A Gift of Hope: Helping the Homeless by Danielle Steel

homeless. If you had introduced me to him and said that to me, I wouldn’t have believed you. How could this be?
    He never gave his name, although some people do as though to make a mark of some kind and be remembered. He said that he had been an executive in Silicon Valley and his wife had left him not long before. They were vastly overextended and heavily in debt, he had lost everything and then lost his job. He was trying to find employment in his field, and no one knew he was homeless, not even his family. He hung around and talked to us for a while, hungry for conversation.
    For whatever reason, he had decided not to go to a shelter—scared maybe, with good reason. Shelters are dangerous enough for people who don’t look like him. And he would have stuck out like a sore thumb and been an instant target. Eventually, we had to go, and we watched him walk slowly up the library steps with what we’d given him. He had been extremely grateful, and before he left us, we wished him good luck finding a job. But he had shaken us all. With many of the homeless people we saw, it was hard to find the bridge between us other than our common humanity. We could no longer see where they came from, and we met them only with compassion. But this man had the kind of story that strikes fear in people’s hearts. A series of mistakes, some bad luck, too much spending, a broken marriage, a lost job at the wrong time. It happens to many, although they are the most likely to get off the streets again, as long as drugs and alcohol aren’t involved. Thinking about him, we were all silent on the way home. He was God’s Last-Stop Curve Ball that night.
    Another pair I always remember with a smile were most likely teenagers, somewhere between sixteen and eighteen, although they looked fairly adult. It was very rare for us to see adolescents, and never children. Homeless children are almost instantly picked up by the police and taken to shelters, hopefully with their parents. In eleven years I never saw a child on the streets—many pregnant bellies, but never an infantor a child. Ever. And I’d say teenagers (in groups of two or three, and rarely but occasionally a camp of as many as eight or ten) were five to every six hundred adults. They tended not to hang out in the same places as adults, and kept to themselves. In San Francisco, they were mostly in an area called the Panhandle, which was too dangerous for us, climbing through shrubbery and bushes in the dark.
    Also, many kids on the streets had the reputation for doing drugs. They were more likely to sell what we gave them than adults. We saw our clients put their new clothes on immediately and we knew they didn’t sell them. There were plenty of drugs among the adults, but rarely did they sell the supplies we handed out. Their need was too great, their gratitude evident as we watched them dive into the bags and put on the jackets immediately. And as I drove around the city between trips, leading my own life, I so often saw the familiar black bags that we used to hold the supplies we gave perched atop shopping carts, their prized possession—so I knew these bags were not being sold.
    Kids on the streets are a whole different breed. And when I say “kids,” I mean adolescents. Most of them, I fear, are out there because they have lived with such shocking abuses at home that whatever evils they meet in the streets couldn’t possibly be worse than what happened to them at home. Some are on drugs. Some have been out there for years. It’snot unusual to talk to a seventeen-year-old who will tell you that he or she has been out there for four or five years. They have no desire to go home, and will grow up on the streets, doing what they can to survive. Many have come from other places and cities; some want to go back home but can’t afford to or organize it. They tend to stay in groups. I have never seen an adolescent alone or even with adults. They almost always tell you that they are