Jess was kind of scruffy, and since childhood, I’ve been taught to avoid talking to strangers. Normally I don’t talk to homeless people. But he came up to me and initiated the conversation. It kind of caught me off guard.

Jess had overheard me talking about working for the Daily Nebraskan, and he wanted to know how I had gotten my job. I explained that it was for students, and his face dropped. Turned out, he’d been looking for work for awhile.

He didn’t stop talking though. Jess launched into his life story, telling me all about working construction in Alaska and getting deported from Mexico.

Yeah. Deported from Mexico.

I’m still not sure how he managed that. Jess said he was looking for work in Lincoln. With the recession and all, he said it was one of the few places that still had good work. His wife had left him and taken the kids before he went to Mexico in the first place.

At the end of it all, he pulled out his iPhone and asked me for my number. He wanted to take me out to dinner at The Outback Steakhouse. That’s where my confusion kicked in, even more so than when he’d cryptically stated that he’d been deported from Mexico.

I asked him why he was homeless if he had the money for an iPhone and steaks. He dodged the question, and we went on our separate ways.

A few weeks later, I actually received a call from Jess (I had not given him my number), and again he talked about his past and his current job hunt. Even though he was staying at the shelter, he didn’t want a minimum wage job to pay the bills; he wanted something better. But with no education and no address to give, no one was giving him a chance.
The thing about Jess, though, is that he seemed like a genuinely nice guy, even if he did have the creepy ability to find phone numbers. He was well versed in philosophy, and knew what he was talking about when it came to construction. I was surprised.    Last I knew, Jess was heading to Iowa to look for work there.

My odd encounters with Jess got me thinking. While I do charity work and walk down O Street all the time, I never give much thought to the homeless. I never take the time to really connect with them, to find out where they came from or how they ended up on the streets. Even though I care enough to help, I don’t always care enough to listen.

And sometimes, that’s what people really need.

I still haven’t talked to many homeless people, but the few that I have conversed with seem like they don’t deserve it. Most have just fallen on hard times or they have mental illnesses.

My boyfriend talked to one man who said he had enough to pay rent on an apartment but preferred to sleep on the streets during the summer. I even met one guy who said he just feels more comfortable sleeping on the ground outside ever since he’s come back from Iraq. Plus, he can’t find a job he enjoys, so why suffer through one he hates? Granted, there are some homeless people who actually threw their lives away, but not all of them are like that. I think we forget that.

The common thread is that their stories are all amazing. These are people of all backgrounds, all experiences, all colors and creeds.

Yet those of us who are unfamiliar with their plight, those of us who’ve slept in beds all our lives and never gone hungry, we forget that they are just like us. They are human beings just trying to make it in this world.

We try to shove them into corners, get them out of out shopping districts and office spaces. We walk past them on the street, ignoring their signs, assuming that all of them are panhandlers or people who don’t deserve the change at the bottom of our pockets. We move our soup kitchens and shelters to back roads and dumpy neighborhoods, thinking that if we can’t see them, they aren’t there.

We need to stop ignoring the homeless, stop blaming them. We need to start listening. They aren’t going to go away.

– Heidi Garvin is a U. Nebraska junior News-Editorial and Political Science Major.