Going into Cape Town’s festive season, it’s always good to remember that at heart, this is a time of giving, compassion and care. As Mahatma Ghandi famously wrote: “A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.”
So, today, I am writing about a very serious matter: the people who share the streets with us, but who, unlike most of us, call the street home due to circumstances well beyond their control. Most of us do not even make eye contact with them, thus they remain unseen.
Just how invisible these people are was recently captured by advertising agency MC Saatchi, which collaborated with The Haven Night Shelter to follow a homeless man asking for money on Cape Town streets for four hours. The edited video is devastating in showing just how dehumanising an existence it is, with most of us Capetonians completely ignoring him, not even acknowledging his presence.
I can assure you that for the person living on the street to have come to that, things must have gotten worse than many of us can even imagine. Thinking that being homeless and living on the streets is an easy choice or because of laziness is the height of reckless insensitivity.
The point is that there are always stories of extreme human duress and survival for all of our communities’ weakest members, and we should not judge another person’s current predicament based on our own privileges. What’s more, homelessness is a societal condition found across developed and emerging countries.
San Francisco, for instance, has one of the world’s biggest, most chronic problems with homelessness and the issue has been a municipal priority for over 30 years. In the past 10 years or so, they’ve finally started to see a turnaround, thanks to the progressive legislation of mayor Gavin Newsom and continued pioneering work of Bevan Dufty. Dufty is director of the city’s Housing Opportunity, Partnerships and Engagement, or better known as HOPE – in fact, the first thing he did was change the name of the department to something uplifting.
When I visited San Francisco, I was lucky to meet Dufty and be introduced me to some of his projects and ideas first-hand. A lot of them were experimental and would raise controversy, but the results are impressive. For instance, aggressive beggars were given guide dogs that would otherwise have been put down, and by caring for an animal it was found their aggression was tempered and self-worth improved. Dufty has also long promoted wet houses – or pre-treatment shelter – where addicts are served lower quantities of high-quality alcohol until they can make their own decision about stopping.
One of the things that particularly stood out to me at the time was that we can’t run away from providing shelter as the primary strategic intervention – whether emergency, temporary, mid-term or permanent shelter. Because to be able to talk to someone, you need to make sure they are housed properly and feel safe. You can’t talk to them under the bridge and expect them to make clear decisions about their life such as sobering up.
When I compare this to Cape Town, I wonder if there is a gap that we are missing. For instance, if you’re a Grade 1 teacher, you assume the children you are getting in class have been prepared to start the education process – they’ve been taught how to tie their shoes, what school is about, why they need to go to school. Maybe they can read a little bit, they can count to five. These are basic, valid assumptions based on the fact that someone else has done the preparatory work.
With homeless people, in Cape Town, too, we don’t do the preparatory work; we just assume that everyone wants to get off the street, everyone wants to have a shelter, everyone needs to make a decision about their lives, and everyone needs to be a functioning member of society. These assumptions can be inaccurate; there are people who have been on the street for 20 years and, for them, the street is home.
We need to listen attentively, empathise and understand the situation before deploying resources. The reality is, however, that the existing resources, both public and private, are limited and often too stretched to cope. There is an urgent need for more shelter as well as assessment centres, social workers and other therapies.
A vast majority of our homeless are also severely sick with Aids, TB or a mental ailment, and this does not even start to tackle the thorny subject of addiction. Seldom do they manage to get access to basic help from the day hospitals, and even if they did, would not be able to take medication without regular meals.
And so we find these vulnerable and destitute people on our street, in the absence of an adequate social programme to deal with the problem. Often, law enforcement becomes the fall-back position. This can only result in the problem being moved, not solved, and often the violent disruption only makes the homeless person that much less trusting of any help.
What any city needs is a consolidated strategic collaboration between NGOs, civic society, the public sector and the private sector. This is probably Dufty’s real genius: how, through his HOPE department, he has facilitated a co-ordinated strategic approach across the metro, the state, law enforcement, social development, health services, child protection services and the court.
Of course this is not a reality that we will witness before Christmas, so I urge everyone to remember this festive season that homeless people are members of our communities, and deserve the same amount of respect, empathy and generosity as everyone else.
Creative interventions can often make it easier for citizens to engage. One of my favourite examples is an idea borne out of Cape Town and has now gone global – The Street Store. A pop-up clothes shop that collects wares from the community and gives it to the homeless, the concept is open source and anyone can host one, although it is suggested that you collaborate with a local homeless organisation.
Around the world there are also incredible stories every day. In New York, there is a hair stylist who gives homeless people haircuts on his day off and in Brisbane two friends have turned a van into a mobile laundry. In Barcelona, designers are working with the homeless to turn their handwriting into fonts that can earn royalties, and in London and a number of other European cities, social enterprises are offering unique walking tours led by homeless, previously homeless or vulnerably housed tour guides. In San Francisco, a bus has been retrofitted to have showers for the homeless, using crowdfunding.
Giving money is also an option and it is a personal decision as to whether you like to give directly or through an organisation. There are a number of shelters in Cape Town that you can support directly or through the City of Cape Town and the Central City Improvement District’s Give Responsibly campaign. There is also the Safety Lab’s Giva, a new website that allows you to give directly to individuals who are in shelters and have a specific need, for example, a bicycle, a sewing machine, a computer or a bus ticket that will help them kick-start their lives again.
If you have a business in the CBD, you can support the Trashback recycling enterprise by arranging for your recyclables to be collected by one of their participants. Trashback grew out of a community project that incentivised the collection of recyclable waste, offering a very non-committal way for homeless people to start earning money or other rewards such as clothes and food. As they earn more and deliver more regularly, they are given more responsibility, such as servicing businesses in the CBD (more details at www.capetownpartnership.co.za/wecare).
Perhaps these feel like small interventions, but we are well past the age of silver-bullet solutions. There is no one cure-all for the worldwide problem of homelessness, but every little way in which we can acknowledge them as human beings, and recognising our shared humanity helps.