Sleeping rough - life on the streets part 1

It is tougher than you would have ever thought. It's deadly cold, it's boiling hot, it's soaking wet and not just until you get home. When it's freezing during the day, it will be worse for the night, and you won't contemplate it from your room. Your frost-bitten toes and fingers will make you feel it. You roam the streets endlessly, and sometimes when you get tired, you lay down. It just has to be flat. They you keep on wandering without a purpose or destination. And when you've walked too far, you start your way back. You only to stop when you realise you haven't eaten for 36 hours. Days follow the nights and that's how you try to measure how time is going by.

Living rough is brutal. In order to understand how this situation is created, what the homeless experience and how their misery could be resolved, let's see their harsh reality under a few headings.

What makes someone homeless?

1. The most common and understandable reason for homelessness is poverty. A great many people cannot afford to pay increasing housing prices and rents. Therefore they are forced to move together with roommates and forget about private housing. In many cases the lack of financial resources drives people out to the streets.

2. If you fail to pay the rent, you might get evicted by your landlord or landlady. Without money, you can't find a new place to live so you may become a down-and-out. If you are unable to pay your mortgage, then it is the bank who evicts you and the consequences might be the same.

3. Obviously, a longer period of unemployment may also trigger homelessness, and often it is coupled with poor educational background.

4. People with physical or mental health problems might also lose their homes.

5. Addiction exposes humans to all sorts of hazards, including homelessness. Alcohol and drug addicts spend all their money on substance, and develop behaviour patterns that will eventually deprive them of their jobs and lead them towards eviction. Gambling addicts also spend everything they have on the games they play, moreover they borrow money from everyone they know, so they may not even have people to put them up for a few days when they end up on the street.

6. Divorces and breakups may result in losing your permanent residence, as it may be owned by your ex-partner

7. Ex-convicts may leave the prison with no place to go home to, so they start to live rough. Likewise, people who were brought up in different institutions are also in big danger.

8. Those who have suffered from domestic violence, or were abused physically or sexually anytime in their past have a tendency to give up their efforts and move to the streets.

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