A Gift of Hope: Helping the Homeless by Danielle Steel Page A

older than they are. Almost all believe that they will “get it together” one day, and many can, with the right help from the right hands. They have a sturdy, determined look about them. Life is still ahead of them, and despite whatever hardships they’ve encountered, many will survive.
    They were the hardest for me to walk away from when we left, because they reminded me so much of my children, and I wished we could do more for them, although they were often leery of us. They didn’t want to be taken anywhere, sent home, or dragged off the streets against their will. The one thing I always did was call a remarkable San Francisco organization called Larkin Street Youth Services, which is set up to assist young people with medical care, shelter, education, finding jobs, drug treatment or rehab, a program for kids with AIDS, or reunification with their families if desirable. Their street teams reach out both with vehicles and on foot, and I always let them know the location of young people I saw, knowing they would go out to them. I hoped the street teams could talkthem into going inside. Sometimes they succeeded and sometimes they didn’t, but they always tried.
    So running into adolescents was rare for us. On one particular night we were in a back alley, and I can’t remember if it was a tent or pile of cardboard boxes we spotted, but out of it emerged a couple of teenagers about sixteen or eighteen right out of a movie or off a CD cover or on MTV. I had never seen such dazzling punk gear in my life: spikes and chains, leather and red plaid. The girl was wearing a pair of knee-high combat boots. He had a towering mohawk that was glued into place. They had piercings and tattoos on every surface, but in their own crazy way, they were so beautiful to look at, and so extreme, that all of us smiled. We chatted with them for a while, gave them our stuff, and didn’t intrude on them further. They wanted no additional help. And in their own outrageous way, they were one of the prettiest sights of the night. They weren’t God’s Last-Stop Curve Ball—we came upon them halfway through the night and they boosted our spirits for a long time.
    There are a thousand other such stories, all of them gut-wrenching, touching, funny, devastating, heartbreaking, like the woman who leapt up from her rags and boxes in a doorway and said, “How did you know? It’s my birthday!” She was ecstatic, and we all hugged her and wished her a happy birthday. One man was totally encased in a roll of tin foil he hadfound, to keep warm. We saw a woman with a dozen cats who we saw for close to a year, all of them on leashes. I was always afraid of the dogs out there. The people I met made their way into my heart within minutes, but their pit bulls and hungry mongrels never did. We had enough to think about, without worrying about getting attacked by dogs. I like dogs and have several of my own, but the dogs we saw on the streets scared me. The team often laughed at me for it. Show me a guy who looks like he might kill you, and most of the time, I could stand my ground. But show me a dog who bares his fangs at me, and I would run like hell, and babysit the doughnuts till the rest of the team got back. Yeah, okay, and I ate a couple of the chocolate ones with sprinkles while I waited. No one’s perfect.

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Some Scary Moments
    N ot everyone we met on the street was friendly, though we were remarkably lucky and had very few incidents. On the whole, people met us with kindness and gratitude, and sometimes concern for us. And then there were a few who reminded us to keep our guard up, and be alert and watchful. We were venturing into someone else’s world, and a hard one. We could have easily become targets for someone’s anger or frustration or fear. There were areas we stayed out of by unanimous consent, as I’ve mentioned. We also decided, after a few unnerving experiences, to avoid places where people were living in cars, old trucks, or school