Everyone deserves a place to call home

Published in The Republican Herald, December 30, 2012

When my mother was the reading teacher for the fifth and sixth grades at the Lengel Middle School, every year at Christmas she read her class The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson. This 1971 novel for young readers tells the Christmas story from a different angle, that of the worst kids in town, who get involved in a Christmas pageant when they hear the rumor that chocolate cake is served on a regular basis at the local church.

Those children, the Herdmans—and they are quite a herd—live over a garage on the wrong side of the tracks. At school, they steal from their classmates’ lunchboxes and at home they try to crush each other beneath the automatic garage door or sic the ferocious family cat on any social worker who comes to call. Their dad left home one evening, never to return. Their mom works two shifts in a factory, surely out of need, but mostly to get away from the kids. Needless to say, the Herdman children, two girls and four boys, had never been to church before they heard about the chocolate cake.

At the first rehearsal for the Christmas pageant, the story of the Nativity, they bully themselves into all the main roles, Mary, Joseph, the wise men, and the angel of the Lord. There’s just one problem: they are the only ones who don’t know the story and, hearing it for the first time, hearing how on a cold winter’s night a pregnant woman and her husband were turned away from the inn, the Herdmans are up in arms. Where were the social workers? Why was no doctor around? And how could anyone leave that poor couple in a stable, with, as the carol goes, “no crib for a bed” for their baby, nothing but a dirty trough filled with straw? What kind of people could do such a thing to a couple of refugees, cold, hungry, and with no place to go?

Bethlehem, a mountain city, is a cold place in winter, but not nearly as cold as Paris has been this December. Winters are generally mild here, compared to Pennsylvania, and snow, since my arrival in the city in 1991, has been rare. December 2012, however, has been different. Snow, intense cold and freezing rain have become our daily lot and fashion-conscious Parisians have taken to wearing hats or caps, pulled low on the forehead, putting at risk (for men and women both) stylish coiffures.

For the city’s contingent of over 5,000 SDFs, a French acronym referring to the homeless, sans domicile fixe (without a permanent home), the cold and snow have added yet another layer of difficulty to their daily struggle to survive. Between the time those lucky enough to have a bed for the night are turned out of shelters early in the morning until they line up to get into a shelter the next night, they have a long day in front of them.

In warm weather, they can take refuge in city parks. In cold, they head underground, into the metro. There, they tend to melt into the woodwork, or, more accurately, into the white tiles which cover the walls of the corridors and stations of the Parisian subway system. As for us commuters, unless one gets in our way, we hardly notice them, so used have we become to the presence of the homeless in our midst.

On crowded subway platforms, we turn our backs on them. Craning our necks, on the lookout for the next train, we stand poised to elbow our way inside. Once the train pulls in and the automatic doors slide open, we surge inside, leaving the homeless behind. We’re heading home, they’re left to sit on the incredibly uncomfortable seats provided by the transportation authority ever since benches were done away with, in order to prevent the homeless from lying down. Since the cold has set in, they’ve set up camp. Wrapped in blankets, they picnic on the platform, washing their meals down with cheap beer or wine, staying till closing time (the Parisian metro closes for about five hours each night).

Inside the train, we commuters travel with beggars. They’re not as easy to ignore as the homeless, who sit and stare but rarely speak. Beggars, on the contrary, speak out. They make speeches, describing the difficulties of their life, how hard it is to keep clean or find a bed for the night. Some go on and on.

Gypsies, for example, go from car to car, all the while shaking a paper cup from Starbuck’s or McDonald’s, repeating monsieur-dame, s’il vous plaît, aidez-moi, please help me, help my baby. And that’s the worst of it—these beggars, mostly women, usually balance a baby on one hip and are often pregnant with another. For weeks, every Tuesday, at the same hour, I cross such a woman, wondering if she may soon give birth before my very eyes.

On another occasion, a woman, a Rom, as gypsies prefer to be called, sang in a keening voice, while her little son worked his way through the crowd, holding a dirty paper cup. Nobody was giving so I reached in my pocket, found a fifty-centime coin and dropped it in. The boy said “merci” and gave me a beautiful, genuine smile. I’d just given him a little more than fifty cents. Did I really deserve so much in return?

Since 1997, the homeless in France have a special number to call, 115, when they need a place to sleep or urgent care, except that, these days, no one’s picking up the phone. Too many requests, too much need, no room at the inn, which, in this case means a shelter where the homeless are offered disposable sheets and a “kit propreté,” containing what it takes to keep clean. What’s even more disturbing, more young people than ever are making the call. Homeless, without work, often alienated from their families, many would join their voices to that of one homeless young man who recently said on the evening news, all he’s asking for is electricity, running water, and a place to lay his head.

I guess there has never been enough room at the inn, not in Jesus’ day nor our own. Then as now, a too large majority has ignored the homeless, the way we commuters do in the metro today. Should we offer them our garages or tool sheds, contemporary versions of the stable of long ago, or the extra room in our apartment or home? Like the Herdmans, should we all be up in arms because so many men, women and children sleep out in the cold? Wouldn’t 2013 truly be a better year if all of us had a place to call home?

You can watch the 1982 made-for-TV movie of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, with Loretta Switt, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4KSXrz28uE