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

from the distance, desperate to get what we had to give. Into the night, in our direction, he shouted, “Yo! Angel!” We waited for him, and I was startled by what he’d said. He thanked us profusely for what we were doing, and said we must be angels coming to help others. We gave him what he needed, and off he went, leaving with us the gift of our name, as a group. We called our outreach team thereafter “Yo! Angel!”
    Another extraordinary thing happened to us that night. We were cruising along slowly beneath an underpass, looking for people sleeping there, and there were a lot of them. Suddenly on a support post for the underpass, we saw a large chalk drawing. It stopped us all. It was a beautiful painting of a boy, done in pastel colors, and he had wings. There was our angel. A sign, after we had just been called that, deservedly or not. But what stopped me and mesmerized me, as tears sprang to my eyes, was that the boy in the lovely angel drawinglooked just like my son Nick. He was the angel in our midst. John and Jane returned days later to take a photograph of it, which they had put on a sweatshirt for me, as a gift. I treasure it still. It was the perfect sign for our first night together as a team, the night Yo! Angel! was born.
    We became Yo! Angel! that night, and so did the foundation I founded years later, to help us manage our finances and make the most of every dollar we spent on the streets. Jane saw to it that we had a sign that said “Protected by angels” hanging from the rearview mirror, and various little angel mascots. The occasionally outrageous jokes we told between stops did not qualify us as angels, but they kept our spirits up, and we all liked the idea of angels as our theme.
    Although our distribution went fairly smoothly, it was nonetheless complicated fishing things out of the van, making sure everyone had one of each item: sleeping bag, jacket, gloves, hat, socks. We had added a wool beanie, which was useful on cold nights on the streets. I wore one myself. Sometimes people wanted two pairs of socks, or a jacket for an absent husband or girlfriend. We gave them what they wanted, but running the supplies out of the back of the van was like a discount store on the day of a half-price sale. We did a lot of business quickly, and Jane had to stay on her toes to keep the rest of us from turning our supplies into a junk heap for her to deal with. She was always a good sport about the mess wemade as we handed things out at a fast pace, and people were patient as they waited for us to turn back to them with our arms full of things they needed. It was only the beginning for us, and we still had a lot to learn about what was needed and what worked.
    In the spirit of that innocence and newness, we managed to drive headfirst into a one-way dead-end alley south of Market Street, where we saw two or three people asleep in doorways. It looked like an easy stop to us, and no big deal. But once we were deep into the alley, with another van behind us and no way out except to back up, about forty young men poured out from doorways and nooks and crannies where we hadn’t seen them as we drove in. They were a rough crowd, and just about all of them looked high on drugs. The alley was closer than we should have been to the very dangerous Sixth Street, where we had agreed not to go. The alley had seemed okay. It wasn’t, and we found ourselves instantly surrounded and outnumbered by a large group of very angry-looking young men, who began jostling each other and us, afraid that we wouldn’t have enough for all of them. We were hugely outnumbered, three or four to one. They were pushing, shoving, and shouting, and in our nervousness, one of us accidentally locked the van with the keys in it, so we were stuck on the street with the men, locked out of our van. I took one look at the situation, and religious or not, I said the only thing one could in thatsituation, which didn’t look good to any of us. I