The Hungry Valley

When my friend Scott told me last year that he was planning on spending a week on the streets homeless, I knew he would take a lot of flack.

First of all, he's a Rancho Mirage City Councilman with a flourishing career that has spanned the lobbying fields, time in the service, and the entrepreneurial zone where he enjoyed much success as owner of a national educational tutoring company. Secondly,  he's got a great house, nice car, and a family that includes two beautful children. I could hear the rumblings of the skeptical out there wondering if he was exploiting the hungry or better yet, working on a savvy PR political ploy.

But I also know Scott as a person. He's a gay man whose worked for over a decade with organizations as a volunteer to promote and build equal rights for all people. He's a father with four amazing children, two who were adopted and have done nothing but excel under his parentage even against not-so-great odds from their dysfunctional childhoods. He's been a stellar example of someone who tries at all times to do the right thing, even if sometimes it causes a stir.

When we spoke first about this project I knew that his intentions were not to show people what it was like for HIM to experience hunger or homelessness, it was about showing the faces of the real people in the valley who are hungry or homeless. As a councilman, he wanted to be able to tell their stories and recount their day to day lives in a "reality versus assumption" way that he could take back to his peers valley-wide in city councils and to the public through consistent reporting on the blog The Hungry Valley.

He's been out there for a week and his blog has become ripe with these faces. Not only is he learning how it is to sleep in a park or a sparse desert field (albeit still afraid of scorpions), he's learning how it is to stand in line at the food banks for food, how it is to feel hunger pangs, and  how it is to survive in the baring down sun when you truly are not welcome indoors anywhere near.

He's also meeting the multivaried individuals who make up our hungry community and he is sharing those stories with us. The young parents who recently lost their newborn, the ex-rich man who lost it all, the brilliant businessman whose motor accident caused his brain to disintegrate and the loss of his home, the young gay man addicted to meth, and so on. It's hard to lump the hungry (who are not all homeless, even though many of them are)  into one category when you see that all of us could be one hard circumstantial event away from the same lot.

I have been reading the blog daily and it's been impossible not to be touched in some small way. I admire the fact that someone is actually taking to the streets to get their information rather than relying on statistics on paper in a plush council meeting with experts presenting the faceless statistics by rote on a powerpoint screen.

We live in a small valley and I have come myself to know the homeless and the hungry over the years. It's too small a town not to recognize people if you're awake enough to look. Like the woman, who is blonde, beautiful and in her mid-forties who is always dressed in elegant but completely soiled clothes who scurries down El Paseo mid-mornings talking to herself, an obvious unfortunate victim of mental disease. Or the African American man with his grocery cart full to the brim who traverses the miles of Highway 111 beneath Cathedral City Cove each day.

I hope this experiment causes everyone to see that we can't lump the homeless or the hungry into one preconceived notion and that we need to work together as a community to come up with fruitful solutions all around that help address the real problems.

I hope everyone who reads The Hungry Valley has enough maturity to focus on the message and not the political messenger, because I know that is the heart and soul and goal of the project.