How involved should "we" get?? What is smart and what is not...

Warning, Extremely Long Wordy Post Ahead!!
So, the area in question here is the homeless population in Calgary. I have always been a suburbia girl myself, so I have never quite been so overwhelmed with the homeless population in a city as I am here. This is really the first time I have ever lived in the "inner city". I have been approached by quite a few homeless people who come up to the mini-van at gas stations asking for money or cigarettes, I even had one person follow me all through a grocery store while I got everything on my list while Collin was in the cart, so that I could help them with money when I checked out. I was a little scared which is why I complied. Overall, the homeless people here have not seemed too dangerous, but a little more aggressive here in approaching you and asking you eye to eye. I am not sure if it has to do with where we live or that possibly there are more homeless people here than we have ever encountered before. Don't get me wrong, we do not live in "the hood" at all, we live in a very nice inner city neighborhood, with lots of families and children.

Let me rewind to 25yrs. ago....

All through my elementary school career, we lived in Denver, CO. My grandparents also lived there. Often times, when I would go to my grandparents house, which was a nice middle class home in a nice suburb of Denver, my grandfather, "Bu" would take me on walks. Before our walks, he would often hand me a plastic grocery bag and I would know what we were going to do.....the collecting the cans game. I thought all kids did this with their grandparents! I thought it was fun, we collected as many cans as we could, then he would take my brother and I to a place where we would get money(very little money) in exchange for the cans. Sometimes we would come home from our walks with many bags...sometimes, none at all. I think it went a bit far at one point when he had taken us to a park and "Bu" and I were digging through the big dumpsters for cans. It was at this point when a couple of teenage guys saw us digging and came up to us and handed my grandfather some coins....I am sure that my mother was a little horrified...but that is truly my only experience being a can collector, dumpster diver...and it was hard work, but I had a nice warm bed to go home to. I think after that, we stopped with taking the bags on our walks:)

Fast forward to now. We have been here for four months, I have never witnessed so many people diving in dumpsters for cans and anything salvageable. As you drive through drive thru's there are usually people right by the drive thru digging in the dumpsters. I feel especially bad if it is a really bone chilling cold day and I see them as I go thru the Starbucks drive thru, they are cold and digging. A friend of ours told us to leave our cans behind our house in our alley and let them collect the cans...I thought it was a decent idea and I had noticed that the man behind our house often left out a coat or some gloves etc...so we started doing that. I must say that Earle did question if it was a good idea to attract people to come near our home. Although he did like the idea of helping people in such an easy way. Strangely enough, within 30 minutes or so of putting them out, they were almost always gone. So you wonder, how they know so quickly and where they may be hiding and watching things from. Yesterday morning, I was coming home from getting some coffee and as I pulled into the alley I saw 3 men walking down it with their grocery carts looking for left out cans. They stopped almost directly behind my house and started chatting with someone, as if, stopping by the neighbors house to say hello. Then I realized that a homeless person had been staying almost directly behind our house. I had remembered on a walk seeing through the fence that there was an old chair and a mattress behind the shed in some one's backyard. Hmmm...my first thought was, maybe we should leave out our left overs for this person or something...I kind of wanted to see where he was living...it was hard to see through the fence, but I could see where he got into the people's yard, there was a hole where the trash cans are collected that he crawled through. I decided I might have to snap a quick picture over the fence so I could see...so on my way to take Ben to school yesterday, I took some pictures outside and then decided to quickly take one to ease my curiosity of where this person was dwelling...


After I picked Ben up from school as I drove down our alley I squinted to try and see between the slots of the fence a little more than I could capture from the pretty poor picture I had taken of the dwelling... and to my disappointment, the chair and mattress were gone. He had left! I am afraid I may have scared him by taking the picture, I had not thought that he was there at the time!

My neighbor was pulling into her garage and I told her of the events of the day. I told her that I felt so badly that I may have scared this person off. She on the other hand, was horrified that there was a homeless person setting up camp directly behind her home! She told me that about the time that we moved in that the three other homes in our garage grouping had all had their garages broken into and bikes and things stolen. And then she said she had noticed that we had been leaving out cans, and that the other neighbors had decided after the break-ins to not leave them out or anything that might attract people to our alley. I guess I now understand her surprised reaction. So after such a long story.....can you tell me what is our place?? I understand being smart about not getting vandalized, but seriously, I have really been thinking about people and classes of people and how everyone is equal in God's eyes. I mean, none of us have "immunity" to the possibility of that happening to us some day. I am sure that none of these homeless people thought, "Hey, I want to be a homeless person when I grow up and have to beg people for stuff and dig through dumpsters."

What about the poor man and Lazarus? Jesus really seems to focus quite a few of his messages on helping the poor and needy people. Hebrews 13:2 says.."Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it."

So where is the line here? I know you have to use common sense and be careful, but it is a hard line to define, especially if it is an issue that is literally almost right in your back yard. I am sure there are other ways to help...maybe we'll just leave our cans out at the recycling plant. Any thoughts????

Here are the pics I took on Friday...


Alley behind our garage...
This fence is to the facing our garage just back from the garage you see on the left. The cut out hole is where people put their trash cans. This is where the person would get in and out of the back yard directly, catty cornered behind our garage.

Dwelling Place....you can see a chair through the fence vaguely... Over the fence....not a great pic, but really so sad.

CB