People ask me, how do I know there are so many women with children living in the creek beds here on the Central Coast of California? People come to visit my workshop. Foster mothers, social workers and those who whisper to me, “I was homeless, but I’m not now”, whispered like they are ashamed. I wonder at that. I was homeless here in this county in 1989 with my two daughters. I moved to the Pacific Northwest, then the Southwest and finally full circle, back to California, where I was born. My daughters love it here.
I’m working to develop creative vocational programs for our County’s at-risk youth and women, including foster and homeless. I have a few volunteers and am getting ready.
Evening 1
I wonder nearly every evening what it’s like out there for the homeless women with children living here, in my county of San Luis Obispo, California.
I was homeless with my two daughters here, MANY years ago. What continues to haunt me is that there are now, an estimated two thousand women with children living, out there. A recognized number in South County region where I work, there are 800 homeless children.
Recently, I learned that there are more women and children living in the dry creek beds of Ventura than here. That gave me a strange comfort.
Someday the shit will hit the fan and I hope the plight of our invisibles will be acknowledged around the world. Will the people who know the facts and have known the facts for years be publicly humiliated? I personally hope so.
I learned a year ago that Cal Poly was one of the sponsors of a movie about our creek bed camps. I’d arranged to view it and was stood up, twice. Told that its director was very cautious about how it would be used.
Why would anyone want to keep such information secret? Who does it prosper to leave them out there to have more children who are growing up in a world that must be tantamount to, “Lord of the Flies”?
Women with foster children visit me each month in hopes that my programs will begin before their children face the creek beds. It’s slow going in a county where the socialites are more interested in hosting benefits for their new Railroad Museum than serving the proportionately growing needs of our lost women and children.
One foster mom told me her daughter is now of legal age, but is not right mentally and will continue to be in her care. I wondered if she suffered in the camp when she came of age, as others I’ve heard stories of?
I serve on a local Committee. One fellow committee woman used the word paradise in reference to our lives here. Paradise for who was on the tip of my tongue. I had to wait for an appropriate opening to lay the scary story of the numbers on her. What a shock it was. Don’t shoot the messenger, I don’t feel satisfaction, and I don’t wonder why people can’t wait to get out of the room when meetings are over and I ‘m present. I interpret they’re afraid I’ll ask them to do something for my work. I don’t ask, I wait patiently for volunteers, the right volunteers with the bravery to begin the work that is here.
I loved the movie, “Field of Dreams”. Like the ball player, I feel, IF I build the programs and BRAVE products, “they will come”. Meantime, I have a burning desire to share outside— to begin to share the stories I’ve heard. It may not make others feel better, but let the light shine.
Stories of young girls sold, sometimes by their mothers, for protection or other commodities in the camps. Stories to shed light on who are those young people, clearing their tables who smile and startle customers. They don’t have many teeth.
IF some of these stories, prove to be urban myth— I’ll be greatly relieved and quite willing to be publicly corrected. But, IF they’re all true, what is wrong with this state and this country?
I’m now a 56 year old woman and I feel older than my years holding these stories to myself. It’s important that people of the other world, the one you and I walk and live in each day, know the truth.
IF then you look away and remain in your vacuum, shame. Yes, I’m angry and have carried it for years. Even when I know it slows my work’s progress— I can’t be silent.
IF there is light cast on our villages, from the California creek beds, to the Northwest’s forest’s, to the New York subway tunnels, will FAIR TRADE recognize us now? Will they seek ways to adopt a global pay scale to accommodate the development of our own American Cooperative workers rescued from aboriginal circumstances in Pismo Beach’s Price Canyon, Oceano Dunes and North Counties Wine Country between Atascadero, Templeton, Paso Robles and San Miguel?
I think the women who live now in transition homes waiting to be clean for a year to have their children live with them again, are some of the bravest women I would hope to know someday. I’m a survivor of homelessness, as are both my daughters, now grown and working in LA.
Thankfully, they moved on with their lives. I remain haunted.
I could have found paradise, too. But that would mean walking away— I chose instead to toss it away, until green living is a way of life for everyone, not just the enlightened. How can we purport to be green when we are leaving so many behind? How environmentally friendly are the camps by the dry creek beds? The ocean in our region is becoming polluted with mystery sewage. Not for long, I hope. Not for long.
