Homeless People

I always feel very disturbed when I see homeless people.  It is always confronting and upsetting to me and I feel helpless and guilty.  As I grew up in a remote area of Queensland, surrounded by the Australian bush, these aspects of a big city were neither evident nor known to me until I was an adult.  I am still not conditioned to it in any way.

I sometimes witness them on the morning train I catch to the city. I get on the city train and walk up a couple of carriages until I can find a "good" seat, one where there are only 2 seats in the cubicle, instead of 4 or 6 or 8+.  Then, it is always good if this "2 seat" seat is facing the way I am travelling towards and not the other way, as all these seats go first.

Today I walked thru 2 carriages or so, looking for the "perfect" seat and then I saw him, a homeless man, lying asleep across 4 seats.  He had obviously been there quite a few hours, maybe overnight.  His dirty plastic bags containing his few worldly possessions were spilled out on the clean floor of the train, obviously rattled out of the bags by the various many trips backwards and forwards from the city he must have made, lying there asleep for the past few hours. He was not old, younger, for a change. Maybe my age, his face, although expressionless and asleep, looked hard and sad, obviously from the life he had had.

There are varying statistics about the number of homeless people in Victoria.  A street count by Council Surveyors walking through Melbourne City in the early hours reportedly counted only (the article said "only"!!!!) 110 people asleep on the streets in the inner city, an ambitious politician stated last year.

There are approximately 20,000 homeless people recorded in Victoria by the Victorian Government.  Where is the charity to help get these people off the streets and into some sort of acceptable housing in the high media profile?  Is there a charity which is visible through the media every day?  I am sure there are charities, but there doesn't seem to be one that is accessible to people every day and in the mainstream media making people aware and asking for financial support.  I say this critically as there seems to be high profile charities for everything else.

Is this because people think it is a lost cause? Is there no hope for these people? Would they change their lives for the better if they were given a huge sum of money or just some money?

I travelled to the city this day, walked past the homeless man on the train, still sleeping, and got out in the city and went to work. I gave him nothing, no money, no help, didn't ask him if he was ok.  Am I afraid of what he will do or say when he wakes up? Do I base my lack of help and assistance with this man on the bad experience I had in Paris once when a homeless man scared me so much on the Paris Metro subway train, that it changed me forever from the country girl from the Queensland bush who used to give money to every homeless person who asked for it when first residing in the city of Brisbane?

The homeless man in Paris demanded money in hostile French slang. I pretended not to understand him, he jumped on my feet. It really hurt and the look in his eyes was hard and desperately frightening, he didn't seem human to me, though of course he was.

We gave him money as he went down the aides collecting money from all the other intimated commuters and my shoulders relaxed and I breathed easier the further I heard him walk away from us, yelling, that he "was collecting the money now. Hurry Up!

Is that why I just walk past this now still homeless man in Melbourne and get off the train?

Homeless people lining up for food at a city help soup van.