The Affero Blog

Discovering homelessness

By Steven McLaughlin in News

25Jun, 2010

It was a whirlwind weekend back in Ohio a couple of weeks ago. My wife and I now live in New England and had flown into Ohio for a couple of days in order to attend the weddings of some friends. We bounced around the whole state putting roughly 700 miles on our borrowed cars wheels trying to get to and from airports, weddings, friend’s houses, houseboats, church, lunches and back again in roughly 72 hours.
Being home is usually an overwhelming experience for us since we live so far away now. We’re usually trying to fill every free minute catching up with people we haven’t seen in months. Sure there’s Skype, email, cell phones, face book and twitter to keep us connected with our friends and family, but what we crave is the ability to sit down and share a meal, or coffee, or conversation face to face with people and reconnect with them personally. Thus being home is usually exhausting in the best of ways.
This is all to say that it surprised me as we were speeding down a dirt road from one lunch gathering to the next we came to an unexpected stop. We had both noticed that in the left lane of this road in the middle of nowhere a large turtle was struggling to cross the street. For the life of us we couldn’t figure where this turtle was coming from or heading to, it looked lost, far away from any semblance of home and it looked like it needed our help. I pulled off to the side of the road, jogged over to where my new found friend was stranded and gently nudged him along off of the road.
Feeling like a champion of all things in nature big and small I got back into my car and continued to drive to see our friends.
And then out of nowhere, like a hot knife through butter, this thought just strikes through my heart.
Why was I so quick to get out and help that turtle, but when I see people on the side of the road with signs that say they are homeless, why do I even question whether or not I should stop?
Of course the glaringly obvious answer that hit me over and over again as I continued to drive was this; it’s incredibly easy to help a turtle cross the road, and it takes much more effort to help out someone who has lost their home.
Homelessness is more than just men and women on the sides of roads with signs. One definition I read of homelessness stated that it is people “without a permanent, safe, decent, affordable place to live.” Statistics on who, how many and why people are homeless range into the upper hundreds of thousands to the lower millions depending on who you might be asking.
Beyond that there are millions on the verge of homelessness, just hoping that they don’t have to pay to fix a broken down car or have an unexpected visit to the hospital that would eat their pay check and have them miss that month’s rent.
All of these things rattled around in my head throughout the weekend as we continued on our way and eventually got back to our home here on the East coast. I realized that homelessness isn’t just this little problem that is sometimes annoying and is going to go away if I ignore it long enough. So I’m going to keep researching and writing as much as I can, finding out where I fit into this puzzle. I’m looking forward to getting back here and sharing what I find out with all of you.

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