Preview: Homeless People Are Just Like Us, With A Little Twist
Dr. Jim O’Connell is featured in Tracy Kidder’s new bestseller “ROUGH SLEEPERS”
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They lived in neighborhoods of abandoned aspirations, of vacant lots, sagging chain-link fences, dark-faced bars. His patients were not the well-to-do.
Instead of mansions, most had territories where they hung around and panhandled during the day — “stemming” was the street term. For sleeping, they had favorite doorways, park benches, alleys, understories of bridges, ATM parlors. “Rough sleepers” were like homebodies without homes. It is the direst form of poverty, and consigns people to appalling miseries and kills them well before their time.
Speaking about the sudden fame that Tracy Kidder’s new bestseller “Rough Sleepers” has thrust upon him, Dr. Jim O’Connell side-steps the spotlight to muse only that “More people realize that many homeless people are just like us, with a little twist.”
Readers may indeed carry with them through this book the tinge of horror that says: but for a different spin in the wheel of life, that could be me on those streets.
The wheel of chance in fact affected the career of the doctor himself: When he agreed after finishing his residency at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1985 to serve a one-year stint at the new Boston Health Care For The Homeless Program, Dr. Jim O’Connell had no idea that his life had just changed forever. Forty years later, he was still involved in the lives of the Rough Sleepers – those who have no shelter and live outdoors.
And his program now consists of 600 medical and behavioral staff who serves more than 10,000 homeless patients a year.
He started by working long nights from a mobile care van that makes nighttime clinical rounds in Boston, offering medical care, food, clothing, blankets, and perhaps most importantly, kindness.
He listened to people who sleep on pavement, rather than looking down on them — or just looking away. As their stories unfold, they turned out to be leading lives of really quiet courage and heroism, against unbelievable odds.
Many refused to go to clinics. One man who suffered from schizophrenia said “Look, Doc, if I’m at Pine Street [clinic], I can’t tell which voices are mine and which are somebody else’s. When I stay out here, I know the voices are mine, and I can control them a little.”
Jim arranged to have their medications delivered to a friendly bartender, who made the homeless men take their pills before he’d pour their beer. Through some other patients, Jim also got acquainted with a barber in Southie who kept a little coffeehouse in his shop that three other TB patients frequented. The barber, like the bartender, insisted the men take their medicine before he served their beverage.
At one of the bus terminals a woman in her eighties never left; she bought a bus ticket every month, and because she was a ticketed passenger, the station security let her stay there in all seasons. She suffered from heart disease but would not agree to go to a hospital. For several years the Street Team had treated her heart in the station, the bent-backed, elderly woman seated on one of the old wooden benches as one of the team knelt in front of her, dispensing out of a knapsack.
Some vignettes are hard to forget: an elderly lady names Caroline was ejected from her public space. She left quietly, in her Santa Claus hat, with her grocery cart of possessions and her cardboard sign that spoke of a family home that she dreamed was still hers: I need a ride to my house. It’s only eight miles away from here.
38 million Americans live in what the federal government defines as poverty…
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