Here is a sad story about those I pass everyday...sometimes several times a day. When you hear about the hardcore homeless in the US...much of it lives on my block. I don't know what you guys think about the homeless. Myself, I am torn. I have to step over them everyday, I get asked for change CONSTANTLY, Smell them, Hear them all night yelling out my window, I have seen things that would defy fashoin standards af any time. Yet a part of me really feels for them. I know that they have a struggle that I cannot even understand. I am also moving away from my neighborhood...and they are the main reason I am doing so. Anyway...this is an interesting read on the hardcore homeless. A situation that will never have the correct answers. People like May here have been on the streets for years...and have no hope of ever getting off...nor do they want to.





Reaching into a void ..Part 2 of a three part series...Kevin Fagan, Chronicle Staff Writer

Part Two: Connecting with the neediest.

An August heat wave had turned the usual foul mood even fouler on the sidewalks of Jones Street in the Tenderloin.

Ricky Smith lay on his back alongside a shopping cart overflowing with grubby blankets and jeans, snoring in the late morning sun. At his side slept tiny Leslie "Jill" May. Sweat streamed across her wrinkled face and into her open, toothless mouth. Across the street, four other homeless regulars argued loudly over a broken crack pipe.

A white van pulled up next to Smith and May. Out stepped Ben Amyes, one of 12 counselors working in San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's new outreach effort to move the chronically homeless off the street and into housing and social service programs.

"Wake up, sleepyheads!" Amyes called cheerily, bending down to nudge the pair. He tapped them both again. No response.

Amyes had made an appointment with the pair the day before to meet them here at this time, 11 a.m., to talk about getting into drug rehab -- and they'd clearly forgotten. Just as hundreds of other hard-core homeless people had forgotten similar appointments with Amyes before this. And hundreds more will in the future.

Seven months ago, Newsom started the street outreach team as the centerpiece of the city's plan to solve homelessness in San Francisco -- a crisis, the mayor declared in his State of the City speech in October, that had "replaced the Golden Gate Bridge and the cable car as one of the city's most defining symbols." With just a dozen outreach workers versus an estimated 3,000 chronically homeless people, the word daunting only begins to describe the challenge.

Catch them in lucid moments, and most of the chronically homeless say they want help -- but actually getting them to take advantage of the offer is slow, hard, frustrating. Amyes and his co-workers say they prefer not to dwell on the toughness of the task but on the one-day-at-a-time patience it requires. And on those moments when they can connect with their "clients" -- broken people like Smith and May.

On that morning in August, 47-year-old May stirred beneath her blanket. "Mmmm, why's it so hot? Where's Ricky? I feel sick," she mumbled in a rush of words that clipped off abruptly as she opened her eyes and saw she had company in the form of Amyes and his outreach co-worker Dorothy James.

Smith, 51, woke, rolled to his side and groaned. "Where's our methadone?" he snarled.

The smile on Amyes face grew wider. "Tomorrow," he said brightly. "We're taking you in for a full doctor screening first, then the next day you get your first dose (of methadone). This is going to work. You are going to get clean, off heroin. You're going to get off this street!"

May stared blankly.

Smith nodded almost imperceptibly and slowly got to his feet.

James handed over two raspberry Nutri-Grain bars. "Take care," she said, getting no response.

As the outreach workers climbed back into their van, May ducked under her blanket, fiddled with a syringe and lit her crack pipe. Smith ambled a few paces over to the wall of the Hotel Layne -- a tourist enclave on this strip of Jones Street, one of the Tenderloin's seamier stretches -- unzipped and urinated against the golden stucco.

Leaning in the doorway 10 feet away, Hotel Layne manager Randy Patel watched Smith without moving, then stared at May. His face was weary with resignation. He snorted in disgust and walked inside. ...continued...


More... http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin...A76I11.DTL
[Edited 12/6/04 13:37pm]

I hear you... and yes, this part of life is hard to take. Nevertheless, many of times, many are given choices... choices many throw away.

Many reasons why people end up where they are (individual and personal) and they are the only ones who can truly know why, if they can get to that point in their lives.

For what I know (family related), it is that very point of "why" they chose that road in the first place (what drove them to that state in their lives) and the attempts to live in a denied state of mind, a way to erase what they wish they could forget.

...

In many of the situations that I am aware of... there is a underlying reason for why they live in a drug related world and it all began somewhere before that world.

Childhood years, most often is where the true horrors begin. The rest of life is the aftermath of these horrors, many of times. (Just speaking of what I know of and have seen)

Everyone has a reason and no they are not all the same.

The rest of the article is really eye opening.

I think I will think of "Crackhead Mary" very differently.

Freespirit said: