Homeless Diary, Entry Three

My friend Janos in Germany, who has been following this series of articles and has been wonderfully supportive, mentioned that they were sad, so I decided write a story that was uplifting.

It is a story about a woman I met on the campus of my college. I had been running around trying to get professors to let me into classes I had already registered for, but for some erroneous reason had been deleted by the system. As I stood looking at the building directory searching for the Classical Culture Department, a woman came up next to me and started looking at the directory also. I mentioned my predicament and she said she was going through the same exact thing. We started to laugh and commiserate about how crazy and nerve racking it was as classes were just about to start in just a few days. As we talked we discussed our majors and how she was going to be graduating soon, and how she was looking forward to grad school and becoming a social worker. One thing led to another as it often does, when she mentioned to me that she had been homeless once, and now that it was her goal help others that were still homeless.

One of the things she said was that she would never forget was how two Hispanic women cooked rice and chicken, that they would put into coolers in a hallway of a building in East New York and feed the homeless. They fed her and it touched her. Here these women as she put it were helping people, the majority of which were not even of their own background, but they did it out of the kindness of their hearts. What was also especially significant to her was that she could tell that they didn’t have much themselves, but they took the time and effort to cook all that food. Those two women were there for her when she needed it, and she knew that going forward she would return the gift that had been given to her because they filled her heart and gave her hope.