What home means to you

“Take a picture and enter a contest,” an item in my inbox from the United Na­tions Commissioner on Hu­man Refugees (UNCHR) sort of struck me as a challenge, at first. Such a commonplace image, I had thought. Yet, it would take more than a pic­ture for me; I would have to tell stories about the many spaces I wiggled into—always been borrowed, such as my grandparents’ homes, rented apartments, as well as a dorm from across the university, and later my in-laws’.

But not just a structure, that even a child can draw or construct with match sticks, UNCHR checks my thought, as it expands the idea of home for the contest to in­clude “a warm memory, or a special place, people you love, or simply a beautiful image that represents comfort, safe­ty and family,” further stating a belief “that nobody should be left outside—everyone de­serves a shelter that they can call home—even if only tem­porarily.”

Of this, contrasts easily stream to mind, such as the raw homelessness common in Manila, as well as in glitzy New York, Chicago and Van­couver, or even in even in Honolulu, right by Waikiki, where on one’s dusty steps a hump of blanketed human lost in sleep or in a stupor that they say starvation or deprivation causes, and by the side, an upturned hat or emptied coffee cup waiting for a clink of charity; hence, the contest challenge, turned me around to take up, in­stead, losing a home, or not having one.

I know, a complex web of factors mostly related to social ills has been recorded and analyzed toward the for­mulation of countless pro­grams on homelessness; I did join protests and signed pe­titions for more meaningful programs here in Vancouver, but in the end, I gave in to hopelessness, until one day at the Main Library, a tiny woman, who wears bliss in her eyes and a single-tooth smile, reversed it.

She had approached my table, where I sat for pizza at the library plaza, to take my emptied paper plate and cup to toss into a garbage bin as if it were her job, and soon, we started talking about eco­logical balance. Guessing that I would ask where she had read about the changing acidity of oceans, she fished out a tattered bag bursting with magazine clippings.

If she didn’t walk back to a shopping cart packed to overflowing with old shop­ping bags, I wouldn’t have guessed homelessness in her demeanor. She spoke without pain about not wanting to go to a shelter, preferring to be on her own, instead, in a cranny she’d rather keep se­cret, and bared no wish, ex­cept “perhaps a bicycle could help me move faster.”

My awareness had soon sharpened to more untypical others like her—the first one, a twenty-something clean-cut woman, who had just lost a job, hence, thrown out of an apartment by someone she thought a friend. She kept tucking in the hem of her lined coat, when I noticed her at the entrance of a Safeway grocery, waiting on the coins in a plastic bowl to accumu­late enough for lunch.

I could only add a toonie (CA$2) but drawn by her fragile youth, I had sat on my haunches, and we talk­ed. Orphaned at 5 years old and brought up by resentful relatives, she has been on her own since her teens, working in odd jobs. Sensing perhaps pity in me, she gave a wry smile, assuring me not to worry because homelessness, “until I get another job,” has been her life.

Not me, but soon, the likes of her started giving me more than I could for them. Take the woman I almost tripped on, seated on folded knees at a corner just past the cathedral—hardly unti­dy and greasy but especially garbed with pain, tears stain­ing her cheeks, hands grip­ping a satchel. I had fished out my last $5 bill meant for a sandwich-and-drink com­bo for lunch and extended my hand; she clutched it, her face squeezing to cry when I asked how she had come to this.

She had bolted out of a physically abusive husband and a child she hoped to get back to, once settled in her parents’ home far away in Kelowna, her fare for which she had started to beg. I had told her about a half­way-house for women like her, feeling as helpless as she did but grateful for a moment with her more than she, who had effusive words for my lis­tening.

Not meeting them again, I have since been compelled to dismiss as mirage the tiny woman who gifted me with a peek into a most unexpected peace and in a way, the twen­ty-something who clutched at elusive hope, but couldn’t. Instead, I kept this thought, which might find its own time: In society’s quest to un­derstand homelessness, they should be mined for their se­cret of sustaining some kind of home no matter how like the wind.

I wonder, could these stories pass for a multiple en­try to the contest?