Far From Home: Stories of the homeless and the search for the heart's true home

By Clare Nonhebel

Mention the word 'homeless' and most people see an old tramp in a doorway but, young and old, many people whose lives seem secure are forced to leave home, for any number of reasons. Others, while having a physical home, experience 'homelessness of the heart,' ill at ease in their own minds or bodies, families or society.
These moving interviews with a diverse selection of honest, intelligent people who have found themseves 'far from home' prompt the reader to think about what home means - not just a roof over our heads but a sense of belonging and identity.
The old ex-serviceman living on the streets; the qualified professional queueing in a soup kitchen; the woman who can't feel at home in her own body; the one who longs to live with 'only my own thoughts in my head;' the family man; the au pair; the divorced and deported, the squatter and the debtor, the redundant and the refugee ... All are reminders that security can't be taken for granted and that home means different things to different people.
All these stories highlight the flaws and successes of solutions to homelessness, and heightens awareness of the rootlessness that is part of the human condition.
Sooner or later, we all need to find a way home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Clare Nonhebel
• Release date: Sep 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311916747

Clare Nonhebel

Giving it all away! I love the idea of publishing online and being able to make my books - 7 novels and 6 non-fiction works so far - available free to anyone who would like to read them. So several are already FREE on Smashwords and others will follow. Feel free to read and enjoy!The most recent novel is 'The Healing Place.' I'm fascinated by all the ways people go searching for peace and fulfilment and by the claims made by an ever-increasing variety of practices, therapies and treatments. But how do we discern the genuine from the fake, the harmless but useless and the downright dangerous? In this novel, Franz, the director of The Healing Place sets out to offer people choice; he tries to be accepting of everything - then starts testing everything, in the context of his own life.The story has light-hearted aspects but touches on some deep questions. I hope you'll like it!I'm also the publisher and co-author of 'Survivor on Death Row' by Romell Broom, now published as an ebook at a minimal price.This was a new venture for me. I had volunteered to write to Death Row prisoners in 2009 and the first one turned out to be Romell, who had just survived a two-hour execution attempt in Ohio's death chamber. The authorities intended to repeat the execution the following week.For me, it was an eye-opener into the nature of the death penalty system. I read Romell's letters and visited him and others. I read accounts by lawyers such as Clive Stafford Smith OBE and by 'Dead Man Walking' nun Sister Helen Prejean, about the failures and flaws that can lead to innocent people being executed. I heard about executioners and prison governors and Ohio's former Attorney General, who now oppose the death penalty and testify that it harms everybody and benefits nobody, including victims' families.More than 155 US death penalty inmates have been exonerated and Romell too has always claimed he is innocent. But how do you prove it - when you live on Death Row?It began to seem more than coincidence that Romell's assigned penfriend happened to be an author. Could his dream of telling his story to the world, and somebody listening, be a possibility?His book 'Survivor on Death Row' is now on Smashwords, and YouTube links are on his author page.Whether you have fixed views on the death penalty, or whether you have never given it much thought, I encourage you to read 'Survivor on Death Row' and hear about it from someone who knows.

Book preview

Far From Home

Stories of the Homeless

and the

Search for the

Heart's True Home

by

Clare Nonhebel

Smashwords edition

Copyright 2014 Clare Nonhebel

INTRODUCTION - Home is where?

The word ‘home’ must be one of the most emotive in any language.

Everybody has an idea of home – an idea that has little to do with four walls and a roof, and more to do with a feeling of being at one with the world and having a place in it.

For some, the word conjures up an image of cosiness and security; for others, a nightmare.

For emigrants and refugees, it is a bundle of remnants of memories clutched desperately to their minds as they travel further and further away from the reality of home, which may never be seen again – or which may no longer exist.

For children who grew up unwanted, home is a place to leave as soon as possible – perhaps thrown out by a parent or step-parent or a mother’s new boyfriend.

For the homeless, what is home?

It’s a question that sometimes goes unasked, in the effort to rescue the homeless from the streets and provide them with homes.

Despite all the housing projects for the homeless, the number of people sleeping on the streets of our cities renews itself annually and shows no sign of diminishing. Not only do newly homeless people join the ranks of those sleeping in shop doorways and derelict buildings, but many of those who have actually been housed return to the streets again.

The fact is often quoted to prove the theory that ‘Some people just don’t want to be helped.’ But it may be that being housed is not the same as having a home, and that the wrong problem has been solved, perhaps because the wrong questions were asked – or no questions were asked.

If the question ‘What is home?’ were asked of a thousand people who had left or lost their homes, there would be a thousand different replies. For each individual person, something different is needed.

And how about us, the privileged ones who read books and have homes? Are we fully at home in the world, because we’re housed? Or are we far from home as well and on a perpetual journey in search of it?

In a sense, we’re only one step away from those spending their days in the same small area of the same city, aimlessly wandering or begging or sleeping the empty hours away. We can feel that we’re going nowhere, endlessly repeating the same routines, but each of our lives has a purpose that we may not be fully aware of – and all of us are on a journey home.

Whether we have only a doorway to sleep in, or whether we have homes and jobs and families and cars and mortgages, all of us came into the world alone and will leave it alone, and our stay here is temporary.

It sounds depressing and pointless. And if we’re all homeless, how can we begin to solve the homeless problem? Have we failed to identify what the problem is?

That the homeless need a home more than anything else is beyond doubt. But what that ‘home’ is for them, only the homeless can tell us.

This book is an attempt to listen.

I am not qualified to write a professional thesis on homelessness or carry out policies designed to alleviate the problems. But the practical problems are already well documented, and most of us are not in a position to solve them anyway. Are we in a position to do anything, then, apart from donate what money we can afford to charities?

I believe we are.

I believe there is a value in approaching the subject in a different way – not from a perspective of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ of how those who have homes can help those who have none – but in terms of the homelessness of everyone. Do the physically homeless – who understand their condition only too well – know something that the rest of us need to learn?

I had no intention of writing a book when I started listening and talking to homeless people, but over the course of a couple of years I found that many of the things I heard from them stayed in my mind and wouldn’t go away.

No two voices were the same, no two stories were alike, and no two people had reacted the same way, even to similar circumstances. For that reason, when I started to write, I decided to transcribe each person’s actual words without too much tidying, so that in hearing their life expressed in their own voice you may get a feeling of what it’s like to be that person.

Much of what they talk about is alien to our own experience – an eye-opener to a different way of life – but if we manage to stay with them as they describe their journey through homelessness and beyond it, we may find glimpses of their vision of life in our own lives.

Staying with them as we read their stories can be uncomfortable, not just because some of their experiences have been painful but because, by the last page of the book, we may no longer be able to see homelessness as something that could never happen to us, or believe that it must in some way be the person’s own fault. And those are beliefs we might have preferred to keep.

By the end of the book, it may also seem less valid to draw a line between the deserving and the undeserving poor, or between those who keep themselves clean and those who let themselves sink into dirt or degrading lifestyles, or between those who survive without turning to drugs or drink and those who don’t.

But the greatest discomfort of all may be to realize that those of us who have never been without a home in this life, and perhaps never will be, can recognize in these accounts some echo of our common human yearning for home.

It may seem, as we read, that – along with Grant and John and Miriam and Dennis and Tom and Eva and the others – we too may be far from home. We may even be far behind them on the road to home, for they have faced their homelessness and survived it, whereas we have not been so forcibly confronted with our rootlessness and aloneness.

It may take courage, then, to read this book.

But it will inspire courage as well.

In all these accounts you will find your worst fears realized: that ordinary women and men, through no fault of their own – or no worse fault than the rest of us – can find themselves alone, unloved and unsupported, without either a home or a welcome from anyone in the world.

But in some of these people who are about to share with you the most desolate moments of their lives, you will find something else as well. For them, that experience of finding themselves at the end of the road – down and out, beyond help, beyond innocence, and beyond the limit of their own human resilience – was also the starting point on the road to a new kind of home.

And for some, that home turned out to fulfil their most heartfelt longings.

CHAPTER 1 - It couldn’t happen to me... could it?

A few years ago, Alan – a friend – and I began spending occasional evenings walking round central London talking to some of the homeless people on the streets.

We began tentatively. A representative from one of the homeless organizations in London told me, ‘It’s best to become a volunteer with one of the organizations, or you can get well-meaning people duplicating their efforts; everyone goes to the same places on the same nights, with their sandwiches and their soup, and other people get missed out completely.’

It made sense. But it didn’t feel quite right. We saw crowds of people in certain places, like the Strand, queuing for the charity van and being handed sandwiches or dockets to collect blankets. But we also saw individuals in doorways who didn’t queue for the vans, and went hungry.

When we asked them, they said either that they were afraid of losing their sleeping-place for the night if they left the doorway vacant, or of their blankets being stolen if they left them, or that they didn’t want to be on the receiving end of charity handouts. They were homeless, jobless and hungry – but once they accepted that first free handout from a Salvation Army van, they felt they would really have hit the bottom and there would be no return.

So we started, at first, just wandering around talking to people, asking how things were going for them and how they were. We half expected to be told to eff off – standing there in our warm coats and boots, with return tube tickets in our pockets ready for the journey home to a comfortable bed that night. But surprisingly few reacted with any hostility.

Most said. ‘You begin to feel you’re invisible, when you’ve been on the streets for a while. People walk past you – or step over you, or tread on you – and don’t even see you as a human being. Thanks for stopping to chat.’

One couple, standing on the Embankment in a biting November wind, started berating us one evening. ‘Why don’t you do something? You could if you wanted to! The politicians and the churches could all do something about the homeless!’

We weren’t politicians, and we weren’t representing a church, we said. We were two individuals without very much to offer, who felt concerned about the number of increasingly young people sleeping out on the streets while we lay in warm beds at night, listening to the rain lashing against the windows. We wanted to do something. But we didn’t know what.

‘What would you do?’ I asked them. ‘If we were you, and you were us, what’s the best thing you could do for you?’

Their anger subsided and they thought for a moment. Finally, the girl said, ‘People do come round with sandwiches and things sometimes. But they don’t have time; they give you the food and move on to the next crowd. No one has time to listen to you.’

So we carried on just walking round, stopping and saying, ‘How are things going for you?’ Some didn’t want to talk but some were desperate to. A few, after talking for half an hour or so about their lives, would say, ‘You haven’t got a cup of tea or anything, have you?’

I bought a couple of thermos flasks and made soup. It was welcomed by those who, addicted to alcohol or drugs, couldn’t manage solids. Those who could said, ‘Have you got a bit of bread to go with it?’

We made chicken sandwiches. Some of the people said, ‘I’m vegetarian. I’m tempted, because I’m hungry, but... no, I’ll try and stick to it as long as I can, thanks.’ So next time we took cheese sandwiches too.

In the summer, when the streets were dry and dusty, we took cartons of squash. Designed for children’s lunch boxes, they had cartoon characters on the front, which made a few people laugh and say, ‘I always used to watch them, as a kid!’

Seeing that the child in people was still alive, we bought chocolate bars. If people were sleeping, we left them by the head of their sleeping bag for when they awoke. It was less functional than just offering food as fuel to live. Chocolate was for fun – a treat.

Often, an older homeless man would refuse the soup and the sandwiches. ‘I’m OK; I’ll get something from the van later on.’

‘Bar of chocolate?’ we’d say, and his eyes would light up. ‘Oh – go on, then!’

Some people from evangelical churches told us we weren’t doing it right. ‘You shouldn’t just offer food. You should be evangelizing – telling them about the life they can find in Jesus Christ.’

Again, what they said made sense – we’re Christians ourselves, and Christ is the focus of our own lives, so why withhold him from anyone else? But again, it didn’t feel right.

People living on the streets become very suspicious of strangers’ motives. Whenever we stopped to chat to someone, the first question was invariably, ‘Where are you from? Which church? Which organization?’

We heard stories of people offering material benefits like food or housing, apparently with no strings attached, then following the person up by coming every day and talking to them about their particular religion, being persuasive to the point of coercion.

The tactics seemed uncomfortably close to those of the drug pushers who cruise the streets, homing in on the homeless and trying to persuade them of the benefits of the contents of their little packages of dope or crack or heroin.

We decided not to evangelize for anything. We were finding it a humbling experience, meeting people whose only home was the streets. They certainly had courage and perseverance beyond any we had ourselves. We had a strong suspicion that they might already be closer to Jesus Christ in spirit than we were, with our relatively comfortable lives.

If Jesus was in them, we concluded, he would make himself known. In the meantime, the only message we would preach would be soup and sandwiches.

After a while of this non-evangelization, we started to notice something. More and more people were talking to us about God and about their own beliefs. It happened too often to be a coincidence.

It would usually start when, in answer to their question about which organization we were from, we said. ‘We’re not. It’s just us.’ Or they’d ask, ‘Who made the food?’ and we’d say that I did, with help from my husband and with chocolate bars provided by a neighbour, out of her pension.

The next question would be, ‘Are you Christians, then?’ and when we said yes the response would often be either, ‘I believe in God!’ or, ‘I’m not a Christian myself, but I know there’s something.’ Only occasionally would it be, ‘I don’t like Christians, so piss off!’

I didn’t find it surprising when people were bitter. They had a poor opinion of Christians and a worse one of God: ‘If there is a God who cares about people, how come I’m in this state?’

I was asking some of the same questions myself.

I couldn’t doubt that God did care about the people we met, and some of them surprised us with unwavering faith: ‘I know God has been looking after me, or I wouldn’t be here; I’d never have survived.’

It didn’t make sense that the God who is called Creator, Provider and Father would only provide a place on earth for some people and not for others, and I had never been able to make sense either of the saying that ‘God only helps those who help themselves.’ My own experience had been the opposite, that God helped me most when I was most helpless.

And my reading of the life of Jesus Christ showed that, far from making a distinction between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor, he chose to spend much of his time with social outcasts and prostitutes. It seemed to me that when he looked at people he saw need – not fault.

There was also the inescapable fact that he was born homeless himself and lived with ‘no place to lay his head’ for much of his life, before dying a criminal’s death, an outcast to respectable society. That wasn’t the lifestyle of someone who saw the poor as inferior or inadequate.

In fact, it seemed that anyone who had experienced being homeless or an outcast, or having no place where they could rest and feel at home in this life, automatically had something in common with Jesus Christ, whether they considered themselves a believer or not.

Could it be, then, that God takes a completely different view of homelessness from us? Could it be that we see things back to front and that homelessness, far from being a social stigma or a sign of personal inadequacy, is a spiritual status symbol, a sign of closeness to God?

But that doesn’t sound right either! Jesus Christ didn’t go looking for homelessness in itself, or recommend it to others. Urging everyone to love each other ‘as yourself’ includes sharing with the poor. If poverty itself brought spiritual rewards, then he would have advised leaving the poor to be poor and the homeless to remain without a home.

I started wondering if God saw no division at all between the privileged and the disadvantaged – the housed and the homeless – and saw us all as equally homeless, all on our journey home. In that case, he might have solutions of his own which would involve taking a quite different view of homelessness.

The question then became not, ‘If