When I was a kid, my mom and I played Punch Buggy. The rules were simple. Whoever spotted a Volkswagen Beetle first got to call it out. “Punch Buggy!” Before long, it seemed like Beetles were everywhere. Of course they …
When people think about homelessness, this is often the image that comes to mind. A bench. A shopping cart. Everything someone owns piled together. It’s a real image. It’s also an incomplete one. My experience doesn’t look like this. Tonight …
Every day has a headline somewhere. This wasn’t one of them. These photographs were made during a single lunch hour on one block of Richter Street in Kelowna. A restaurant opens for lunch. A delivery arrives. Shelter staff prepare lunch. …
The Richter Street Bike Shop It really was a five-dollar bike. You could tell. It was kind of silver. Kind of rusty. The paint was chipped, scratched, and faded from years of use. The front tire was black. The rear …
People tell you to keep looking. They mean well. They imagine looking for housing means scrolling through listings over a morning coffee, sending a few messages, arranging a viewing, signing a lease, and moving in. That isn’t what it looks …
There are sentences you’re not supposed to say out loud. “I like taking my shits here.” Read that again. It’s crude. It isn’t polished. It isn’t the sort of sentence you’d expect to open a piece of journalism. It’s also …
The shower room has a motion sensor light switch. Outside. If you stop moving long enough to wash your hair, dry off, get dressed, or simply sit and organize your belongings, eventually the lights go out. Then you have two …
Someone invited me for fish and chips this morning. I wanted to go. The people inviting me weren’t offering charity. They know me. They knew me before I became homeless. They know my work, my photography, my radio background, my …
At 4:42 a.m., I called 911. By that point, my regular medications had stopped controlling the pain. It had become so severe that simply getting from my bed to the shelter door was an ordeal. Every push on my manual …
I wasn’t looking for a story. I’d finished what I needed to do for the day. I was tired. I had a few hours before the last bus, and I really didn’t feel like going back to the shelter just …