A Gift of Hope: Helping the Homeless by Danielle Steel Read Free Book Online

sizes of jackets for men and two for women, my first question as I walked up to people, after telling them we had things for them, was “Excuse me, sir, are you a large or an extra large?” The men stared at me as though I was crazy, and the team made fun of me. (After a while, I could pretty much eyeball our clients and guess the right size.) There was a lot ofteasing among the team about our “winter line” as opposed to our “spring line,” and if someone would be coming out to do alterations later. It kept the mood light in the early part of the evening, when we were able to give people items that really fit in the correct size.
    With off-duty cops on board, we were braver about venturing into some nasty neighborhoods that night, and thereafter. We felt a confidence that maybe we shouldn’t have, but we wanted to be where we were needed most. And the policemen added fearlessness. They knew what they were doing and what not to confront. We made some early safety rules, and set some boundaries about neighborhoods. There were so many homeless people in the city that there were a lot of options. We decided to avoid the Panhandle area of Garden Gate Park, near the once-famous Haight-Ashbury, because there were mostly transient young people there, almost all of whom were high on drugs, and whose homelessness often stemmed from that. We wanted to get to the hardcore homeless at the bottom of the barrel, where no one else would go, not the “cream” at the top.
    Our fear was that in the Panhandle, the kids would be most likely to sell what we gave them, for more drugs, which seemed to defeat our purpose. There were also parts of thepark where our police teammates felt it was just too dangerous for us to go, where we would have to climb through bushes in the dark and were too likely to get attacked. Likewise, we made Hunter’s Point off limits, where street violence was extreme and where shootings occurred too frequently for our safety. We eliminated another area where dirty needles were the weapon of choice. And the police on our team said that if we worked in the Tenderloin, we were likely to inadvertently interrupt the flow of business in drug traffic, and we were liable to get killed. Sixth Street was the hotbed of drug deals and also the scene of frequent shootings, and Bob and Randy said that we were almost certain to get shot there, so that was out.
    But in spite of those reasonable limitations, that still left huge parts of the city, mostly south of Market Street, where we would find countless homeless people. It was a big area, and those still relatively dangerous regions kept us busy all night. And admittedly now and then we strayed into places we shouldn’t have, where we’d promised not to go, but we tried not to stay long and moved on as fast as was practical. Bob and Randy advised us that wherever we went, the goal was to get in and out fast, not to give people too much time to think about it or attack us if we were in a tight situation in a tough neighborhood. In the gentler places, we could stay longer, but they still urged us to move quickly. It’s a policy westuck with and that always worked well for us, even when we made mistakes and wound up where we shouldn’t. Moving at high speeds served us well every time. We didn’t need to linger, we gave what we had and got out. We were there to get a job done, not hang out.
    Another agreement we made early on was what to do if someone tried to hijack the van. Many people living on the streets have weapons. Some have guns, but knives were more current, and getting stabbed was a real possibility for us, working at close range. More than once I asked myself what I was doing. I am a single mother of eight children who need me. Risking getting killed on the streets wasn’t sensible, yet I had an overwhelming need to continue what I’d started, as did the others. But I had a strong sense of responsibility to the rest of the team too. I worried a lot about them