mango4ever and fringe ministry

     I have been in Salt Lake City now for over 12 years.  In that time, I was homeless and a majority of that time I have spent working to help the homeless community.  So, I have known more people than I can count who have frozen to death.  I’ve been in a position before where I was afraid that I might freeze to death. Put that into perspective, I cannot count all the people that I have known that died from freezing to death.  So when I see our local leaders pat themselves on the back for a job well done when it comes to addressing the homeless issue, it makes me sick. 

     They point to the fact that our homeless population in Utah is 11 in 10,000, which is only a little more than half of the national average which is 20 in 10,000 as a good figure.  But if you consider that our homeless mortality rate is almost 3 times the national average, then their “job well done” nonsense falls apart.  I have seen firsthand how this is playing out.  As I mentioned before I cannot count the people that I have known that have frozen to death.  Definitely not a job well done.

     For one thing, we pay these useless people that we call “ambassadors” to walk around in yellow shirts and shoo people away from store fronts with no concern about what happens to them once they are out of sight.  I know of one young man, that I have been working with since he first ran away from foster care at the age of 18, who was “helped” by these useless ambassadors to travel to North Carolina to a small town for some girl he met online, in the middle of a blizzard.  Long story short after a week stranded in a blizzard on the other side of the country he could have died.  If it weren’t for people like me and a very nice North Carolina sheriff who helped us, he very well could have died.  These useless ambassadors might think of that as a success, one less homeless person in front of their precious tourists.  But to people like me who have to deal with the problems their lack of concern for people causes, it was almost another lost life.

     For over 12 years now I have had to fight against the very system that “helps” the homeless to stop them from dying from that help.  The previous mentioned story is only one of many that I have at this point.  Just the ways they have threatened my life are enough to make me want to change this corrupt system that is more about raising money than it is about saving lives.  Because anyone with a brain knows the real reason we have ambassadors anyway, and it is NOT saving lives.  But that is for another blog.

     Long story short, we need to stop looking at the homeless in Salt Lake City as less than human and something that can be exploited to raise money, which is the main and only goal of some of our local “nonprofits.”

     We can do better, and we need to do better.  Period.