Therefore, first among the survival skills is to escape the looting on the streets.
A homeless person on the streets depends on doing little jobs here and there to make enough money for everyday food. This could be anything such as washing car windows on the streets to gathering cans for recycling to playing instruments on the street corners. For most homeless people, these menial jobs as it may seem to us provide the bread and butter on a day-to-day basis. [Simon Wykoff] Weathering the rough conditions, sleeping on cardboard boxes and surviving the dangers of the street with the limited possessions of a few clothes and coins teach one of the toughest life lessons. As the British prince Williams who spent a whole night on the streets sleeping with the homeless said, "I cannot, after one night, even begin to imagine what it must be like to sleep rough on London's streets night after night. Poverty, mental illness, drug and alcohol dependency and family breakdown cause people to become and then stay homeless." [The Guardian] To resist and survive drugs, alcohol and other dangerous elements on the streets requires a tough mind and this is a very critical quality for a homeless person.
3
Reading through the article by Simon Wykoff makes it clear that the familiar view of the homeless person as a 'Lazy bum' is a totally wronged notion. As Willem De Kooning, the...
Living amidst dangerous and unpredictable circumstances without any food or financial security makes these homeless street dwellers the roughest and toughest survivors of the land. When there is no certainty as to where and when the next meal would come from, and no safe place to retire for the night after a tired long day spent roaming on the streets doing menial jobs, it makes life an ongoing battle against all odds and certainly a far cry from the public branding these homeless people as 'Lazy bums'. As Simon Wykoff explains, living on the streets as a homeless person is certainly living on the edge, a task that requires patience, perseverance, stamina and loads of luck just to survive one more day!
Bibliography
1) Simon Wykoff, 'Unemployed and Working Hard',
2) The Guardian, 'Prince William Spends Night on London Street', Accessed January 2nd 2010, Available at, http://www.ngrguardiannews.com/world/article02//indexn3_html?pdate=231209&ptitle=Prince%20William%20spends%20night%20on%20London%20street&cpdate=293009
3) Jim Stringham & David R. Workman, 'The Unemployment Survival Guide', Published by Gibbs Smith, 2004, pg 13 -18
