Person First Project is a photo blog that seeks to give those currently or formerly experiencing homelessness in D.C. the chance to share their stories. In doing this, we hope to reduce the barriers that separate people in D.C. and spark a dialogue. The Person First Project aims to connect us – and to make us all feel a bit more human.
“I grew up in Montgomery County. I’ve been here my whole life, pretty much. Now I live in Frederick because it’s cheaper; our hotel is in Frederick. So I take the commuter bus every day to Shady Grove and then I take the Metro. It’s a little bit of a commute but it’s worth it because I couldn’t afford a hotel in Montgomery County.
I live with my two kids and my fiancé. I have a seven-month-old and a two-year-old. He stays with them all day. The whole reason we’re in this situation is because he got laid off and has disabilities, so he’s been having issues finding a job. He was a restaurant manager in Silver Spring and the restaurant just went down. He’s in the midst of filing for disability, but obviously it’s kind of hard for him to find a job with that going on.
We’ve been in and out of different hotels – now we’ve been at the same one for about three months. We’ve been bouncing around for over a year and a half. Hotels are expensive – but we weren’t smart and we ruined our credit when we were younger, so finding an apartment is very difficult. The amount I pay in a hotel probably equals what I’d pay in rent but I would never get approved anywhere. And then whoever is renting rooms on Craigslist never wants kids, a lot of people don’t want couples… there’s always something.
If I had just saved, if it hadn’t screwed my credit up – things you don’t think about when your twenty-one or twenty-two years old – I’d be in a very different situation.
….
Apparently I am known as the ‘candy lady’. I’ve had so many people come by and say, ‘Good morning candy lady!’ It’s fine with me. It could be worse.
My favorite thing about doing this is getting to know people. I have met so many people that have helped me. Not even just with money, but even the most random things. My fiancé had this really infected tooth for months and we were trying to find someone to pull it. We have state insurance but it doesn’t cover dental, so everyone wanted to charge him a fee to pull this tooth. But this one lady signed him up for something and we got a phone call saying in a week and a half we could go to this church and they’d pull this tooth. Or I have a lady that used to drop off baby clothes. Cute stuff like that, so I’ve gotten to know people. I like that.
I went to University of Maryland for the full four years. I wanted to become a pharmacist… and then I had children. So that really didn’t pan out very well. I’m twenty-six, but most people think I’m older.”
– Liza, Bethesda
Person First Project is a photo blog that seeks to give those currently or formerly experiencing homelessness in D.C. the chance to share their stories. In doing this, we hope to reduce the barriers that separate people in D.C. and spark a dialogue. The Person First Project aims to connect us – and to make us all feel a bit more human.
“I joined the Navy in 1978 and I was honorably discharged because I have manic depression so my thoughts tend to race a lot. So when I first moved out on my own, I was smoking a lot with the mood swings and the drug addiction.
Before Saint Elizabeth hospital was taken over by the D.C. Government they had a lot of long-term programs. So when I was homeless and wasn’t doing too well, I’d be there. I’d spent months and sometimes years in there. So housing wasn’t a big issue; we always had someplace to go: psych ward, detox, or something. As these things started being cut out, I started realizing I’m actually homeless. I’m going to all these places but they’re discharging me and I have no place to go. I had no rental history. I had severe mood swings. I couldn’t stay sober. They called me ‘treatment resistant.’ The addiction was so strong. No matter how much I wanted to stop, I just couldn’t.
One of those particular times when I was in the psych ward and got discharged on the streets, I had an incident happen and I contracted HIV. I seroconverted* shortly after that in the street.”
-Waldon (formerly homeless at the Housing First Rally in Chinatown)
*Seroconversion is the period of time during which HIV antibodies develop and become detectable. Seroconversion generally takes place within a few weeks of initial infection. It is often, but not always, accompanied by flu-like symptoms including fever, rash, muscle aches and swollen lymph nodes.”
Person First Project is a photo blog that seeks to give those currently or formerly experiencing homelessness in D.C. the chance to share their stories. In doing this, we hope to reduce the barriers that separate people in D.C. and spark a dialogue. The Person First Project aims to connect us – and to make us all feel a bit more human.
Ed. Note: per MPD “Please keep the hypothermia hotline phone numbers readily available – (202) 399-7093 or 1(800) 535-7252″
“Good morning, how ya’ll doin’? God bless you have a nice day!
I’ve been doing this for about two years and I’m here every day. People always say, ‘You greet us, but you never ask for anything.’ But that’s not what God wants me to do. This is the job God assigned me to. And I enjoy it, I love greeting these people in the morning. If God sees that I need something he’ll send it to me. When I greet someone coming out here it makes them happy.
People ask me if I ever get mad. Mad about what? If I get mad today because I’m homeless and I’ve got nowhere to go, tomorrow I’ll still be in the same situation. They say that I’m always happy. Yeah, I gotta be happy. Because me getting mad is not going to solve the problem.”
– Garcia outside the Postal Museum
Person First Project is a photo blog that seeks to give those currently or formerly experiencing homelessness in D.C. the chance to share their stories. In doing this, we hope to reduce the barriers that separate people in D.C. and spark a dialogue. The Person First Project aims to connect us – and to make us all feel a bit more human.
Ed. Note: per MPD “Please keep the hypothermia hotline phone numbers readily available – (202) 399-7093 or 1(800) 535-7252”
“When I was younger my mother moved us from our house to live with this gentleman who she thought she would be happy with, but then he kicked us out. We were on the street after that and we’ve had our ups and downs in our relationship with the shelter system. Now my mother is in a HOC program. I was staying with her, but when I turned twenty-five they said I had to leave so she wouldn’t get in trouble. I’ve been on the streets for about two and a half years – I have no residence anywhere.
The warming center at the John F Kennedy Recreation Center has been playing a pivotal role in my life lately. It opens up when it gets really cold out at night and they’ve been keeping me warm, out of the cold, and off the streets for the past two weeks. If it wasn’t for their hypothermia program I would basically freeze to death. On days when it’s not real cold, I have to stay out on the street. I just have these blankets to warm me.
I would just like to inspire people to have faith in people that are homeless. They have the ability to move forward – they are worthwhile, and helping them can help everybody else. When they hit rock bottom they have the ability to pick themselves up and move back into society, and they can get to that point where they feel like they weren’t left behind. When others pull away it makes people that are homeless feel like they aren’t worth it. But when you help them and you bring them up, you can inspire a person to believe in themselves again. If we keep that up we won’t lose so many people.”
– Jordan in Chinatown
Person First Project is a photo blog that seeks to give those currently or formerly experiencing homelessness in D.C. the chance to share their stories. In doing this, we hope to reduce the barriers that separate people in D.C. and spark a dialogue. The Person First Project aims to connect us – and to make us all feel a bit more human.
“Everybody acts differently when they see someone homeless on the street. Some people shy away because they’re afraid of you, and some people come right up to you like they’re your best friend. But it gets lonely. Sometimes I don’t really want money, or food, or clothes – I just want somebody to hear what I have to say. For example, this lady Rachel stops by every Monday through Friday to sit and talk to me for a few minutes – and it makes my day. You just have to take the positive with the negative.”
– Irving at Union Station
Person First Project is a photo blog that seeks to give those currently or formerly experiencing homelessness in D.C. the chance to share their stories. In doing this, we hope to reduce the barriers that separate people in D.C. and spark a dialogue. The Person First Project aims to connect us – and to make us all feel a bit more human.
“By the time I got to D.C., I had been homeless for nearly a year and I was a lot sicker than I was when I first became homeless. I was really becoming what you think of when you think of a stereotypical homeless person – dirty clothes, scraggly beard, greasy hair, smell vaguely of urine, sitting on a park bench talking to invisible people. We see people like that all the time, especially in big cities, and we’ll think to ourselves, “That’s a darn shame, somebody should do something about that!” but that somebody is never us. I think we really have a tendency to write those people off. Nobody deserves to be written off. Every single one of those people is just like me. They just need some help and haven’t gotten it yet.
And I didn’t get it – I spent over a year just sitting on a park bench on Pennsylvania Avenue day and night, basically waiting to die. And I think a lot of people in that situation, chronically homeless people, have given up. Folks think they’re lazy. It’s not that they’re lazy, they’re lost. They’ve tried to get off the streets over and over again and they’ve failed over and over again and everyone’s given up on them so they just give up on themselves.
I’d probably still be out there or I’d be dead if it wasn’t for the fact that I got lucky and got arrested. It doesn’t sound very lucky, and it isn’t usually for homeless people. Homeless people usually get arrested for these little quality of life crimes – you might get fined or locked up, and then when you get out you’re back to being homeless again, but now you have a record so it’s even harder to get a job, or services, or housing. But for me it was lucky because they were out of public defenders so they gave me a private attorney that knew the judge and the prosecutor. He said “This guy’s not a criminal, he just needs some help.” So they released me with some conditions: One was I had to go to a shelter. The other stipulation was that I had to see someone about my mental illness. I ended up at Green Door – Independence for People with Mental Illness, which is a private provider here in D.C., but you can use the money the district would be spending on you at the department of mental health. That was in November of 2006, and I’ve been with them ever since.
My biggest fear is that I get as sick as I used to be, because that’s not just losing your home, that’s losing yourself. All of the work I do at Green Door, with all of the therapy and the medications, I always say that my biggest goal is just to stay out of the hospital. My biggest goal is just to not become that person again. Because I know that that person is just waiting to take over again.
– David”
Ed. Note: This new series will appear every Friday.
Person First Project is a photo blog that seeks to give those currently or formerly experiencing homelessness in D.C. the chance to share their stories. In doing this, we hope to reduce the barriers that separate people in D.C. and spark a dialogue. The Person First Project aims to connect us – and to make us all feel a bit more human.
“This guy saw a group of black people sleeping outside and approached us asking for drugs. Well, we don’t sell drugs and we don’t use drugs so we had no answers for him, but he sat with us anyway. He was a doctor and he was all upset because he takes home $3,500 a month, but that’s only half his salary because the other half goes to student loans. We couldn’t believe it! Any one of use would’ve taken that situation and been happy with it. Hey man – the college career you’re paying for is going to earn you millions! And you’re complaining to us, asking us why we’re out here? Man, you don’t understand.
The biggest problem with this country is isolationism. In DC, the privileged communities encapsulate themselves – they build condos and everything they need so they don’t have to blend into the community, and then they move the underprivileged people out so they don’t have to intermingle. Afterwards, the privileged people sit together and talk about the exact same things that we underprivileged people talk about. The issue is that since we don’t all sit together to talk, we’re going to each end up with our own separate opinions.
Privileged people might get together, maybe have some coffee and tea and then talk about how to solve our problems, but the truth is that if you haven’t been where I’ve been then you won’t understand. It’s the same problem with a lot of service programs that come out here. That’s why I love Capitol Hill Group Ministry and Ebenezers Coffeehouse. They will actually approach us and ask, “Well, what is it that you need?” Because let me tell you, this guy was genuinely upset about his $3,500 a month! And the truth is, we can’t understand it and we can’t relate because we just don’t intermingle with you all.”
– Scooby
