“Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there”—homelessness…here

Around 2000, I traveled to Cape Town, South Africa for a wedding. It was less than a decade after Apartheid ended. My family and I stayed at a friend of a friend’s luxurious home. It sat on a high hill in a wealthy neighborhood. Exquisitely build into that hill, the house offered amenities like I’d never seen. The window in the bathroom looked down on the city and a stretch of beautiful beach. While you soaked in the deep tub, you could watch the waves roll in in. The floors were covered in smooth and polished stone.

Everything about the house screamed money and luxury. Real wood everywhere, no laminate furniture, solid wood floors, rugs that cost thousands, décor worth more than my house today. The exterior was just as beautiful, a long, wide balcony that looked down the hill, a nicely sculpted lawn with trees and bushes. It stood on the side of that hill like a king on a throne.

But it didn’t look upon the shanty town below. Trees hid those tiny shelters. The indigent population had put up little huts made of old tin, cardboard, and just about any junk that could cover them at night. It was a suburb of tacked together garbage.

In the winter months, the temperatures can get down to the low 40s. So what do these people do? They get gas heaters that sometimes burn down the shanties, sometimes trapping the residents within. Even if the folks didn’t have fires, and if they were able to get these heaters, they breathed in the poisonous fumes.

When we drove down or up the hill, we saw this abject poverty. It was heartbreaking—if you had a heart. I talked to the wealthy homeowner and her neighbor, “Cape Town is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen,” I said and then asked, “How do you feel, seeing those poor people, their suffering, the poverty?”

“What poverty?” they replied.

There was absolutely no way that they could have missed it when driving up and down that hill unless they’d grown callous. Every time they drove anywhere, they had to pass that shanty town. They were blind to it.

I smoked back then, and one day, I was at an outdoor café, having an espresso, smoking fresh Drum brand tobacco. A man with a limp approached me. His clothes were tattered and dirty. He had a cigarette rolled in a piece of brown paper bag.

“Can I get a light from you?” he asked. I felt ashamed that even though my income was fairly low, I sat at that table with the luxury of fine coffee and tobacco. I gave him my lighter and the rest of my tobacco and cigarette papers. His gratefulness made me even more ashamed to have so much when he had so little.

Last week, I attended a meeting of local aid agencies here, and I asked them, “What do you want the public to know?”

One of them answered, “Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there.” Homelessness. One of the members said that he knew of 32 homeless people in Dyersburg. These aid agencies are trying to coordinate resources in order to better help the poor and homeless. Bless them. Another attendee remarked, “Sure, some of them are on drugs. But many of them are mentally ill and need help.”

Others at the meeting noted that State of Tennessee doesn’t recognize someone as homeless if that person spends a night on someone’s couch, has a car, spends one night in a hotel, or stays with a friend for one night.

They need more help than volunteers and nonprofit agencies in town can give them. The agencies are already struggling with trying to feed the poor.

Granted, government helps, but we need a more concerted effort that address problems with mental illness, drug addiction, and just plain old hard luck.

We are lucky in this town in that we have so many folks who help the poor. They come together to help. But the homeless crisis is real. We have a warming shelter. But what about the warmer months? There is no shelter.

My hope is that instead of seeing the homeless as a burden, instead of turning a blind eye to them, we will find a way to shelter these people. What grants are available to local government for shelters? Can our wealthier residents and businesses set up an endowment to house them and feed them?

I hope that we open our eyes to the misery. These folks are sons or daughter, brothers or sisters, fathers or mothers. They are humans in need. Each one of them is one of us.