Summary of Rough Sleepers by Tracy Kidder: Dr. Jim O'Connell's Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People

By Willie M. Joseph

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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of Rough Sleepers by Tracy Kidder: Dr. Jim O'Connell's urgent mission to bring healing to homeless people

 

IN THIS SUMMARIZED BOOK, YOU WILL GET:

• Chapter astute outline of the main contents.
• Fast & simple understanding of the content analysis.
• Exceptionally summarized content that you may skip in the original book

Tracy Kidder tells the story of Dr. Jim O'Connell, who helped create a program to care for Boston's homeless. Kidder has been described as a "master of the nonfiction narrative" in his book Rough Sleepers. The author previously wrote the New York Times bestselling book Mountains Beyond Mountains.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: Jan 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215299890

Willie M. Joseph

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I

The Van

Dr. Jim O'Connell had been riding on the outreach van for three decades. During those years he had built a medical organization, Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program. It now had four hundred employees and looked after about eleven thousand homeless people a year. The Street Clinic is still open on Thursdays. The Boston Street Team's van was like a 1950s doctor making house calls, though it rarely dispensed more than minor medicine.

It was meant for bringing food and blankets and socks and underwear to rough sleepers and for finding people in distress and bringing them in, if they would come. Street Clinic's wellness checks should continue, but with flashlights, Dr. Jim and his Street Team should first shine their flashlights on their own faces so as not to startle the patients. Board of directors convened a meeting of rough sleepers who issued this advice. Homelessness afflicts Black and Latino people disproportionately both in the United States and in Boston. Jim has long worried that outreach efforts have consistently missed rough sleepers of color.

There are many Black faces, but far fewer than white ones, and this is surprising. Jim O'Connell is the founder of Boston Health Care for the Homeless. Afterward, I wondered if I'd misunderstood, or misremembered what I'd seen. Some months later, I contacted Jim and asked for another van ride. When I step out of the van, the buildings feel much taller, the alleys much darker.

Street Team van driver Jim often speculates about people he encounters on the streets of Boston. Take away a little twist of fate, and maybe he could be playing for the Patriots, he says of an addict with 'lots of potential'. One young man tells him he's afraid he's going to kill himself. Like I really give a fuck, one homeless man says to Jim. Housing is a big goal for the Street Team and most of its patients, and for some—only some—it has meant salvation.

To get five minutes with Dr. Jim. it's impossible, Nick says. I want to believe there's value in that. You're doing everything you can for the patient, but you're not deluding yourself into thinking that what you do isn't worth doing because the person is going to die anyway, says Dr. Jim Wexler. In the winter of 2009/10, Jim and a social worker headed out to find rough sleepers ahead of a blizzard.

They rescued a pair of homeless men living in a patch of urban wilderness known as the Fens. The men's makeshift tent had collapsed in the storm; Jim and his companion had to dig it out with their hands. Some city officials defended the operation; Jim watched helplessly as it happened. Every homeless person had been offered a ride to a shelter, and if rough sleepers didn't want to sleep there, that wasn't the fault of the cops or the station's owners. Among the evicted were many of the Street Team's patients.

The list included Jane, sober five years