Last night I volunteered at the men’s homeless shelter for the first time. I would actually say that I had a good time. Or at least, a worthwhile time. They slept in beds that can be pulled out from a large cabinet. There were ten cabinets in the room, a row of table and chairs around it, and plenty of space to walk about. It didn’t feel like a very different world, but it undoubtedly was. The things they talked about—-the other homeless shelters, subsidized housing, gifts that came from donations—-were so far away from my life that I had a hard time realizing that their words were, in fact, deeply, deeply real. They talked about the injustices in another large homeless shelter, how it has a really hostile and incompetent staff, how the only thing it provides them is a plastic chair to sleep in, how it treats people like animals, driving the sane to insanity, how it is keeping the insane because it can collect more money from the government.
"I will try to bring them down. What they are doing is not right." Chris, a big, well-spoken Black man, said.
They were seriously angry, but they also expressed their anger through jokes. The stories about the crazy homeless folks and their own “first nights” were just too funny and too sad. One anecdote that all of them cherished was about this man who left the shelter two weeks ago. He was the joker of the bunch. One night all of them received gifts from the shelter, mostly clothes, and the "joker" tried on his black, T-shirt-looking top in front of everyone—-except it wasn’t a T-shirt, it was a form-fitting, woman’s halter top. “What is this?” He looked down puzzled at his chest, which was so tight that a cleavage was clearly visible.
The rest cracked up all night long.
"So what are you doing right now?"
"I'm trying to get my GED."
"Woah, that's really nice. Do you know what you're going do with it?"
"Oh yes, of course. I'm going to be a judge. I know it."
“If they were walking on the streets would you ever think that they’re homeless?” Yuan Yuan, a friend who came with me, asked when we were on our way back.
“No. Never.”
“Me neither.”
The truth is that some of them certainly would make me suspect that their standards of living are not too good, but I would never even imagine that they are homeless—-this word is so distant from my own life that my mind does not even treat it as a possibility for the less fortunate others. But today in the subway, a big Black woman, dressed in an even bigger, oversized red jacket, walked out of door carrying a small luggage and a plastic bag sitting on top of it. Her expression was the same as the men in the shelter when they were not talking.
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