The intersection of Telegraph Avenue and Bancroft Way on the edge of the campus at the University of California at Berkeley.

At the corner of Telegraph and Bancroft sits a guy, cross-legged, as if he is meditating the countless pedestrians that rush by on their way to the University of California at Berkeley campus. The man has a dirty face, a scraggly beard, and tattered clothes. He is homeless; he needs a good bath, and a nice warm meal.

Yet none of the passersby seems to notice him, even though his life is just as sacred as that of the success-bound college students with their Cal–emblazoned gear and khaki shorts. If you listen carefully, you can hear this man utter a greeting and a “God bless you,” at times sounding more heartfelt than the President of the United States during the state of the union address. There may be wars being waged on other political and social fronts throughout the world, but here, there is none against homelessness and poverty.

When I came to this country eleven years ago, I was shocked by the sight of homeless people on the streets. In the Netherlands, few people are homeless, and those you do see lingering in the streets at night are probably homeless by choice. So coming here, I couldn’t help staring at homeless people out of fascination. Why were they living under bridges and in the corners of monumental buildings?

Hanging out outside Crepes-A-Go-Go in Berkeley.

“Look away, don’t make eye contact”

That was the usual advice, since the last thing you want to do is provoke a homeless man. He could be mentally ill, after all. “Don’t mess with homeless people,” was the mantra of indifference rooted in the perception that homeless people were probably there for a reason. So I looked away, and lived out the American dream in a quaint suburban house with an American husband and two blond cherubs, my Dutch-American children. On our trips into the city, I no longer stared at the toothless faces and the grimy hands that extended towards us from below on the sidewalks. I even told my children to look away and ignore the problem.

Homelessness was as far removed from our quiet middle-class lives as the moon is from the sun.

But then, on a glorious suburban day, our polished world caved in during the dot-com crash. Within months, we saw our reserves dwindle. Paying the bills became increasingly difficult. And after two and a half years of unemployment, scraping by on menial jobs and macaroni and cheese, I realized how easy it was to lose everything. Homelessness was not exclusive to the losers, the outcasts and the mentally ill. Homelessness could happen to boring suburbanites who hit a patch of bad karma.

People like us.

Seeing again

We still had a roof over our heads, but the future of our house and our health insurance were the demons that kept us awake. We anticipated the abyss, an abyss I had become all too familiar while helping out in a soup kitchen.

At first I was too busy helping out with the cooking and serving, but as these tasks became more routine, I had time to observe the haunted souls who dropped in. For the first time in years, I did not look away, but stared and registered.

There was a single mother with three children who should have been in school at that hour. They were all coughing, and although they were probably living out of their car or sleeping in a flee-infested shelter, the mother insisted on manners – the manners of a society that had completely abandoned them.

“Johnny, put your hand in front of your mouth when you cough.”

“Ellen, darling, use your napkin.”

“Paul, say ‘thank you.’ Now listen, let’s pray and thank the Lord for this
food.”

The children put their dirty hands over the white paper plates, closed their eyes and surrendered to the tranquil moment ordered by their mother. My eyes wandered off to a boy my son’s age who walked in alone. I filled his plate and asked whether his parents would be coming. He looked at me, both suspicious and afraid. The staff had instructed us not to ask questions.

The boy was silent, so I did not press him for an answer as to why he was there. I was curious though, and bringing a second dessert, I sat down with him and asked him about school.

“Don’t go to school much anymore,” he grumbled. “Both my parents work, but there is little food in the house, and my mother thinks it more important to come here. This is my first hot meal this week.”

At the end of the meal, I looked up as a woman walked in, impeccably dressed in a pearl necklace and high heels – the kind of woman one might expect to see in a bistro downtown. I shot a glance at our staff leader for the day, a Vietnam vet whose stories could fill the pages of a novel, although he never talks about the war. When the woman walked away to find a private corner – some of which carry a urine scent so heavy it made me gag, the staffer told me, “You know, we’re not here to judge. We’re here to feed. God knows where she’s at.”

“Maybe she lost her job and has to pay her parents’ nursing home bills, while also having to provide for her own family,” he added. “Judging is easy, feeding is a whole lot harder.”

As he said this, a man scraped the food off his plate into a plastic bag under his table and returned to fill up again. That was against the rules, but I didn’t report it, for that would have been a form of judging too. If the bag of food would tide him over for the rest of the day, I didn’t care about rules.

I struck up a conversation with a couple holding a newborn baby in their arms. They lived on the streets, but were remarkably upbeat for people who were raising a baby in the elements.

“We’re okay, really,” said the 19-year-old woman, whose eyes were bloodshot.

“The worst part is that people in the streets don’t look at us anymore,” she said. “They look away as if we’re dirty, or worse, as if we’re air. The baby attracts more attention, but as soon as we catch someone’s eye, they look away again. We might as well be dead.”

An elderly woman thanked us for the meal as she walked out. Her mouth had holes where her teeth should be. Her hair is a tangled web. And her T-shirt proclaims: “Proud to be an American.”

“Interesting T-shirt you’ve got there,” I said, unable to resist in this basement of America’s downtrodden. She caught my irony and said, “Honey, I never bought it. Got it second-hand. Don’t care much for the text, but I like the colors. God bless you.”

A month later my husband landed a job with a software company. We have slowly been able to crawl away from the snake pit of potential homelessness and hunger.

Now, I make eye contact with every homeless person I see.

And if I happen to be carrying food, I give some to the man who’s sitting at the intersection of Bancroft and Telegraph.

He is always grateful and has the grace to acknowledge me. He does so even when I don’t give him anything at all.

He’s just homeless, and still human.

In The Fray Contributor