When I worked in New York many years ago, I saw the sad truth of homelessness. At the subway stop at 33rd, in the dark recesses of it, one could make out the presence of homeless people not through their shadows but through their stink. Smell of dried urine and of un-washed bodies and clothing.
There was a New York City woman who put a name to homelessness, who became its poster girl. Her name was Billie Boggs. She was forcibly taken into a homeless shelter and out of a ritzy Manhattan neighbourhood because she was considered a "loony."
In Toronto, one such homeless person was Paul Croutch. He was beaten to death in 2005 by three Army reservists one night as he laid in a cold bench in a Toronto Park. Mr. Croutch had been the co-publisher of a weekly paper in northern B.C. in the late 1980s. Nobody claimed his body, not his daughter nor his ex-wife.
In Manila, homeless folks sleep under bridges and highway overpass, in sidewalks and even cemetery tombs. Recently, an 11-month old baby girl was abducted, raped and killed while she slept with her parents in a make-shift tent outside a bank building in one of Manila's congested cities.
Homelessness. No one notices it, until it hits the headlines.
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