When I was doing my reading for my book report I over came a couple stories about peoples lives and how they are not able to do certain tasks in order to keep surviving and being healthy. The book is call “Tell Them Who I Am”, and the topic that made me really think so deeply about is when the homeless population has to go to a doctors and are told to do certain things in order to get better and they can’t even fill those basic needs and demands really opens your eyes. For instance in the book I talked about how the person had something wrong with their legs and their back and the doctors told the person to stay on bed rest for a couple days, but how are they supposed to do that if they are living in a shelter and have to be out of the shelter at a certain time a day and come back later in the day. Another story in the book discussed how one person had something wrong with their skin and was ordered to take 3-4 warm baths a day to help out with the infection or skin disease, which is impossible because they don’t have a steady place to shower in order to take care of themselves. This got me thinking about some ways that would help the homeless in these certain cases. I think that if they had a place that is like a shelter for people with special needs from doctors and allow the homeless population to stay as long as they are prescribed to get help. If we don’t already have these things i feel like this would just limit the amount of deaths and the amount of diseases out there.

How do we really know what people are homeless? What categorizes people as being homeless? How does our society and community around us look at homeless people?

Our image of the homeless population is seeing people with raggedy clothes and dirty and pushing around a shopping cart on the side of the street, Or the people that are sleeping on park benches and under freeways. We never think that a lot of people that don’t look like that image are homeless. Being homeless has a broad definition it can be people that are sleeping on a couch at a friends or relatives house or it can be a person that is living in a motel, or can even be people that are living in a shelter for the night. Being homeless is seen different in many people’s eyes and is mostly seen as the people on the side of the road. Our community and society I feel has put a bad name on homeless people and has not really looked at them as people but more as an outcast and as they are worthless. The homeless population should be treated and looked at as equal because everyone has gone through tough times and some have it worse than others, our society has a way of out casting people who don’t fit the norm and puts a bad name and tag on them which makes them looked down upon.