A warm summer evening at Camp Runamuck, maybe one of the last

Their next prospective location is under the Washington Bridge in East Providence (we are still waiting for community uproar…the bridge is within two miles of three different country clubs). The East Providence police have talked to the residents and tried to dissuade them from settling there, but again, it is state land and John Freitas, the tent city’s main spokesperson, has said that if state police tell them to move then they will comply, but until then will continue setting up their camp there. Noreen Shawcross, director of the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development, has had services providers send case workers to try to help place some of the resident’s into nearby shelters and give them case management. For more info, see “Social services for tent city; some move to East Providence”

And now, yesterday, Dan Barry has taken an interest in Camp Runamuck and written a rather dramatic, survivor-esque article about it in the New York Times. Check it out: “This Land- Living in Tents, and by the Rules, Under a Bridge “ In my experience, I have never heard anyone call John “chief” nor use the term “voted off the island.” My time spent talking to the residents of the tent city made them see how they were trying to make life as normal as possible in the tent city, as human as possible. What appealed to so many of them was the proximity to downtown Providence, rather than any sense of island-like isolation. More isolated/isolating are shelters like Harrington Hall in Cranston, the men’s emergency shelter that has 96 beds. Traveling the three miles to the shelter requires homeless to take a bus or walk, carrying all their possessions. Locations  like this truly isolate the homeless, furthermore, the doors of the shelter closing at a certain time  keep them from normal social patterns that all of us enjoy. Especially on warm summer nights, being herded into essentially a warehouse full of bunk beds with 90 other people at seven in the evening is hardly a morale booster.

Richard and Rachel, his girlfriend of three years, cook up dinner at Camp Runamuck

It made me sad to see Richard Jackson and his girlfriend, Rachel in the photos in the NY Times slide show; when we talked to him on July 14 he was adamant about his exit from Camp Runamuck. He works part time at a car wash, but the rainy summer has hurt their business and therefore demand for labor. Nonetheless, he told us that he had a good chunk of money saved up and that there was no way he would have to worry about getting kicked out of the tent city because he and Rachel would be out of there and into an apartment within two weeks. He and Rachel moved to tent city because after two years of being together they did not want to be separated into the men’s and women’s shelters.

During the Indie Arts Fest in the greater Kennedy Plaza two weeks ago–where I went with my friends to enjoy outdoor music, refreshments, and dancing– I saw three or four different people that I recognized as residents of the tent city. At first I was a little put-off, thinking, but…but…this is my social circle. I waved at quiet Justin in his flat brimmed hat and baggy jeans and smiled. He is nineteen and has lived in the tent city for a few weeks, but it is temporary until he leaves for boot camp. He figured that he would enlist in the Army since he can’t find a job and there he can “at least be a normal member of society again.” The more that I think about it, the more I value events like Indie Arts Fest that offer the homeless opportunities to be outside at night without being hassled out of parks by cops and to brush shoulders with all of us without us knowing, to escape judgment and blend back in for a few hours.

repeated Professor Silver for the hundredth time to the NEXT stranger we saw on mile and a half long Potters Avenue in South Providence. We were looking for Jesse, a man who was interviewed at Welcome Arnold in 2007 and who we had almost lost hope of finding. At one of the shelters someone had heard a rumor that he lived somewhere on Potters Ave, but that was it. Let the wild goose chase begin!! (or the silly goose chase, in my case). I was impressed by our Professor’s tenacity, asking person after person, most of whom thought we were crazy and had no idea who Jesse was. We knocked on a boarded up, abandoned building covered with graffiti we thought he might be squatting in and tried to peek in, but the after some puzzled looks a neighbor admonished us,

Jesse on the front porch of his house on Potters Ave in South Providence

“No one lives there, that is why it’s boarded up.”

We kept asking. Finally, one teenage girl gave us some information,

“Some white people live in those two houses on the end of the block.”

Fate (or dumb luck?) was on our side and one of the mail slots on the two houses had Jesse’s name on it! We knocked, Jesse answered and we got our interview. There is always a moment of suspense when we find someone, a sense of adrenaline at their story about to be told. We have clips of them, watched on a computer screen. We search for people we have never met but who we feel like we know. I always feel strangely invested on these searches, hoping so hard that we will find them with housing and income, sober and happy.

Leaving Jesse’s house an hour later, after the long interview in the hot room (Corlis almost fainted manning the camera) I had mixed feelings. When Welcome Arnold closed in 2007, Jesse went to a different shelter in Rhode Island, then had a failed move to Washington State (went on a promise of a friend’s couch, ended up being unable to find or contact that friend) where he spent Christmas 2007 in a homeless shelter. He did odd jobs long enough to earn enough money to come back to Rhode Island where he at least had friends and some distant family. After another year of being homeless in Rhode Island, Jesse met his current girlfriend, Holly. Holly has a seizure condition that renders her unable to work and for which she receives SSI. She found a friend who needed a roommate and after dating for three months, she and Jesse moved in there. He has lived in the house where we interviewed him with Holly since February. He does not work, but considers taking care of Holly his “full time job, without pay.”

Her SSI pays their rent and for simple meals that they cook at their house. Part of me is indignant at his complete lack of self sufficience, but then I stop and consider that I wouldn’t feel this way if it were a husband caring for his sick wife and living off of her disability check. Still, the situation worries me. His name is on her bank account, but he has no account of his own and no income at all. He could apply for SSI because of a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, but says, “I don’t really have ambition for that sort of thing, money does not matter like that to me…I am doing pretty well without it.”

I risked offense when I asked the obvious question, “Where will you go if anything were to happen and you and Holly were to break up?”

“I don’t think of things in terms of ‘if.’”

The whole car ride back and while we rewatched the interview Corlis and I kept randomly bursting out with “ahhh, Jesseeeee,” our frustration with his fragile stability easier to express with exasperated goans than with words. He is physically able to work, but doesn’t, and choses instead to rely on his girlfriend of seven months completely. He has a support network for now, but I am saddened by the fact that if this research project were done in six months or a year, who knows where we would find him. A “success” story for now…

Kevin told me I have a good strong handshake, especially for a girl.

43 year old Kevin explained his reasons for being at Hope City for the last four months while he worked on switching some tires around on donated (or stolen?) bikes. The part that stood out the most was how he kept insisting that he wasn’t a loser in this half desperate voice, kept saying how hard he is praying to find work, “I’m not a loser, okay? Don’t think I’m a loser. I’m just in a slump.”

He was surprisingly interested in us, asking about our lives and studies. He bestowed a certain amount of responsibility on me, saying, “Urban studies, huh? You better plan it better than the last guys did. It is up to you, go talk about it, tell them we aren’t losers. Fix this mess that they’ve made.”

What should I have responded? “I don’t think you are a loser ” and “I’ll do my best” both tried to eek themselves out of my mouth at the same time and came out in an embarrassed mumble. I repeated, “I’ll do my best” and walked away feeling a little bit glad that maybe I somehow have the potential to make a difference, maybe he believes I really can, but also with the weight of having no idea how.

-George Elliot

Crossing the waist-high metal roadside barrier to enter the tent city this morning, the first thing that we saw was two guys playing with their pet mice. The scraggly mice were on little harnesses and leashes made of brightly colored lanyard string and crawled all over the legs and shoulders of their owners. We got introduced to them as Cakesters and Oreo by nineteen year old Ryan and twenty one year old CJ who have been at Camp Runakmuk for two months. While

Ryan, left, and CJ introduce their mice, Cakesters and Oreo

Oreo crawled in his curly black afro, CJ explained how they bought the mice at the pet store and at night keep them in a cardboard box with grass on the bottom, feeding them fruits and nuts. Ryan assured us of the quality of their care, despite their lack of funds for a proper cage, saying, “We change the grass every day.”

At first, I couldn’t imagine why two homeless guys who cannot afford housing or food for themselves would want to take on the responsibility for another living being. When I thought about the joy that Sophie (my black lab/alaskan malamute mix) brings me, however, I understand how CJ and Ryan could want the simple pleasure of an animal’s unconditional love in the face of their hardship. They are not the only ones either.

Pooky enjoys a little head rub at Camp Runamuk

Camp Runamuk’s resident dog, Pooky, a bull dog mix, is owned by six foot two Bobby who has the tent closest to the water’s edge. He guards the door of his master’s tent and apparently bites strangers when his owner is not around. The residents like to give him leftover bones or just rub his head and watch that happy doggy look of contentment arise. When people become homeless, so do their pets. The shelters obviously do not allow animals for space, feeding, and hygiene reasons; when someone becomes homeless, the pets get given away to friends, to the pound, or abandoned on the street. Living in one of the tent cities allows people to keep their animals and the small joy that can come from a silent, drama-free companion. Put into such trying situations, they have to appreciate and hold on to every little happiness they have, it is all they have. Anti-depressants don’t need to come in the form of pills, but in soft caresses given to someone or something who does not care that you are down and out, who is not judging you or telling you to get a job.

Who is enjoying it more?

Across the river at Hope City, the tent city on the western bank, Judy keeps two cats, Snow and Magneto. Snow is white and fluffy, with her pregnant swollen belly hanging low to the ground. Judy has been homeless for almost ten years now, but said that when Magneto was a kitten, the last of a litter of a friends cat, she couldn’t say no. She recounts,

“I remember looking at him, his eyes all big and cute, and wanting to take him so badly, wishing I had a home so that I could give this sad little kitten a home. When I found out he would be going to the pound since no one wanted him, I took him.”

Judy’s words reminded me that the human instinct to care for another does not go away just because the resources to do so disappear. She took Magneto and has cared for him well, he is has a shiny tiger striped coat and a tag around his neck with his name and Judy’s phone number. She got Snow just a few months ago when a friend asked her to care for her for a week or two and then never called back to pick her up. The poor cat was raised indoors and is having trouble adjusting to the camping life, getting her white fur all muddied up pretty often. Faced with the prospect of a litter of kittens on the way, Judy says that she will give away the kittens only to people who have good homes for them. She explains,

“It is bad enough that they have to be born outside and that I have to have these two (pointing to Magneto and Snow) outside. I will only give those kittens to people who can really afford them.”

Judy with Magneto

Elliot’s quote about animals being agreeable friends rings true here, among the homeless whose natural support networks have broken down and for whom new relationships that form are fragile. People become friends, but there is some sense of distrust at people taking advantage of one another’s scarce resources and a sense of discomfort at choosing to accept the world and life of the homeless as your own by forming tight bonds with other homeless people. They depend on one another, and some rest their hopes on the opportunities sometimes offered by friends only to be shot down when the weak connection falls through. In their animals, some of these homeless men and women are finding adoring, affectionate friends with whom there is no danger of a wrenching end to the friendship, no danger of questions or of criticism. They cling to a certain type of domesticity that makes the tent city feel that much more like home.

An unsuspecting fisherman stumbles upon the tent city

“What IS this place??”

“What do you think, man? We’re homeless,” he responded with irritation and turned back to continue our conversation, ingoring the intruder and his demands. Eventually, someone with more patience than Derek explained, but I realized that without seeing it and talking to residents it is hard for people to understand what exactly is going on. Furthermore, the tent city has a fluid population, constantly shifting and growing, and not everyone likes one another. At any rate, here are a bunch of photos and brief quotes expressing what THIS PLACE is to those who live there. Maybe the photos can give a better taste of the camp than reporters’ descriptions can.

The deck was here when the homeless moved in, a porch that certainly beats most in the city and that you definitely won't find at any of the homeless shelters

Camp Runamuk has a large kitchen area filled with donated cookware and food. The food is locked up, a fact that some complain about but that Derek defended, "Some of these kids, they'll open a can, eat half, and toss the rest."

The Leaky Lena II got donated; people drop off a surprisingly random assortment of unwanted stuff. The residents have taken it out on the river a few times, but the coast guard got mad that they did not have oars or life jackets. On the water conditions: "I wouldn't swim in that water no matter how hot it gets, half an hour in there you'll come out with super powers."

Seagulls refused to tell us his real name, saying that he hoped to preserve some anonymity during his time at the tent city. He said he ended up there a week ago because his neighbors in his apartment were too noisy and he thought he might as well save some money and live outside. His thoughts, "They have everything you need here, food, it's beautiful, it's close to Providence so I can go to work, and I sort of wanted to spend the summer outside."

Business as usual continues at Camp Runamuk

Providence is interested! And the homeless who live there are  interested in the media coverage that helps keep homeless issues somewhere on someone’s agenda (We aren’t sure who yet, Mayor Cicillini is “deferring to the state.”) You can read the article and get a quick video tour of the tent city here (or click the photograph).  For the neighbors in nearby Fox Point (my neighborhood), I guess a safe backyard isn’t enough, it’s grown to Not Under Our Freeway Bridges! In my opinion, the concerns about the tent city being an active construction site are the more legitimate ones. Their accusation that the homeless bathe and wash clothes in the river is one of the more ridiculous things I have ever heard. The residents of Camp Runamuk know better than anyone that the river is disgusting and would make you dirtier were you to enter it.  The article says that 60 people live there on a given night, but the number is from the police officers who drive by. Residents said the cops never stop their cars unless there is a specific call (someone needs an ambulance, etc) but just drive by slowly now and then. I think the real number is closer to what John and Barbara told us, 40, but maybe a higher number is better for getting more attention.

Bethany and her boyfriend, Louis

Bethany

Her eyes are bright and there is a refreshing bounce in her step that is rare among the people that I usually interview. Even the service providers I talk to have that downtrodden look in their eyes a lot of the time. It comes from staring the worst of it in the face. They watch desperation bring out the worst in people; they watch poverty tear families apart; they fight for some too numb to fight for themselves. But Bethany shows no trace of that deadening sadness as she happily agrees to sit down and explain her life in the tent city to us. She settles down on the cement base of the freeway column, leans against her boyfriend, Louis, and starts to explain how she got there. As she tells her story, I marvel even more at her content demeanor; she has experienced enough to take the light out of anyone’s eyes.

“I’m pretty much sober now”

Nineteen year old Bethany has been homeless on and off since she was seventeen. At the age when my biggest worries were who I was going to take to the prom and how fast I could run four laps around a track, she was running away from an abusive fiance and bouncing from friends’ houses to troubled girls’ homes to shelters and back. She rapidly describes her decline, listing drugs and boyfriends as if they were groceries. She developed a financially unsustainable coke habit and to fund it, “stupidly turned to the call girl business.” She moved from coke to ecstasy and “went on a four month ecstasy binge, nine pills a day.” Her pimp provided housing, but when he started to abuse her too, she ran away. She says, “I realized that I was safer out on the street than I was in my own house. So I said I was going to go get coffee and I left and never looked back.”

She deftly avoids the question of any continuing drug use with a quick, “I’ve cut waaaay back, I’m pretty much sober now.”

She talks about drinking with Louis and going out to clubs, but maintains that they always respect the rules of the camp and take their partying elsewhere. She understands the idea of her own actions having the power to affect others: if cops found out about underage drinking at the tent city they would have reason to shut it down and blame the other residents for providing alcohol to underage kids. I almost want to fault her for her behavior and demand, why are you partying? You are homeless, go fix your situation before you worry about what to wear to the club. But whatever choices she has made to get herself into this situation, a desire to have fun is certainly not something I am in a position to try to deny her.

She is a teenager.

The signs of her youth are clear. When she talks about drama with her friends and how she hates people who “like, say one thing to your face then go, like, tell everyone else something else” you can see the young girl coming out through the shadow of her very adult experiences. She and Louis slept in the back of his green ’93 Ford Taurus for their first two weeks in the tent city until a tent got donated for them to use. She proudly gives us a tour of their home, pointing out their unmade air mattress bed, her cardboard box night stand with all her jewelry and toiletries, and their “couch,” a cot strewn with a dozen stuffed animals. She smiles a little sheepishly and says, “Well, I had to bring the important stuff with me when I ran away from home.”

Adolescence is meant to be a time for trying on responsibility with a net below you and a network to lift it from you when you find it too heavy for your slim shoulders. Instead, Bethany spent two and a half years in free fall. Hopefully, the community that has formed under the bridge will become a new network of support so she can step into adulthood with a lighter load than she has born thus far. Philosophical musings aside, I have every hope for Bethany to pull herself out of this situation. Her highlighter-orange hair is a clue to her spunk as is the way she bosses around Louis, though he is nine years older than her. I can tell she is a fighter. As strange as it sounds, I find her inspiring. I do not know if having experienced the same things as she has I would be able to hold my head so high.

John, in-charge at Camp Runamuk

Home

We asked Bruce who we should get permission to film from, and he pointed us in the direction of the Barbara and John’s tent, remarkable because of its rectangular gravel “yard” in front, complete with 2 weathered plastic lawn chairs. They have a porch to flush out the surroundings that have become their home. Home. Such a fluid concept, is it defined by a picket fence? Or by the presence of family? By warmth? By safety? By community? As the framed water-colored hearts on our living room wall declare, “Home is where the heart is.”

On Montecito Drive in Glendale, CA, home is undeniably where the FOOD is. Where the practically licked clean plates clink into soapy water, where the oil sizzles with lumpia or plantains. Home is in the kitchen where my mother expresses her love to us in a way that her words cannot. Her food is life-giving beyond caloric value, beyond its fantastic flavor, it is showing, not just saying how much she loves us every day. So is it really surprising how hard these homeless men and women have tried to create that same sense of home?

Several tents have porches similar to John and Barbara’s, one even has a flower garden planted on either side of the door. These roughly 40 people have come together in a community, sharing the few resources that they have.

Since the forming of the camp in April 2009, the residents of Camp Runamuk, as they have jokingly named themselves, have gone from being vagrants sharing a common space away from downtown’s traffic and the eye of the resentful public to a true community that eats meals together, has a counsel, a contract of membership as well as all the family drama that goes with any community. They carry 2 gallon plastic jugs in a shopping cart to and from the nearest gas station to get water for dishes and cooking. They have 2 camping stoves and a grill. People drive by and drop of clothes, food, tents, and all sorts of random items.

So…why aren’t these people in homeless shelters? Don’t they have those in Providence? Isn’t it illegal for them to camp out like that? Are the questions I get asked about the tent city, but why these people are here instead of in a shelter is rather complicated. Some have been banned from shelters for breaking rules about possession of alcohol or drugs, some for getting in fights, some for theft, some for confrontations with staff members at shelters. Some, however, have more passive reasons for choosing a tent over the somewhat overcrowded shelter system.

For John, 55, and Barbara, 49, the head honchos of Camp Runamuk, the motivation to stay out of the shelter is simply that of being together. In the shelter system, men and women are separated regardless of marital or romantic status. For many, the tent city offers a relative freedom compared to the shelter system where you must be awake and out of the building before a certain time and back in at a certain time or your bed will be taken by someone else. Worse yet, if you flout the rules too often, you will be banned.

Freedom is a key part of the tent city’s appeal; no one monitors anyone else’s comings or goings or nags them to wake up in the morning. The freedom is not absolute anymore, however. After a short time of living in Camp Runamuk, the residents collectively decided that “anything goes” was not a satisfactory way to divide their donated resources or their space. Now, when a new person enters the community, they must sign a contract in which they agree to certain standards of respect for one another. On the evening when someone new arrives everyone gathers for dinner and afterward they have a meeting to introduce everyone. And when does the Kumbaya start, you ask? I didn’t stick around to see, but maybe next year after I default on my student loans… after all, none of these people expected to be where they are right now. The reality of each of our susceptibility is the scariest part of all; the people living in the tent city are not all radically different from us, and certainly not more or less deserving of a place to call home than we are.

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Camp Runamuk, on the East bank

Venturing down to the tents

When I explain that I am doing research on homelessness, one of the first things that people ask about are the tents set up on either side of the Providence River underneath the unused 195 on/off ramps. The people living in these tent cities fit HUD’s most basic description of homeless: those living in spaces not meant for human habitation. They provide a visible representation of the hard economic times and a reminder that there are many who are hit harder than us. I visited the tent city once or twice during the semester to conduct interviews for my individual research project, but never delved specifically into the story of the tent city and its residents. This Thursday morning Corlis and I finally did, climbing over the guard rail, tourists entering a world where we clearly did not belong…

I don’t want my kids to see me like this

Bruce greeted us as we walked down the muddy slope; he was wearing a grungy black sweat suit and his gray hair looked around 2 weeks overdue for a cut. He rejected our request to get our brief conversation with him on film, responding, “I can’t be in your movie. I don’t want my kids to see me like this.” Despite his resistance to being filmed, he was eager to talk. He wanted to share his story, wanted someone to listen.

Too often, we think of the homeless as wayward single men throwing their own lives away in some way or another, but we cannot afford to forget that homelessness is something that tears apart families, too. What does he mean by “like this”? The shame goes far beyond just grubby clothes, unkempt hair, and a muddy canvas residence under the freeway bridge. Bruce explained his true shame: his complete surrender to alcoholism and how it has destroyed everything important in his life. He told us it takes him about 10 or 12 beers to get to where you can tell he has been drinking, but that vodka is cheaper. He said has taken to drinking it instead lately, a fact that made his label-less plastic water bottle suddenly seemed less innocent. He said that it only takes about a pint to get him really going, and that when he gets going he becomes an entirely different person. This other person he becomes is the reason that he got kicked out of several different rehab programs and several different shelters. Slave to his disease, he has driven away every opportunity designed to help him up.

When I asked him if he had plans to get clean, he responded honestly, “Eventually, yeah, but right now all I think about is where my next drink is going to come from. As soon as I get a buck, I go right to the liquor store.”

He followed this immediately with, “Hey girls, that camera looks expensive, do you have a dollar or two you could give me?”

Te tee at Welcome Arnold shelter in 2007

It is strange how the small things are sometimes the most striking in an interview. Te tee’s boyfriend calling her T across the room while we were packing up to leave really jarred me. I guess the fact that we have the same nickname forced me to realize again that she is no better equipped to deal with the hardships life has thrown at her than I am, but for some reason I am the lucky one.

Te tee has had an incredible life, starting with her escape from civil war in Libera at age ten. While she and her siblings escaped to the United States with their grandmother, their hardships continue on this side of the Atlantic. Te tee suffers from severe post traumatic stress disorder and was described by her boyfriend as manic depressive, although I do not know if she has ever been formally diagnosed. She is smart enough to have survived the transition from war-torn Libera as well as an abusive step mother and a series of ill-fitting foster families. Her voice swells with pride when she talks about how she is a smart girl, but drops again when she says she only completed high school through the eleventh grade because of the birth of her first child when she was 19. She now has three children: two boys who are in the custody of Te tee’s foster mom in Baltimore, and a daughter who is in the custody of Te Tee’s 78 year old grandmother.

32 year old Te tee has been homeless on and off for the last 5 years. Her fiery temper gets her into trouble and she has lost both jobs and housing because of it. She fell prey to cocaine addiction but says that she is clean now because she “got sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Before she got clean, however, she began to sell her body on the street in order to fund her addiction. One potential customer turned out to be an undercover cop and she spent six months in the Adult Correctional Institute(ACI) in Rhode Island. She has lived in emergency homeless shelters, transitional housing, in abandoned buildings, on her grandmother’s floor, and literally on the street. We interviewed her at her grandmother’s apartment in Manton Heights, a Providence public housing complex. For Te tee, the small apartment is a haven where she and her boyfriend go when they leave the homeless shelter in the morning so that they can stay out of trouble, but it is far from an ideal retreat. Mold creeping up the walls and roaches everywhere hardly compare to the violence outside the door. Te tee’s boyfriend is one of the only white people around the neighborhood and his black eye at the time of the interview is evidence of how the black boys in the neighborhood do not tolerate outsiders “messing with their women.” Drugs and alcohol flow freely in neighboring apartments, and popular Te tee has trouble consistently resisting all of her friends offers.

While she is chronically homeless and without work, Te tee looked healthy and relatively happy. Compared to her 2007 interview, Te tee spoke with much more clarity and with a lot more smiles. She has gained weight and is looking for a job with the ultimate goal of getting her children back some day. The arrest on her history and her listing of the homeless shelter as her address are hindering her job application process, but she tries on a fairly regular basis. Until then, she at least gets to visit her daughter at her grandmother’s house and has high hopes for eventually going back to school. It is hard to say if the system has failed her, or if she has failed the system with her constant violence and breaking of shelter and transitional housing rules. She still has a case worker trying to get her help into supportive housing programs, but she has honestly had almost every opportunity that service providers offer given to her. Somehow all the help and opportunities have somehow slipped through her fingers. The hardest thing for me to get my head around is the fact that I do not know really how to help her. Our small offering of a few pizzas in thanks for the use of the Manton Heights apartment as an interview space is meager in the face of their intense poverty. I am not even sure if a few hundred dollars or a few thoughsand dollars would really result in true success for Te tee. The more people I talk to, the more I realize how complicated “getting back on your feet” really is.