“Homeless: having no security of tenure.” I am homeless. I never in my wildest dreams thought I would be in that position. Yet here I am . . . homeless.
Oh yes, I do own a home, and yes, I do hope and expect to be returning to it soon, but for the moment, right now, I am homeless. For me the reason is because of the West Kelowna fires. Did I plan on becoming homeless? Did I wake up last Saturday morning and say to myself, “Tonight I think I will become homeless”? Of course not. How silly you say. And yet now, more than ever, I can empathize with the people we serve here at Kelowna’s Gospel Mission. We assume (and you know what happens when we assume…), that the individuals that we see on Leon Avenue are there either by choice or because of some poor decisions they have made, and therefore it is their own fault that they are in that predicament.
I guess you could say that I deserve to be homeless, since I was stupid enough to purchase a home so close to a wooded area. Ah but alas, I haven’t heard that opinion from anyone. In fact the opposite has occurred. Many of my friends and workmates have called or emailed with “are you ok?”, “do you need a place to stay?”, “is there anything we can do”? You get the picture. You see, I am one of the fortunate ones. I have a social safety net that caught me when I was in crisis. But many are not that fortunate.
And that is why we do what we do. It is not our place to pass judgment on those who have “no security of tenure.” We have the duty; yes the privilege, as our entire community is doing during this fire, to serve the homeless 365 days a year. There ARE many reasons why people are without homes. But rather than condemning them to that fate because somehow they deserve it, we must strive for solutions that will change their situation, and bring homelessness to an end.
Hanging with my papa (wearing my dirty cargo shorts….)