I would always have a care. I just figured that a story about waiting for buses would not be very interesting to read.” However, I don’t agree with this, because waiting for ab us shows you that you don’t have freedom as a homeless person. You don’t have the option of being able to hop in your own care any time of the day and go where you want. I personally feel that Ehrenreich could write a lot about this experience. Yes it may be boring about waiting for the bus but here is a lot through the experience itself.