• A Homeless Guy Finds a Refuge on the Internet
• The Homeless Guy
• Gracious Extra Miles & Beyond, by Morgan W. Brown
• What I See From Down Here, Marc D. Goldfinger
• Homeless is Homeless, Joel Alfassa
• Seeking Shelter, Bruce Whealton Jr. MSW
• Macy DeLong Helps the Homeless Get Back on Their Feet
• A Walk Across America
• Plodding Gauche Type Epileptic, by grom
• North American Homeless News Network
• Art by Earl Janack
• Art by Dominick Parlapiano
• Help Find Missing Children
• Publication Information
• StreetViews Index
• Wyoming Winds Index
• WCH Home Page

StreetViews is published by the Wyoming Coalition for the Homeless,
907 Logan Avenue,
Cheyenne, WY 82001-5247.
phone: 307-634-8499; fax: 307-634-9089.
email: wch@vcn.com

Views expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of the Wyoming Coalition for the Homeless, its staff or board.

Copyrights revert back to the author upon publication.

WCH is a 501(c)(3) all volunteer non-profit agency depending upon the community for funding.

© 2002.

Articles from other papers are published with permission of the paper listed with the article.

**In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.**

        Pathos technoethos exhortation is what fundamentally
comes to cognizance as I convey the sentiment of the moment -- medical faux pas. This gives me the element of a refulgent sysob spurting out elegies.

        ...Difffffffferant ssssttrokesss fooorrrr difffffffferant fooollllkkss.

        Lacuna.

        Lacuna.

        Lacuna.

        Now for the conclusion is a picture (mental image)
of the eye of Horus, eyebrow and all, perpetually starring
you down or up which ever the case may be.

In Bend, Oregon fire retardant was dumped
into a river killing four miles of fish. What was
the name of the river, the name of the river
is lost to me; they have so many names.

One year ago planes flew into the towers;
the planes were full of living people, the towers
were full of living people, sometimes when
everything goes crazy we see through the

web we have constructed, it is clear to us
someone is lying. When humans jump
from the top of towers to flee the flames
we are all falling into the streets. We all

know who the heroes are, some of them
will still be breathing when it is over, if
they are not fortunate. When the skull smiles
at us from the golf course and says, "We must

be ready to sacrifice everything, he does not
mean "we", it is thee he speaks of. When the
   :    :    : air
is so heavy it hurts my lungs and the heat
sits woolen wet mat on us, the whales drive

themselves up onto the beach insane with
the noise of engines thrumming the ocean
we have set creatures before us who mock
life and raise them up to rule while we

sleep crazy in the streets sharing garbage
with one another until we creep
about stealing our brother's shoes, let
a child bed down for the skin price, gather

in church song of kin lost on the eleventh
day of the ninth month, 2001, this is no
space odyssey, we have come full circle
to face the enemy. The sky is empty

like a mirror, clear as the eye can see.

For years, I have been watching the press casually use the word 'homeless' when referring to people burned out of a house or apartment and people who have been displaced by natural disaster. I would like to know what the difference is between a person without a place to live because of a fire, tornado, or hurricane and a person who is homeless because of financial instability of one kind or another. Both types of people are homeless. Both types of people are traumatized because they have no place to call home anymore. The press, as well as the federal and state governments, seem to draw a line. Even insurance companies have a problem - homelessness is not covered. It's sort of like flood insurance - the insurance companies were not ready for the rash of recent flooding, and they were not ready to accept the problem.

Could there possibly be room for homeless insurance? A lot of people might have been prevented their last tailspin if they had something like that when they still had money and a job. Now take that opinion and chew on it for awhile! If a person is barely making it, but has a job that has insurance with the option of paying a reasonable amount from his paycheck to guarantee that, if fired, and when unemployment runs out, he would receive insurance benefits until he found another job that provided benefits. This could very well prevent a person from becoming homeless. Since most employers have to pay into unemployment pools, this could also be a benefit and a savings to all taxpayers. When a person becomes unemployed, they should be given a discount by the IRS until they become employed again.

The difference between an emergency homeless shelter and a shelter for people caught in a disaster is this: tax money will be spent immediately for a victim of a disaster and only trickle down money will be spent on homeless shelters. We have to find a way to equalize the trauma of both. Both types of victims are needing the same types of services - food, shelter, and resources to help them get back to a normal life.

Why are these two groups treated differently at intake into the systems?

If an employee of a company becomes unemployed they usually have the option to continue their insurance. The cost falls upon the individual and may be difficult for them to afford. If a person had been paying, while employed, into an insurance policy that would guarantee they would have an income until they found another job it would solve a lot of problems.

I am an opponent of dependence on the government for a handout. I believe that insurance companies could deal with this if they got paid while the person was employed.

Obviously, if a person makes sixty or seventy thousand or more a year and they become homeless when laid off or canned they have a bigger problem than unemployment. If a person only makes fifteen or twenty thousand than that person could have a big problem very soon after being released from a job. I think the disparity in the shelters reflects this problem and the thinking of the status quo needs to be adjusted to fit the times - it's that simple. I think a homeless shelter is just as much an emergency shelter as any other type of shelter with the exception of battered shelters and abandoned children's shelters. It usually boils down to a problem regardless of type in a problem with money.

Ponder these thoughts if you will and I will look forward to your response in the future. A shelter is a shelter is a shelter no matter how it's put together. See you on the streets……..

On an icy winter night in 1988, Macy DeLong huddled on the stoop of a Cambridge, Mass., bookstore, hoping to find a warm place to sleep. It was a few blocks -- but worlds away -- from the Harvard University lab where she once worked as a biology researcher. Suffering from bipolar disorder, she had willfully deserted her comfortable home in Lexington, Mass., for life on the street. "I reached an emotional point which was not rational," says DeLong, now 53. "I couldn't live with myself. I walked out of my house. I left my husband.

Although she recovered enough to return home in six months -- her condition gradually improved, she says, after she stopped taking prescribed antidepressants -- DeLong's perspective was altered forever. "I had wandered through what the state had to offer a homeless person, from dangerous shelters to indifferent doctors,"she recalls. "No one offered me an opportunity to work, to sign a lease, to get back my life."

While still on the street, she launched Solutions at Work, now a nonprofit agency that provides the homeless with transitional employment, low-cost moving services, free cars, furniture and clothing.

DeLong estimates that Solutions has assisted nearly 65,000 people since its inception in 1989. "Macy takes everyone as an individual and doesn't categorize them," says Colleen Thomas, 38, a once-homeless mother of three and now one of the agency's program managers. "Just having her believe in me has given me back my pride and self-esteem."

For DeLong, those things were in plentiful supply until she reached her late 30s. The eldest of three daughters of William, 79, a retired finance executive for General Motors, and Maggie, 78, a homemaker, the Illinois-born DeLong was a bright student who majored in biology at Colby College in Maine. Wed to an engineer just after her 1971 graduation, she was soon hired as a technician by Harvard's developmental biology lab. Her career flourished, and the couple hoped to start a family. Yet in 1985 DeLong's seemingly idyllic life began to unravel. Unable to have a child -- she suffered through an ectopic pregnancy and two failed rounds of in vitro fertilization -- she grew despondent. After spending three months in the hospital for a suicide attempt, she was released with a prescription for antidepressants and soon embarked on a carnival ride of manic highs and crushing lows. "I went from overseeing a lab of 25 people to not being able to tell someone how to wash a test tube without having a panic attack," recalls DeLong, who left Harvard in 1988. "I became completely dysfunctional."

Refusing help from her husband and family ("All they knew is that I was behaving totally irresponsibly -- no one knew why," she says), DeLong abandoned suburbia, sleeping on subway gratings or in her car and scrounging meals at community centers. Over the next six months she faced a daily round of indignities and frustrations. "I told shelter workers I was a biologist at Harvard and they thought I was delusional," she says. "The way they treated me was so demeaning."

DeLong grew determined to improve the lot of her fellow street-dwellers. She began by distributing blankets and referring people to shelters, then joined the board of the fledgling Massachusetts Housing and Shelter Alliance, a policy and advocacy organization. When she learned that a city-run furniture bank for the poor was about to close, she offered to take it over. Cashing out $20,000 from her Harvard retirement fund -- she would later resign -- she quickly expanded the operation to include a clothing exchange, a moving service and other forms of aid.

Soon afterward, in June 1989, she returned to Lexington. Her marriage ended three months later. "It was a relief," she says. "So many things had happened; I had changed so much. While it was hard, it needed to be." For the next nine years, DeLong pursued her mission despite continuing mood swings, until she was diagnosed as bipolar in 1998 and given proper medication. Meanwhile, Solutions thrived. Today it has an annual budget of $500,000 (funded by government grants and private donations) and a paid staff of seven. DeLong herself earns $37,000 a year and has opened her eight-room home as a temporary haven for homeless friends.

Now stable through therapy and meditation -- with her doctors' approval, DeLong went off medication in June -- she is grateful for her second shot at a legacy. "I can't change the world by having children and leaving my genes behind," she says. "With Solutions, I have a chance to do something permanent."