6:00 a.m. I woke up in the tent. It’s not crazy cold this morning. Above freezing probably around 39°. I got my things prepared for the day and got into the truck. I didn’t change my clothes. I didn’t feel like going through the effort of changing outside. I backed the truck out of my secret driveway and did a turnaround on the highway to head towards my work.
7:00 a.m. I arrived at work and began working on some paperwork stuff from the day before. My colleague and I spent an hour or so preparing some food and getting gear ready to give out to the homeless people in the street.
Around 9:00 a.m. My colleague and I stop by the same encampment behind the church near the river that I was at before. We talked with some of the homeless people there. Fentanyl use is a huge contributor/cause to the homelessness that we see in the street. Some fentanyl users are high functioning and you can have an intelligent conversation with them. Some people that are heavy fentanyl users struggle to communicate. They act erratically, sometimes this depends on how high they are.
12:00 p.m. After walking the riverfront and talking to the various people living in tents out there, my coworker and I stopped to get some lunch at a Dominican bodega. A lot of the bodegas around here have little restaurants that serve rice and meats and other Spanish dishes.
3:00 p.m. My boss asked me if I could do a favor right before I left. I had plans with my girlfriend so I had to decline. When I arrive at my girlfriend’s apartment, the social service provider across the street has a lot of activity. There’s people on the street high on drugs, interacting with each other and just hanging out as they usually do all hours of the day and night. When I say interacting, I mean all kinds of different behavior: Talking, yelling, arguing, and doing shady side deals behind the building.
The rest of the night I spent with my girlfriend. It’s been a long and interesting week. I’ve been making a lot of connections in the town that I work in, based on my ability to help homeless people with various things. I would love to see Society come together to try to solve these major issues at hand, homelessness is just being a symptom of deeper societal issues. We as a society have enough resources to provide shelter for the people living in the street. That would be a good start. I know how much money is spent on social services and the outcomes equate to only a small fraction of the money spent. It makes no sense to spend money on something, especially when the more money you spend the worse the problem gets.