The difference between a flower girl and a lady

I keep coming back to an interview that Ben DeSoto and I did with Dr. David Buck, who is the founder and executive director over at the excellent Healthcare for the Homeless of Houston. Although David’s experience and accomplishments are almost ridiculous (he volunteered with Mother Teresa, for goodness sakes!), I really like his sort of nerdy eager way of talking about what he’s passionate about, which is how to empower people on the streets enough so that they don’t end up in one of his medical clinics.

To begin with, Dr. Buck strongly feels that one of Houston’s biggest problems is that most of the homeless organizations here do not have anyone on their boards who has actual experience of being on the streets.

“You [need] people who are formally or are currently homeless that would serve on the board. So that someone’s not seen as ‘oh he's the problem’ — but they're a part of the solution. So they start to identify themselves as part of the solution. And that's

“Bad luck seemed to have turned him half-witted in a single day.”

When George Orwell was a young man and still a comparatively unknown writer, he spent several years in destitution in Paris and then outright homelessness in London, tramping about from flophouse to flophouse. The first book he published was about this experience, Down & Out in Paris and London, which came out in 1933. It is one of my benchmark books and I have read it many times and pressed it on many friends. Here is some of what Orwell had to say about what he saw and what he experienced:

“It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty--it is the thing you have feared all your 
life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely

Under the Pierce Elevated

We set out January 16 to talk to some people on the street.

It was a hard day for me, because it was the birthday of my mother, who had passed away unexpectedly 18 months earlier. Her presence and her loss still shadow me hourly. It was rocky for my photography partner as well, as he tries to persevere and raise a young family despite his changeable work situation. He’d just had a setback, so was anxious and wanting to administer the medicine of busy hands and good work. I was crying and shaken, but pulled myself together and bundled in the car, game to face whatever fate and the cold wind placed in front of our lens and our pen.

It was a cold day, and still damp from the rains that had poured on the city all night long. With Ben driving, we circled over to where the freeways crisscross on the south and east of downtown. Ben is drawn to this area, for the Pierce-Elevated freeway had served as a 24/7 refuge for the city’s homeless throughout the 70s and 80s, sometimes 200 people at a time. There used to be a public park under the freeway. What a quintessentially Houston thing, a park under a freeway.

"The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street," by Giorgio de Chirico