Don't Feed the Homeless in Hawaii?

I was working in a small Alaskan community prior to relocating to Hawaii. I received a job offer making a great deal more income than I'd ever experienced by using my nursing knowledge, skills and license as an administrator type over several vital programs for the elderly, rather than direct patient care. Thanks to this "life-style upgrade" I was able to take my first real vacation ever, and chose to come to Hawaii. I spent a fabulous week in Maui and then flew over to Oahu and stayed another week in the Waikiki Beach area.

During my stay on Oahu I noticed several homeless people, bought lunch for a couple of them, and not proud to say it, I overlooked those at the picnic shelters at the beach when I went down to swim, sun or go boating. I guess it is sometimes too easy to do, put the blinders on and pretend they are not there - even when you were once one yourself.

I was raised by a functional-at-the-time paranoid schizophrenic single mother. She was able to hold down a job and pay her bills, well most of the time, the rest of the time we moved, repeatedly. She was verbally and physically abusive, then there was the sexual abuse tolerated in the home, perpetrated by one of her siblings and also by one of her short-term lovers.This led to my fleeing the home environment and ultimately working for a living and paying my own rent and bills around the age of 15. At seventeen there was a relatively short period of time when I was homeless.

A teenager living under a bridge when she should have been in a loving home with at least one loving parent, I experienced first hand the hardships and despair that can come from homelessness. It is hard to understand, I suppose, if you have never been there. It is harder still, when you have been there, to hear or see comments made such as:

• "Why don't they just go get a job?"
• "They don't WANT to work, they just want to game the system."
• "They'd stay in shelters if they weren't so worried about drinking and drugging!"

The list goes on. Just a few of the problems are:

• It's hard to get a job when you don't have clean clothes, a place to shower, an address and phone number for your resume/application, etc.
• Shelters can be extremely dangerous places where often robbery, rape and physical violence takes place.
• Shelters have hours that often are not conducive to those working second or third shift.
• Families and single women with children are the fastest growing segment of the homeless population
• Shelters are often full with a waiting list
• Shelters do not often have the capacity to take in those with medical issues
• In a lot of smaller towns there is no shelter available
• Shelters often do not have the capacity for family units

There were many times, in the years after my experience homeless, that it almost occurred again. As a single mother of three working as a nurse, when my income just was not stretching far enough and the child support continued to never come, I feared we would all end up on the street or in my car. I refer to it as my there but the grace of God days. Our family, my children and I, were one of those one-paycheck-away families that never failed to thank God that that one paycheck away never came.

Even after a few lucrative years in my Alaskan job where I was able to significantly pay down and pay off a lot of my debt, I still cannot purchase a home because I have some medical debt that has been outstanding for a long time. When you are broke and you have to choose between paying your rent and light bill OR paying for an MRI you had done - well let's just say my choice was always to pay what was currently an actual "right now need". When I'd get a shut off notice on a utility (or cable at times) I would tell them you are only important to me while I have service, so if you leave it on I WILL pay you. The moment you turn service off and I have to make due some other way - you are no longer on my radar....it always worked, but it was also always true.

If our experiences make us who we are, it was with those eyes that I read an article yesterday about Hawaii Governor Neil Abercrombie's plan for homelessness in Hawaii. I was gratified that they are taking the problem seriously since Hawaii has a very high rate of homelessness per capita, however some of the Governor's comments were appalling to me as the Governor asked that we do not feed the homeless. I could not help but to equate his comments to the signs at the zoo asking us not to feed the animals. Don't feed the homeless? REALLY? What could possibly be the motivation for that statement?

"You may be giving them food in the sense of sustenance, but it does not change their circumstances," he said. "You have to feed someone's soul. If you just feed their body their soul remains barren because you have no sense of yourself as a worthwhile person...It is not doing them any favors...People are not feral cats, they have consciences, they have thoughts about themselves...."

Seriously? So is the homelessness plan you are devising going to be to send them to church? Tell them about God? That is what feeds the soul, no? Let's get real, are you familiar with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs? It is the idea that before an individual can concentrate or focus upon higher level needs, basic needs must first be met. The base needs are the requirements for human survival: air, water, food and shelter. So before one can even focus on safety, the second in in the hierarchy, one must focus on survival. Cliff notes version as follows:

1. Physiological Needs: air, water, food, shelter, sleep
2. Safety Needs: security in one's person, property, employment, finances
3. Love/Belonging Needs: family, friendship, intimacy
4. Esteem Needs: self-esteem, confidence, achievement, respect
5. Self-Actualization: morality, creativity, problem solving, lack of prejudice

If you are going to talk about real solutions to a very real problem, you have to start with the most basic of solutions. The real problem with feeding the homeless, it seems, are that a lot of the groups who voluntarily feed the homeless do so at the beaches and public parks and the problem then becomes that the homeless are a "blight" and an "eyesore" to the tourism industry, Hawaii's biggest industry. Another promise was strict measures to get the homeless out of the parks and off the beaches. This they are doing by ticketing homeless people. If one is homeless, how does one go about paying for that ticket? If one does not pay for the ticket, what happens to them?

Oh Governor, please understand it is with great respect that I point out to you that it is much less costly to house the homeless than to jail them. Would you rather see homeless on the beaches or dead bodies of homeless on the beaches because they died of starvation? I know I'm being a tad dramatic here, but tourism has not suffered here because of the homeless problem, it has suffered because of the economy. The real issue, I believe, is that it does not leave a good impression of what is happening in Hawaii when there are groups of homeless people hanging about the tourist areas. Rather than focus with our pocketbooks on aesthetics and the opinion of some tourists, why don't we focus with our hearts and souls on the human element and rather than push them behind dumpsters or into the residential areas, which is what is happening now, why don't we invest those resources in affordable housing, job training, treatment programs, and medical care for those affected?

I don't begin to think I know all the answers or what is perfect, just and right.........but I absolutely know when something is heartless and wrong.