A lot of the service that Mid-MO JBGC does is concerned with the homeless community. Several of us work weekly as “Door Keepers” – hosts of a sort – at the local Loaves & Fishes soup kitchen. With our local support group, Friends of John Brown, we also serve food monthly at the same kitchen. Others of us have volunteered for the winter-lodging program Room At The Inn, for Operation Safe Winter, or for several community-organized camp cleanup projects over the past year. And then there’s our John Brown Mobile Soup Kitchen, which for the past three seasons has served soup & baked goods 3 mornings per week for about 25-to-30 people per day, totaling some ~ 1,200 individual meals served each winter season.
In the United States, nearly one million people experience homelessness any given month. The lifespan of homeless people is between 42-50 years old, or about 25 years less than the life span of housed people. Opportunities for illness in the homeless community are endless. Two years ago a young man from Texas was on antibiotic treatment for a tick bite he received in one of Columbia’s camps, but the antibiotic resulted in diarrhea, which made it challenging for him to be away from a restroom – a near impossibility in a community where lengthy travel is required between the soup kitchen, downtown facilities, and camps and sleeping facilities. Later that summer he went to the emergency room – the treatment place of choice (society’s choice!) for the homeless community– after injuring his shoulder while falling off his bike. He also has circular scars on his arms where he has injured himself intentionally from cigarette burns. He is presently in jail on $50,000 bond for charges that, as best we can determine, have to do with running from the police.
In fact, many homeless endure bike accidents or are hit by cars, especially at night. In 2019, the community lost a charismatic and well-loved Cheyenne known as “Chief” when he sustained an injury accident riding his bike home one night after dark. Ironically, Chief was technically no longer homeless, having recently acquired his own apartment. Some people may have deep slashes on arms, hands, or wrists from from bike wrecks, self-inflicted wounds like those mentioned above, random attacks, or even firearms accidents. Without antibiotics, cuts and lacerations can result in gangrene and amputation, and we have bandaged and pleaded with the injured to get themselves antibiotic intervention. Amputation also occurs from frostbite, as happened with two members from one of the camps we fed in Winter 2019; one man lost several toes, the other lost the tips of several fingers. Two years later, both are still with us, but the man with missing toes walks with a limp while he dwells in the interstices of abandoned stores in the town’s old business loop.
Deaths from overdoses are common. When bad batches of K2 hit the streets, our local Turning Point day center can be deluged with overdoses and ambulance calls, with the director having to do chest compressions on expiring patrons several times a week or even several times a day. In 2019 one of our young homeless men, still greatly missed, died from alcohol poisoning, another common occurrence in the community. Alcohol or drugs may be ways to self medicate in a cruel world, but in another sense can be thought of slow ways of committing suicide; tragically, our most recent homeless death in the community was by direct suicide, that of a young woman found dead last week reportedly by hanging.
Sometimes injury or death come by adversarial means, with bad results on one or both sides of the confrontation. A young homeless man who flies a sign on the corner for cash was beat up one night by a gang of men, and had scars and dents across his nose the next day to show for it. A homeless guy who sometimes carries a machete injured a young homeless woman’s arm in a dispute last year, ending up in jail on $100,000 in bond. Earlier this year another member of our community died in a fatal stabbing from a different homeless man, the latter someone who was seriously mentally ill. He was someone who we had watched descend further into agitation and violence for weeks, and yet were powerless to help, as once again the state’s incarceration system eventually became the default repository for mental illness.
Sometimes things just happen and we are at a loss as to figure out how or why. A small white man, mentally ill but never violent – “lemon, lime, and orange with crushed ice,” he repeated over and over to me one time while I tried to gently escort him from a church service – was discovered drowned in a creek earlier this year. Another man, amiable and never one to cause trouble, has been missing since summer, his camp abandoned. In itself, camp abandonment is not unusual, but in the previous week he had collapsed and injured his head in the heat. We wait to hear news of his whereabouts.
While we in Columbia Missouri have yet to notice an increase in homelessness due to the pandemic and the expiration of eviction moratoria, we have to watch with apprehension as density-dependent conditions (like pandemics and climate) compound poor societal decisions (about money, care, and law enforcement) to potentially result in greater numbers of the homeless. Not everyone can visit a homeless camp or volunteer at a shelter, but many of our best supporters in this work have been the donors who cook soup, bake muffins, or whose financial help allows us to purchase the hundreds of handwarmers, gloves, and socks that we go through each winter. As we enter the longest night of the year on December 21st, candlelight vigils are often observed for the occasion of the Annual Homeless Persons’ Remembrance Day, this one being the 30th. If it makes you feel better, do light a candle in remembrance… but you might also keep in mind that tiny candles can do a remarkably good job heating and lighting a tent. The next day, collect your candles, with those of your friends, and repurpose them – take them to your local service worker, to your local day shelter, to a homeless camp, or to us – where their flame can be used to heat & light someone’s tent.