Adam Interview : “You just have to keep moving forward man.”
29 from south bend
Date of Observation: 3/4/17
Location: Weather Amnesty
Type of Observation: Casual Interview
Newly Homeless
Adam has recently turned to homelessness. Unlike many, he has never been addicted to drugs or alcohol. He recently lost his house and quit his job. He told him that God had told him to not worry about letting go of all of his material possessions and just to trust Him.
Troubles at work
Until recently, Adam worked with mental health patients. I am not sure of what his exact title was but he said that he enjoyed forming relationships with his patients a lot better than interacting with his coworkers. After some of his patients passed, he said that he quit his job because he felt that he could not give his patients his best self and had too much going on with his family. After quitting his job he shortly lost his house as well.
Religion
Adam told us that when his house and all of his other possessions started to slip away, God told him just to let go and that everything would be ok. Adam was very emotional throughout this whole interview almost coming to tears multiple times. When I asked what he thought God had in store for him next, he said that he had no idea and was just trying to take it day by day.
Interactive Card Sort:
I did an Interactive Card sort with Adam. He seemed very confident in what he thought that the order of his words were. The card sort that we gave him was a bunch of words and we asked him what words he thought described himself the best. To my surprise, towards the top he put outgoing, which was odd to me because he was quite shy. I guess that talking to complete strangers is something that most people wouldn’t do.
The main takeaway that I took from Adam was that he was really mentally shaken about his situation. When I talked with him about how he became homeless, he really got emotional and almost broke out into tears. He is clearly someone that would need some sort of counseling help to get his mind right again. He is an example of a cause of homelessness that didn’t cross our minds from the beginning.
Marty: “There are a lot of mean people around here. There is just no reason for that”
47 years old from Niles
Same Location as above
Not a Regular
2nd night at the weather amnesty center. He seems to have some kind of problem at home and left the house. Used to be a very heaving drinker, which has led him to have scerosis, spinal injury, and many other health issues. Grew up in California where his father was a belligerent drunk.
Been through a lot
Other than his father being an abusive drunk, his mother recently died of cancer and his girlfriend has MS. He has a spinal injury where he is unable to move his right arm without assistance. He has scerosis from excessive drinking and smoking. He also has 3 kids that are 16,15, and 7 with different women.
Intelligence
Marty claims to be a very quick learner. He seemed to want to talk about every subject that he could. His next steps were trying to find a job where he can support his family better. He also wanted to get an operation on his spine so he can use his right arm again.
Billy: “I’ve heard of these people that do drugs and help kids now, that’s where I wanna be.”
53 from Houston, involved in Gangs and Drug Trafficking
Rough Upbringing
Didn’t have a father and didn’t have a good relationship with his mother so he got involved with a gang when he was in middle school.
Prison
Has spent 30 of 53 years in prison for drugs, attempted murder, and various other gang related charges. He is on parole and involved with Hope because he was selling cocaine in South Bend. Brought a stripper back to his room and she was tryin to by cocaine from him, he refused and she tipped the cops. He has been in jail for 2 and ½ years and now graduated hope program and done in December.
New Life
When I asked if he was glad that it happened he at first said no but then responded yes because it allowed him to get out of his vicious cycle of selling drugs and gangs. He is now enrolled in school and wants to go around to schools and help kids in Houston with the same problems he had. Every chance he gets he kept showing me his school ID on his phone and was very excited to start school in April.
Expert Interview: Randy
Junior High Teacher
How He Got Started with this Work
Randy is a junior high teacher at the Montessori school. He has been a long time volunteer with the Center for the Homeless and he actually brings a group of 8th graders to the center every Wednesday to help with the Pre-k program at the Center. He started this by knowing Steve, which gave him the connection to start this program through the school. He said that this program really helps educate his kids, himself, as well as obviously help educate the children that are at the Center for the Homeless.
His thoughts on Barriers
He had two main barriers for people choosing to stay homeless. 1) drug and alcohol abuse is extreme. He said that he doesn’t think that everyone is ready to get the help that they need and they refuse to get off of the streets because they know that they can use their substances there without any pushback. 2) Capacity. He said that there are so many people that come to the Center and use similar resources that there are just not enough for the whole homeless population. He also put a special emphasis on families and the fact that families may not want to come into the Center because they men and women will get split up at night because of the rules of the Center.
Randy gave a very valuable perspective about his view on the homeless situation. From the view of a volunteer who also has some experience working with city councils and such, he seemed to want to stress a housing first method but was unsure how to educate taxpayers how this method will reduce costs in the long run while keeping homeless people off the streets. He understood that not everyone has the most empathy towards homeless people and wanted to figure a way to educate the average person on the situation.
Immersion:
For my immersion I went to the bridge site where tent city had been previously set up this past summer. What I witnessed there was quite similar to what I imagined there would be. There were broken bottles of alcohol lying next to empty bags of chips and other various types of packaged food. There was a large cardboard box torn open and dirty with some alcohol bottles,a syringe, and some tattered clothes. As I was walking around taking pictures (which for some reason I am unable to upload because it is saying that the files are too big) a group of homeless people were sitting around in a circle. They seemed to be boozing it up and once they spotted me, they started shouting and cussing. I promptly went back into my car and drove away.
Analogous Immersion- Dan Speers
So for my analogous immersion I interviewed one of my teammates that is from Great Britain. WE thought that a foreign student would be a good person to interview because it is similar in the way that they may not be aware of the resources that they have available and that they may have to deal with a major cultural difference moving to a different country. The main takeaways that I had from Dan’s interview and his experience going to school in a different country is that he definitely had a big adjustment to being a student athlete at in America. It was crucial for him to learn about the resources that he needed to help him succeed. He also said that the cultural difference was a slight barrier but for the major part the cultures are rather similar and not a huge barrier for his success in America.
The major takeaway from this is that the education of resources for Dan was essential. Education plays a major role in our problem because we need to educate the homeless about the available resources but also we need to educate the citizens of South Bend that there is a huge cost advantage to giving these homeless people the help that they need now in order to get them to stop using resources and tax money in the future.
Takeaways from research
This research showed me that these people don’t want to be a spectacle. It made me realize that they are just regular people with some not regular problems. At one point all of them were just regular school kids doing things that I used to do when I was younger. Homeless people come from all types of backgrounds. Whether they were affluent or poor, had both parents or none, or graduated college or didn’t make it our of the 5th grade, the important thing is that they are people too and should be treated like so. I feel we are guilty of treating homeless people as some kind of spectacle or just something that we try not to make eye contact with at a stoplight. The only way that this problem will be solved is if we treat homeless people not as some circus act, but as if they were our own friends who just made a few bad decisions.