The Compassion Initiative

The wall for the “homeless” side of the room.

Al (a different Al from the Al in the interview) who used to be homeless but started to turn his life around last year, said something one day that stuck in my head. “I felt safer when I was homeless.” He’s not sure why he feels that way, either. Maybe it’s something with the need to keep what you have in having a job that pulls at you.

Endless cycle; Search for safety

empty bottles of alcohol for the room

Sketch of the room

the text for the t-shirt

T-Shirt Text

December 10, 2011

I went to a design show of students from Carnegie Mellon University and there was this one piece that had two rooms with a line in between. One room looked like my room… the other looked like it belonged to a homeless person. The line in the middle asked me if I would cross. It told me the other side wasn’t easy. It wasn’t going to be comfortable. And I couldn’t go back to being the same person if I did this.

I CROSSED.

The paragraph above is going to be silk-screened onto a t-shirt, and the bolded sentence is going to be printed on top of it in large letters. Also thinking of making buttons with the words, ‘I crossed’ on them.

A Lady By the River

He saw her when he went jogging that morning. So we left to go see if she was still there, and if she wanted lunch.

She was, and she was shivering inside a tent. Temperatures were near freezing, and the air by the river was especially cold. ‘This cold– I can’t stand it no more,’ she said.

‘I never thought I was going to be homeless, y’know. I used to be the one who helped the homeless.’

She told us her story.

She was from Massachusetts, and she used to work in a circus side-show featuring freaky animals. Like cows with five legs, she said. There was one that would get you with its horns if you weren’t paying attention. One of the new girls had gotten trapped by it once. Even herself. ‘Poked,’ she said.

She told us she had had to work from five or six in the morning to eight or nine at night with maybe a half-hour for lunch, seven days a week. They had to take care of the animals. And they had to set up the tents. As she got older and couldn’t lift heavy things, her job became screwing in bolts. Painting the tent-poles different colors. Her hands were always covered in paint or black oil. She couldn’t even recognize that she was white anymore.

‘He said, You don’t quit until I say you quit. And I said, That’s it, I’m done. I’m leaving tomorrow. And the next morning I didn’t even get up to feed the animals. And I love animals.’

She was right.

When we visited her the following week, she had a family of ducks that were hanging around her, playing in the river. She told us she and her husband had found a place to live, hopefully. They just needed to hear back from the landlord.

I hope she gets the place.

EDIT: She didn’t get the place.