This blog post isn’t so much about the news or a personal story its more of a question and an observation of one of my friends living situation. So I know we talk about in class about what the definition of homelessness is and i was wondering if this specific story or living situation is considered a type of homelessness. So my friend currently is in college at this university and he was living in an off campus house and his lease ended so he was forced to move out and he had no were to go so some of his friends let him stay in their dorm room on a futon that he had and he brought into the room and they are letting him live there for the semester because he does not want to have to sign another lease and he does not have the money to afford a new place on his own. so my final and overall question is based on our description and definition of homelessness that we have gone over in class and done in our reading would this considered a type of homelessness or what i know its not a permanent place he is staying at but it is a place that he has his own bed and his own section in the room with two other males so i was just wondering what would this be considered as.

When i first started my internship i did not really know what to expect and i was a little scared to even go. I thought that i would just be sitting around and talking to the homeless men at the shelter and not really learn anything  about the agency and just listen to the personal stories of the men at the shelter. Not only was i scared i was nervous that everyone in the agency would look at me like why are you here you and that i was just a no good kid from a college that had to be there and did not really care about them. When i first got there i took a tour of the facility and was shown were everything was and how a regular day was conducted around the office. The first person i met was Stephanie she was in charge of the scheduling of my hours. I worked a lot with Rick and Ziggy they are both case managers of the men at the agency, Rick is the case manager that is there during the day and is charge of the intakes and meetings that the men have to go through before they can start their programs, Ziggy is the case manger that is there during the nights and stays with the men through the night as they stay there. The shelter is open from 7PM unitl 7AM they are served 2 meals which are breakfast  and dinner but if they want they can come back during the day and get lunch if they want, but they cannot stay at the shelter all day they need to leave when the shelter closes. This shelter can have a total of 75 men staying at a time and they are allowed to keep a bag at the shelter during the day which has their personal belongings in it. One thing that i thought was really cool and interesting about this shelter is that when the men do their first intake and assesment they are ask what their goals are and most of them say they want employment, but for most of the men their first goal should really be getting help if they have mental disorders and other medical things like that  and thats what CCLM helps them do it helps them with their fist goal and helps them get the proper help they need. After my experiences at the agency it really made me think about my life and how i take a lot of things for granted when there are men like the ones in the shelter that have nothing and are trying to survive everyday on the streets. By working at the shelter it really it close to home and hit a soft spot because no one should have to live the way they live and i just wanted to make a change in their lives and i feel like i did that by just the little things that i did in my time there.

This weekend i went to las vegas with my fraternity and when i was walking around las vegas during the day and the night sometimes off the strip and on the strip. I really noticed something that there really is not that many homeless people or of this population that seem to  be around this area. I saw a few homeless people and just watched them for a couple minuets just looking at them and their body language and what not it was really weird what came to my mind as i watched and observed several of them i thought about the homeless population here and how huge it is and how the homeless people here act. When i thought about that i just thought about how the homeless population or some homeless people will just come up to you and ask you for change or something and when i was in vegas i walked past a couple homeless people at different times and i assumed they were going to ask for some money or spare change but surprisingly they did not and this sort of made me think about the different cultures and the different areas and why most people here in California will go out of their way to ask and the people of las vegas really don’t or just do not want to bother people. This was just my observation of some homeless people on my trip to las vegas. Its really crazy because before taking this class i would never have thought about this and took my time out of my weekend to do this and actually be so curious about it.

So i know that this really is not an article or a thing to help homelessness but was a very heated conversation i had with my friend today to dinner. I was talking to my friend about my classes and how i’m taking this course and i went into a lot of detail about it and what not and she was very intrigued by it. So talking more about the class we started talking about homeless people and her opinion on homelessness that it was all their fault and its their problem and how we should not help them and thats were i lost it. I told here that ya it might be their fault sometimes but a lot of the other times it is because its the way life runs its course and there are always natural disasters and after going in on this topic and conversation i sort of opened her eyes to a whole new way of thinking about it and talking about homeless people as another outcast but as equal human beings. I brought us how when i have spare change i always give it to homeless people to try and help them out in any little way i can, And my friend was so against that idea and i can in some ways see it as a bad thing she brought up to me how i can either feed into their addictions of some sort or i can actually really help them. She brought up the point of how when you give them money that you are just messing up our economical system and in someways i agree but i really do not understand how it is messing it up. Can some one please shed some light on this topic to help me better understand? I just wanted to sort of share another experience about how active conversations can change peoples opinions of others and also demonstrate a change in life.

So i was reading this article and watch a little video on the abc news website about a veteran that was living on the streets for countless years in Washington DC. Tony jones is an African American male that got a great opprotunity to make his life better and change his life around. The news reporter met with Tony months before and now he got a chance to meet with him again in a different setting now his own apartment. Tony lives in an apartment that the veterans association has paid for him to live in, Tony now has a job as a local delivery boy riding his bike for a law firm delivering messages from place to place. He has furnished his apartment stocked it with food and has turned his life around. The quote that he says in the interview is ” Im living large now. You know? Im living large”. This is crazy to think one day he was living on the streets with nothing now he is in an apartment with a solid roof over his head. They got a chance to talk to the veterans association that put Tony into his beautiful home and they said that in their city they have about 1,500 veterans on the street and they plan on ending homelessness in DC by the end of the year. I honestly think this is so amazing i know that not all homeless people are veterans but i feel like its only right that they are being helped because they risked their life on the line for our country and they do not deserve to be living on the streets, no one should have to do that. But like they say once you make a change in someones like people see that and it makes others want to help out.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/homeless-veteran-top-world-moving-apartment/story?id=37936686

When we think about what causes homelessness we typically think the usual things about how people loose their jobs or deaths in family or a tragic life changes. We don’t really hear of top Athletes becoming homeless and without a place to live . I was reading this article about a former offensive lineman from UNC that was homeless due to what people thought was drugs and alcohol, but his family thought it was from football. In the article they talked about how scientist studied Hoffman the former football players brain and found out that he had stage 2 C.T.E or also called chronic traumatic encephalopathy which causes problems like depression, short-term memory loss, lack of impulse control, irritability and mood swings. This disease has stages that range from 0-4 on the severity level, Hoffman was diagnosed with various mental illness and manic depression. Hoffman after being diagnosed with the C.T.E continued to live on the street, He is now dead he rode is bike into oncoming traffic on a poorly lighted road in Haines City, Florida in November, hid died on the way to the hospital after colliding head on with traffic on his bike. His Mom didn’t think that  he killed himself or tried to she thought it was the C.T.E and all the head injuries he got while playing football that made him this way and ended up homeless. For me being a football player its crazy to think that this can possibly happen not only to me but to other friends i care about. We tend to think that being homeless comes from money and other tragic things in peoples lives we do not think that it can happen because of football or sports. After reading this article it made me think about how anyone and everyone is at risk of possibly becoming homeless.

So over break i was in the city after i went out with my friends one night and we cam across this homeless man that was outside in the freezing cold didn’t really ask for money or for food but just said anything will help. When i looked at him i thought about our class and the readings that we did and i wanted to try to make a change in someones life. So when i saw the homeless man after me and my friends stopped at  Mexican place to get burritos, we were walking down the street and i saw him and i talked to him for literally 15 min about life and other things and towards the end of our conversation i asked him if he was hungry and he said he was so we walked back to the Mexican restaurant and i bought him a burrito and some chips and a drink. When i gave it to him i have never seen someones face light up so much he started to tear up and would not stop saying thank you. I told him over and over again no problem i was just so happy and it felt good to help someone in a time of need. I usually am the one to just walk past and not say anything but this time seeing him and thinking back on the stuff we talked about in class made me want to do something to help others.

One thing that i always want to write about in my blogs every week but i keep forgetting to write about is the one time i slept outside in streets with my church group. The reason why we did this was to see how it felt to sleep outside and live outside for 3 days straight. I remember all we had was a back pack with a couple changes of clothes and a sleeping back and a cardboard box. There were a total of 15 of us doing this that weekend including my youth group instructor. When i first did this i didn’t think it was actually that bad but after sleeping outside for three nights straight with nothing to really keep you warm really sucks and i am so glad for what i have and ever since then i don’t really take things for granted because things for my life could honestly be worse. After staying the night on the street everyday we would go eat back at the church and hangout and talk about the experiences of each night and talk about the overall experience and talk about things that went through each others head and feeling while outside. After we had our debrief everyday ended  up going to homeless shelters giving out blankets and clothes to people in the shelter that were donated to the church, we also fed the homeless people at the shelters and just tried to do the best we could to make the people happy and make their lives and days as easy as we possibly could. I would encourage everyone to do this if they are ever presented  with this opprotunity because it really opened my eyes and made me think about how good my life is and how i can help the less fortunate.

Do you know anyone that is homeless or has ever been homeless? I know people that have been homeless, my best friend was homeless when were in high school and he had no place to stay because his mom kick him out of his house. He came and lived with me because he had no place to go and didn’t really have any family. I called him a couple days to go to ask him how everything is going and he said it’s a struggle he is still moving from place to place stuff but after our conversation we had he told me that I made a huge difference in his life and that he wouldn’t know what he would do with out me. That brought a tear to my eye and made me think about how fortunate I am to have a household above my head and not really have to worry about much.

Going onto another topic that really caught my attention as we left class the other day when were talking about just the struggle of being homeless and about welfare. We talked about how people that when they get out of prison or jail that they are automatically denied welfare and aid for them to live , which honestly sucks because I feel like everyone should be given a chance to make stuff right in their life and not be rejected based off a couple life decisions. Like what are people getting out of prison supposed to do if they are rejected from everything they are most likely going to rob and steal just to get by but even then they get caught and go back into the system. I know some friends that are in prison and have been in and out of there since they were 15 just because they don’t have to worry about were their next meal is going to come from or were they are going to stay for the night, one of my friends told me it’s a struggle in jail but it’s a different struggle than being on the streets and he would rather take the jail struggle over anything any day. I sucks to see your friends go through stuff like this but its life and all we can do is try to make a change no matter how drastic it is anything helps.

The super bowl is a very big thing in our culture, it is a time were people get together and bring food and have fun sitting around watching Americas favorite sport. We never think about the people that are homeless and how they have to move their belongings and stuff around when super bowl or some big event is is their city. For instance in USA today they wrote an article about a man named Otto that lived in the bay area and was forced to move from his corner because of super bowl Sunday and the city and police didn’t want homeless people around festivities. Otto told the reporters his life story and how he lived in the spot were he was told to leave for over a year. They interviewed a group of homeless people about how they celebrate the super bowl and majority of them said its just another Sunday to them other than the crowds of people nothing really changes. The article goes on to interview the homeless population around the super bowl of the memories and thoughts about super bowl and all the ones interviewed said they remember the barbecues, having fun and the gathering of people, majority of the people said that they would watch the super bowl because they had no television but were going to stay in high hopes and not get down to much. When having a home and a roof over your head we sort of take things for granted, like instead of figuring out were your going to go for super bowl you could be trying to find your new home!