Homeless kids are talking

The first time I had a conversation with a homeless kid, she shouted at me. I was working at a women’s shelter for mentally ill women, and I was alone. I had some hard and fast schizophrenic women at my back as I answered the door.  A family pulled up with a dirty, beat up station wagon. It was a heat wave. The kids were in bathing suits and the parents were beside themselves with worry. The man and the woman could not think of one more thing to do in the situation. Their things were piled up to the roof. I would eventually give them a quarter and tell him to call the police, see if they would spring for a hotel room. Sometimes they did that charity in Santa Monica on nights when all the shelters were full beyond capacity. I dipped down, looked inside the car, “How you all doing?” I asked the kids, and one small girl, who was not in a stupor like the rest of the kids, jumped up in my face and said, “We are not doing very well!”

Do babies spend the night outdoors in the cold and rain? These are the questions we are afraid to ask, and yes, they do.

I’m making this short because the answer is not the story.  The answer is where do we go from here?

I’m thinking of the middle grader who sat at my reading table with other kids and shook his head, looking sadly down with incomprehensible emotional pain. “I can’t understand,” he said, “If my dad bought the house at the start of the month from the man, why do we have to move out at the end of the month? My dad gave the man money to buy a house. Why do we have to move out after just one month?”

                Without hesitating, his young seat mate said, “Are you going into the car then?”

We don’t know from this conversation if immigrants were being exploited in Central California, or if the father thought he could continue with payments to someone. We just know that the kid is certain he is about to be homeless. And me, I’m thinking of homes were five and six families live in a single house with no furniture. The men are collapse asleep on the carpeted floor. It's wall to wall bodies, young men and old and some teenagers who have quit school to support their families. The women are cooking communally in the kitchen. Was the kid's father thinking there was a better way for a farmworker to live?

And now I am thinking of kids in El Salvador who played ball with me in a bombed out church, and of the tarot cards that rolled and tumbled through the streets, of how I  used the cards to tell the children stories of bravery, marriage, wealth and abundancy, not knowing what else I could do beyond playing ball in the bombed out church when bombs were still falling, and women were being shot on sight from helicopters if they wore there colors: there were no books in this village, but there was a mural made by the children, depicting a helicopter shooting down their friend. And this was our enemy? The people and children on the ground? 

So this is to say the answer is radical, revolutionary. This changes everything. We can't be materialists anymore.