Homeless who «WANT» to be Homeless
In his book «Ghost Soldiers», Hampton Sides tells the story of a dramatic mission during World War II. On January 28th, 1945, 121 hand-selected Army Rangers slipped behind enemy lines in the Philippines in an attempt to rescue 513 American and British POW’s who had spent three years in a hellish prison camp near the city of Cabanatuan.
Hampton Sides describes the first effects of liberation as chaos and fear.
The prisoners were mentally too brittle to understand what was taking place. Some even scurried away from their liberators. One particular prisoner, Bert Bank, refused to budge, even when a Ranger walked up to him and tugged his arm. «C’mon, we’re here to save you», he said . «Run for the gate».
Bank still would not move. The Ranger looked into his eyes and saw they were vacant, registering nothing. «What’s wrong with you»? he asked. «Don’t you want to be free?» Finally, a smile formed on Bank’s lips as the meaning of the words became clear, and he reached up to the outstretched hand of the Ranger.
The Rangers searched all the barracks for additional prisoners, then shouted, «The Americans are leaving. Is there anybody here?» Hearing no answer they left. The freed prisoners marched 25 miles and boarded their ship home. With each step, their stunned disbelief gave away to soaring optimism.
One of the most unjust, ignorant, and offensive judgements and excuses to do nothing, which I have ever heard in dealing with the poor and the homeless is the despisement and the accusation that they are homeless because they «want» to be.
A short time ago the Portuguese actor, Pedro Carvalho, spent one night on the streets disguised as a homeless man with homeless people on a very cold night in the city of Lisbon. He realized that in some cases this seemed to be true: it seemed that some homeless people don’t want to leave the streets. They don’t want to leave that misery.
That observation left him completely lost. Who «wants» that kind of life? Who «wants» to check two, three, five or even more garbage cans before finding a piece of hamburger, or a piece of chicken mixed with other garbage and mixed with cockroaches, ants and dead flies in order to be able to satisfy their hunger? Then he decided to call one of his friends who is a psychologist to see if she would be able to find something that would make sense. And yes. Her answer made sense. After living like that for a while they become mentally sick. They get this pathology that doesn’t make any sense to us and neither to them. Schizophrenia is probably the most common.
One homeless man told me that he was not able to sleep more than half an hour at a time. It’s the noise, it’s the inhuman conditions, it’s the bathroom that they don’t know where to find, it’s a police officer that kicks him out just saying: «You cannot sleep here». But one of them told me «they don’t tell us where to go». They start their journey again. A very well-known psychiatrist from Funchal told me one day that «their brains don’t work like ours».
What about the institutions? I have to confess that I have tried to work with a famous institution in Funchal that is supposed to shelter the homeless, but I have never had a good experience.
One of the homeless told me that it looks more like a concentration camp and «the way they treat us is like being in a concentration camp».
My belief is that the homeless, the poor like everybody else, should be treated like a priest treats a consecrated host.
After reading the story of the soldiers that were freed from the Philippines, maybe it will be easier to understand the minds of people like the homeless, and prisoners who have been brutalized by their miserable life conditions which have left them miserably sick.
None of the American soldiers, including Bert Bank, “chose and wanted” to stay in that hellish prison.
None of the homeless around the world “chose and want” to be homeless.
«When we start by judging, we have no time to love».
(Saint Mother Teresa)
Love and Peace,
Fr. Bernardino Andrade