When I was a graduate student at the University of Iowa, I frequently used their wonderful public bus system to get to campus from my west-side apartment. On occasion, I would see the same homeless man riding the bus with me, particularly in the bitter months of winter. He often struck up conversation with the driver, and at times with other passengers on the bus. He was thoughtful and articulate, clearly well educated and interesting, nothing like the image I had in my head of what homelessness acted or sounded like.
My most vivid memory of an experience with a homeless person was when I was sixteen, on my first trip to New York City with my mother. I remember distinctly walking alongside the Stock Exchange building and stepping over the frail, outstretched legs of a woman sitting on the concrete sidewalk with her back against the wall. She looked filthy and much older than she really was. She didn’t say a word, and had a shallow cardboard box sitting on her lap with a few dollars and coins in it.
After passing her, I asked my mother to give me a few dollars to give to the woman. I returned to her, and just as I was leaning over to drop the money in her box, she pulled out a cigarette and lit it. I held on to the money, retracted my hand, and walked back to my mother, confused.
In my adult life, I have come to think about homelessness in a different way. There are days when I’m trying to manage motherhood, wifehood, bills, work, appointments, and household maintenance that I just want to drop out of this life for a while. I daydream of being magically teleported to an all-inclusive, mostly vacant, resort on Fiji, without a single responsibility. There, I could just live.
It’s no longer hard for me to imagine that for some people, this life is just too much. We’re practically born with responsibility, and before we know it, we are required to have a car inspection, pay our taxes on time, show up to work at eight o’clock almost every day, and do a myriad of other jobs that just living and having a home require.
In 2000, I had the opportunity to spend a few days in the village of Koular in Senegal, West Africa. My husband had spent three Peace Corps years there, and we went back to visit this place he grew to love. In some respects, life is hard there. Labor in the fields is backbreaking without modern machinery. Education is limited, particularly for girls. Health care is minimal. There is no phone, electricity, or air-conditioned reprieve from the hot, humid days and nights. A deep hole in the ground is the toilet, and water is hauled regularly from a well in plastic buckets.
Despite the challenges of living there, all someone has to do is tap on the end of one of those buckets and a whole group of people are dancing and laughing, full of fun and silliness. It was completely refreshing. No bills, no deadlines, no car inspections, no car!
Americans often snub their noses at less technologically developed communities, but comparing the quality of life between them and us is like apples to oranges. I often wonder if the homeless man on the bus in Iowa City would have had a better life in Koular. I look forward to the day my family and I can return to Koular for a nice, long visit.
