I Slept in a Tent for Nearly Six Years
My first night officially homeless was December 31, 2011. I was evicted from my apartment and decided I would rather sleep in a tent than return to a housing situation that was contributing to my health issues.
I bought a tent and threw it out the next morning and replaced it, having sweated god awful stuff out, contaminating the tent. Sleeping in a tent for some years allowed me to periodically replace my "home," usually every one to three months, thereby helping me break the cycle of sickness that I was stuck in.
The first two days on the street, none of us had much appetite. We looked our symptoms up and we were all reacting like people withdrawing from heroin, though none of us had ever used recreational drugs.
We believe the apartment we had been living in had drug residues from a previous tenant or perhaps a neighbor was smoking it or perhaps both.
After three nights in a tent, I felt so much better than I had in years that I decided I wasn't going back to work. I emailed in my letter of resignation and left town on foot.
At some point in those first few days on the street, I laughingly said about how good I felt sleeping in a tent among trees "It's almost as if we evolved to live among the trees." I think that quip occured after I quit my job and left town.
While homeless, we routinely went hungry or underfed for part of every month. I often threw up on days when we were seriously underfed and I used to joke "I didn't want to eat today ANYWAY!"
It was around January or February of 2017 when it finally really sank in that this wasn't coincidence. So it took several years for me to realize that fasting or being underfed was causing me to throw up and actually helping me to heal.
The healthier I got, the more it took to provoke vomiting. The incident that caused the Aha! moment was one where we were underfed one day and actually had nothing to eat the following day but I didn't begin vomiting until the evening of the second day.
In reaction to me finally vomiting, one of my sons quipped something like "Today is a real fasting day."
One day, I was talking off the cuff about my half-formed ideas of the how and why behind fasting being helpful. I don't recall what I was saying because my son said in reply something like "No, I think it frees up white blood cells to be used elsewhere."
Normally, between 70 and 80 percent of the immune cells in the body can be found in the gut, plus the gut is lined with mucus. These facts suggest that filtering out invasive microbes from our food is a large burden on the body and one way to free up immune resources is to take a break from eating, a la the saying:
Common religious themes seem to include: encouraging people to eat less meat, encouraging people to fast periodically and encouraging people to live a spartan life. These are all things I have done to get myself healthier in the face of an incurable genetic disorder.
From previous posts on this site:
My husband apparently brought back a trypanosoma infection from his six-month tour of duty in Saudi Arabia. My understanding is Islam encourages or requires people to shave all their body hair and we have found that shaving body hair helps remove trypanosomas from the system with generally less drama than other methods (usually).
Trypanosomas vindictively poison you as they die in your system, leaving you very miserable and in a state of despair with a deep sense of hopelessness. They feed on cartilage which is made of the same stuff as hair and nails. Cutting hair and nails is one means to reduce the load of infection and remove them from the system without giving them the chance to poison you as they die.
So I can't help but wonder if this Islamic tradition that I have heard exists might not be a best practice for peoples living in a region with trypanosomas to help keep infection under control and perhaps even reduce odds of transmission to other people.
According to Wikipedia, chronic trypanosomas is not treatable or curable. It can only be treated in its acute stage -- i.e. shortly after exposure. And yet here is a religion with practices that I know to be helpful in combatting the infection to some degree.
While homeless, as much as possible, we tried to use public bathrooms to relieve ourselves. If we had to go in the bushes, we still cleaned up afterwards. We just did so with "field methods," such as hand sanitizer and peroxide.
For more than a year, none of us managed to get a proper shower. We would clean up in bathrooms or go to the beach and clean up in ocean water.
And, yet, our health was improving.
Still, my first hot shower after more than a year without a proper shower caused a lot of dead skin to slough off. I didn't really feel clean until after my second shower in that same hotel room before hitting the road again.
Our last two years on the street, we typically managed to spend one to three nights in a hotel room about once a month. At first, I bathed to soak the grime and dead skin off. Over time, I resumed showering because showering regularly once a month made a big difference in how clean I was able to stay by washing up in bathrooms the rest of the time.
Elsewhere, I have pondered how to better address hygiene for homeless Americans. Such thoughts are rooted in the fact that I got to visit modern hygeine infrastructure periodically while homeless but didn't have consistent access to such.
When I was growing up, sometimes in the summer we would go to a lake with a wave machine and probably a man-made beach. There were public showers there.
Swimming was a big part of my childhood. I used public showers at so many pools, beaches and lakes as a kid that I just thought public showers were commonly available in the US.
There were also public showers in Port Aransas that cost only a dollar and didn't require any kind of camp fees or have other barriers to access. Those were on the beach where I spent a month early on in my adventures in homelessness.
I was shocked to learn this is not a norm at beaches across the US. I could not find similar while homeless in California where I assumed it would be easy to get a cheap shower in a coastal state.
A lot of beaches in California only have "rinse off" showers out in the open where you can't take your clothes off. They are seemingly designed to be used by someone still in a bathing suit, not someone changing back into street clothes.
To my mind, this is bizarre. I thought private showers with changing rooms so you could clean up after swimming all day and go home in your street clothes was the norm at beaches because that's what I grew up with.
I thought "rinse off" showers were only found at apartment complexes where the rule was that you had to be a resident or guest of a resident, so you only needed to get the chlorine bleach off before going back to the apartment to shower properly. Putting them on a public beach and providing no private showers at all seems just unfathomable to me. Like "What on earth are they thinking??"
I don't understand why there aren't more public showers in the US. When homeless individuals develop serious health issues, it spreads to other populations.
Sleeping in a tent is not such a terrible thing. There are people who do that for FUN. They call it camping.
But lack of adequate access to modern wash facilities is a hardship for the homeless population and this fact seems to be rooted in hating on poor people. It's a hatred that comes back to bite us when it fosters the spread of diseases like Hepatitis A, a disease that has been a quiet problem in the US in recent years.
I would like to see more affordable housing in the US, but the reality is that long before the US had serious chronic homelessness, it had vagabonds and hobos. Some people like moving around and will not be stopped by the fact that they are poor.
Nor should they be.
But lack of adequate access to shower facilities is a problem for such people and it is a problem that we all pay for. When we deny the poorest of the poor -- the homeless and vagabonds and hobos -- ability to get a shower somewhat regularly, it puts all of us at risk of getting sick from something.
So, again, I would like to see more affordable housing in the US, but I would also like to see more "public" showers in the US. It seems to me more public showers is probably the easier/cheaper thing to quickly improve in some fashion.
For the larger world, what you see is that in towns that have grown too large and dense for village life but still have the public infrastructure of a village -- they lack proper sanitation -- women get raped and sometimes even murdered when having to relieve themselves in public fields unofficially designated for such. It's also a health issue that spreads disease.
Past a certain population density, we need to supply public toilets and showers somehow. (I don't necessarily mean "by the government" per se. Just that the public should have access to them.)
Being able to stay in a hotel about once a month so I could get properly cleaned up once a month made it substantially easier to stay adequately clean all month. My feet stopped turning black from road dust on sandaled feet.
I will note that in the time of Jesus, washing a visitor's feet was apparently a cultural norm and also people tended to wear sandals and walk everywhere.
This is, no doubt, written very badly. People routinely think I am some kind of radical trying to be controversial. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I'm just someone who took a long strange journey and it made me a social outcast whose truth is "unspeakable." I struggle to find ways to adequately express my thoughts in a socially palatable fashion while trapped in social Siberia because no one wishes to engage with me.
I'm absolutely not trying to be a radical. I'm trying to quietly suggest relatively easy first steps to take to make certain things better, both personally and at larger scales.
I bought a tent and threw it out the next morning and replaced it, having sweated god awful stuff out, contaminating the tent. Sleeping in a tent for some years allowed me to periodically replace my "home," usually every one to three months, thereby helping me break the cycle of sickness that I was stuck in.
The first two days on the street, none of us had much appetite. We looked our symptoms up and we were all reacting like people withdrawing from heroin, though none of us had ever used recreational drugs.
We believe the apartment we had been living in had drug residues from a previous tenant or perhaps a neighbor was smoking it or perhaps both.
After three nights in a tent, I felt so much better than I had in years that I decided I wasn't going back to work. I emailed in my letter of resignation and left town on foot.
At some point in those first few days on the street, I laughingly said about how good I felt sleeping in a tent among trees "It's almost as if we evolved to live among the trees." I think that quip occured after I quit my job and left town.
While homeless, we routinely went hungry or underfed for part of every month. I often threw up on days when we were seriously underfed and I used to joke "I didn't want to eat today ANYWAY!"
It was around January or February of 2017 when it finally really sank in that this wasn't coincidence. So it took several years for me to realize that fasting or being underfed was causing me to throw up and actually helping me to heal.
The healthier I got, the more it took to provoke vomiting. The incident that caused the Aha! moment was one where we were underfed one day and actually had nothing to eat the following day but I didn't begin vomiting until the evening of the second day.
In reaction to me finally vomiting, one of my sons quipped something like "Today is a real fasting day."
Poverty stole your golden shoes
but it didn't steal your laughter
One day, I was talking off the cuff about my half-formed ideas of the how and why behind fasting being helpful. I don't recall what I was saying because my son said in reply something like "No, I think it frees up white blood cells to be used elsewhere."
Normally, between 70 and 80 percent of the immune cells in the body can be found in the gut, plus the gut is lined with mucus. These facts suggest that filtering out invasive microbes from our food is a large burden on the body and one way to free up immune resources is to take a break from eating, a la the saying:
Feed a fever. Starve a cold.I think one constructive purpose of religion is that it serves as a repository of observed or accumulated human wisdom that hasn't been fleshed out "scientifically." Some of it is sort of half-baked and erroneous, but you see certain themes across many successful religions and while some of the specifics sometimes seem to have gone awry -- I have heard that Ramadan (a month of fasting during the day) was originally scheduled for the coolest month of the year for the part of the world where it originated and it has moved over time due to calendar errors -- those broad themes seem generally sound.
Common religious themes seem to include: encouraging people to eat less meat, encouraging people to fast periodically and encouraging people to live a spartan life. These are all things I have done to get myself healthier in the face of an incurable genetic disorder.
From previous posts on this site:
There doesn't seem to be a lot of hard science on how and why fasting helps but there seems to be substantial anecdotal evidence that many people with a variety of health issues find fasting beneficial.
So one easy way to eat cleaner is to eat less meat, fish and dairy.
...seeing that movie made it clear in my mind that even a single old keepsake photo can have millions of microbes on it and can, thus keep your health problems alive by keeping your infections alive.I have come to believe we have the phrase North American Affluenza as a kind of Freudian slip, a subconscious acknowledgement that our excess of possessions are keeping a lot of people unwell.
My husband apparently brought back a trypanosoma infection from his six-month tour of duty in Saudi Arabia. My understanding is Islam encourages or requires people to shave all their body hair and we have found that shaving body hair helps remove trypanosomas from the system with generally less drama than other methods (usually).
Trypanosomas vindictively poison you as they die in your system, leaving you very miserable and in a state of despair with a deep sense of hopelessness. They feed on cartilage which is made of the same stuff as hair and nails. Cutting hair and nails is one means to reduce the load of infection and remove them from the system without giving them the chance to poison you as they die.
So I can't help but wonder if this Islamic tradition that I have heard exists might not be a best practice for peoples living in a region with trypanosomas to help keep infection under control and perhaps even reduce odds of transmission to other people.
According to Wikipedia, chronic trypanosomas is not treatable or curable. It can only be treated in its acute stage -- i.e. shortly after exposure. And yet here is a religion with practices that I know to be helpful in combatting the infection to some degree.
While homeless, as much as possible, we tried to use public bathrooms to relieve ourselves. If we had to go in the bushes, we still cleaned up afterwards. We just did so with "field methods," such as hand sanitizer and peroxide.
For more than a year, none of us managed to get a proper shower. We would clean up in bathrooms or go to the beach and clean up in ocean water.
And, yet, our health was improving.
Still, my first hot shower after more than a year without a proper shower caused a lot of dead skin to slough off. I didn't really feel clean until after my second shower in that same hotel room before hitting the road again.
Our last two years on the street, we typically managed to spend one to three nights in a hotel room about once a month. At first, I bathed to soak the grime and dead skin off. Over time, I resumed showering because showering regularly once a month made a big difference in how clean I was able to stay by washing up in bathrooms the rest of the time.
Elsewhere, I have pondered how to better address hygiene for homeless Americans. Such thoughts are rooted in the fact that I got to visit modern hygeine infrastructure periodically while homeless but didn't have consistent access to such.
When I was growing up, sometimes in the summer we would go to a lake with a wave machine and probably a man-made beach. There were public showers there.
Swimming was a big part of my childhood. I used public showers at so many pools, beaches and lakes as a kid that I just thought public showers were commonly available in the US.
There were also public showers in Port Aransas that cost only a dollar and didn't require any kind of camp fees or have other barriers to access. Those were on the beach where I spent a month early on in my adventures in homelessness.
I was shocked to learn this is not a norm at beaches across the US. I could not find similar while homeless in California where I assumed it would be easy to get a cheap shower in a coastal state.
A lot of beaches in California only have "rinse off" showers out in the open where you can't take your clothes off. They are seemingly designed to be used by someone still in a bathing suit, not someone changing back into street clothes.
To my mind, this is bizarre. I thought private showers with changing rooms so you could clean up after swimming all day and go home in your street clothes was the norm at beaches because that's what I grew up with.
I thought "rinse off" showers were only found at apartment complexes where the rule was that you had to be a resident or guest of a resident, so you only needed to get the chlorine bleach off before going back to the apartment to shower properly. Putting them on a public beach and providing no private showers at all seems just unfathomable to me. Like "What on earth are they thinking??"
I don't understand why there aren't more public showers in the US. When homeless individuals develop serious health issues, it spreads to other populations.
Sleeping in a tent is not such a terrible thing. There are people who do that for FUN. They call it camping.
But lack of adequate access to modern wash facilities is a hardship for the homeless population and this fact seems to be rooted in hating on poor people. It's a hatred that comes back to bite us when it fosters the spread of diseases like Hepatitis A, a disease that has been a quiet problem in the US in recent years.
I would like to see more affordable housing in the US, but the reality is that long before the US had serious chronic homelessness, it had vagabonds and hobos. Some people like moving around and will not be stopped by the fact that they are poor.
Nor should they be.
But lack of adequate access to shower facilities is a problem for such people and it is a problem that we all pay for. When we deny the poorest of the poor -- the homeless and vagabonds and hobos -- ability to get a shower somewhat regularly, it puts all of us at risk of getting sick from something.
So, again, I would like to see more affordable housing in the US, but I would also like to see more "public" showers in the US. It seems to me more public showers is probably the easier/cheaper thing to quickly improve in some fashion.
For the larger world, what you see is that in towns that have grown too large and dense for village life but still have the public infrastructure of a village -- they lack proper sanitation -- women get raped and sometimes even murdered when having to relieve themselves in public fields unofficially designated for such. It's also a health issue that spreads disease.
Past a certain population density, we need to supply public toilets and showers somehow. (I don't necessarily mean "by the government" per se. Just that the public should have access to them.)
Being able to stay in a hotel about once a month so I could get properly cleaned up once a month made it substantially easier to stay adequately clean all month. My feet stopped turning black from road dust on sandaled feet.
I will note that in the time of Jesus, washing a visitor's feet was apparently a cultural norm and also people tended to wear sandals and walk everywhere.
When I came into your house, you gave me no water for my feet, but she washed my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair.I don't know what infrastructure and cultural practices we need to make sure that even people sleeping in tents can keep clean and healthy. I do know from firsthand experience that it doesn't take full-time access to a private bath of your own to raise the bar substantially on personal hygiene.
This is, no doubt, written very badly. People routinely think I am some kind of radical trying to be controversial. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I'm just someone who took a long strange journey and it made me a social outcast whose truth is "unspeakable." I struggle to find ways to adequately express my thoughts in a socially palatable fashion while trapped in social Siberia because no one wishes to engage with me.
I'm absolutely not trying to be a radical. I'm trying to quietly suggest relatively easy first steps to take to make certain things better, both personally and at larger scales.
