Sunday today, I forgot to disable my alarm clock so Bruce Dickinson screamed in my ears "Fear of the daraaark Fear of the Daaaark! I hated him for a couple of moments and then I snoozed him. A few hours later I’m on my pc. I plug in my external drive and I see that it’s almost full, so, I decide to clean it up. As I am deleting my useless junk (and I have a good pile of them because I’m a scavenger), I find a picture that I downloaded from an article 4 years ago.
This article was about a homeless person that I met when I was a student in school of economics. To pay for my living expenses I was working as a waiter in a restaurant near the harbor. Every single morning he was getting by each restaurant with his sports newspaper pile, which he was probably getting for free and giving them away to the restaurant owners. They in return gave him food and some coins. A few moments later instead of keeping the money he would come to us secretly for the owner not to see him and split the coins in our pockets. He said "half for you and half for Yannis" (the other waiter that was in my age) "I know you are good kids and the work is tough". We then of course kindly tried to not accept it and when we couldn't deny him his generosity , we took the money back to the owner to give it to him the next day. It was a surreal routine. He was telling us stories of his life, funny, sad, shocking (what life can bring to your face shocking) but he would never mourn about how hard life was on him or ask anything of us. He was a very proud man.
Homelessness is a serious error of our current economic model. Governments are trying to control it by investing on education, barcelors, masters and doctorals or lifelong courses. They put their focus on increasing the human resources for science and technology to help people get absorbed by companies and prevent the most serious contributing factor of homelessness, unemployment. The economic crisis made this harder for the governments as it affected the resources for education infrastructure and the funds for other educational lifelong programs. These all work as precautions to the problem but actions don't stop there.
There are the permanent supportive housing beds, which is a combination of housing and services intended to help people live more stable, productive lives. Funding transitional housing is another way for support that provides temporary housing for the certain segments of the homeless population, including working homeless making insufficient wages who have trouble affording long-term housing, and is set up to transition their residents into permanent, affordable housing. The costs are high and burden the society as it has to spend money on medical treatments, hospitalization ,shelter provisions police intervention and incarceration. People who can't cover their basic needs will succumb to criminal actions to survive.
The contributing factors are different from person to person but the most common is the loss of job, the inability of a person to find and keep a job. It can come from the lack of education, the skills gap (mismatch between the skills that workers in the economy can offer, and the skills demanded of workers by employers) and constraint government budgets. Other serious contributing factors are drugs and alcohol, sickness, mental issues and disability problems. Furthermore, bills that are higher than earnings and other factors like an unexpected family loss, as you can see on the diagram. Banks were selling housing loans to people with almost no limitations but after a while they couldn't make it due to a lower income. The housing bubble brought a lot of devastation to many households and blew up the global economy in 2008 but I won't analyze it further in this blog.
The homeless fall victims to social exclusion and denied of basics rights. Often whether they are sick or injured they can't get medical attention because they can't be issued a medical insurance due to lack of certain conditions. They are largely ignored by the rest of the society and that has a great negative impact on homeless children. They grow up after a devastating or non-existent childhood due to psychological pressure and rejection, making it hard for them to incorporate to a functioning member of our society. Homeless people are often handled poorly, the other members of the society treat them as they are diseased or mock those with have mental issues. There are many cases in which they get attacked, as their lives are deemed to have a lesser value.
When I bumped into that photo earlier, I felt nostalgic of those days and especially of this character and I decided to make him my today’s blog topic. When I come across beggars I have the tendency to look away, I do it as a reflex, to avoid scammers and there are too many of them nowadays. But among them there are people who really need our help. We only have to look.
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