I'd live in a tent in the back yard before I'd let my mother sleep on a park bench. Just sayin'.......... 
Posted on 08/22/2016 4:37:47 PM PDT by Theoria
If you’ve spent any time in downtown D.C., you’ve likely seen 80-year-old Wanda Witter.
Shock white hair, a determined, unsmiling set to her mouth, jeans. She may have asked you for some change and probably didn’t smile if you gave her some. This month you may have also been taken aback by the black eye and stitches across her face.
For years, Witter bedded down for the night at 13th and G streets in Northwest Washington, on the cement in her blue sleeping bag, pulled up tight to keep the rats and cockroaches out. Her tower of three suitcases was stacked on her hand cart and bike-locked to the patio chairs next to her.
She may have even told you that inside those bags is all the paperwork to prove the government owes her more than $100,000. And she was right.
“They kept thinking I was crazy, telling me to get rid of the suitcases,” said Witter, a former machinist from Corning, N.Y., who is divorced and the mother of four adult children.
“I knew, when I committed to homelessness, I had to be very careful about what I did. ‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ I told myself. Because they’ll think I’m a mental case,” she said.
She was right about that, too.
More than a dozen years passed before Witter finally met someone who didn’t think she was a nut job, who finally believed her — a social worker named Julie Turner.
Turner, who works for the Downtown Cluster of Congregations, got a call a nine months ago from the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless asking if she could work with Witter.
In fact, Turner had tried to help Witter once before when they met at a soup kitchen. Witter rejected her.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I wonder what country invented the “social Worker”
I'd live in a tent in the back yard before I'd let my mother sleep on a park bench. Just sayin'..........
She was a little wacked, not cashing the checks. She could have kept books on the checks vs. the total she was owed and still pursued her case.
Sure...or she would rather sleep in a park then live with them.[Always more to the story]
Yeah, there are sad relatives that way.
I know a person exactly like this. She has a few kids but she walks the streets selling stolen newspapers to get buy. No one wants her, and no one can help her.
I learned a long time ago not to assume that someone was crazy just because they told you a story that seemed outrageous or fantastic.
A wonderful man I knew in Sacramento told me about the tattoo on his arm and about a place called Theresienstadt.
Someone else told me about how he was getting harassed by the police and then one day I was there doing his laundry when the police showed up to harass him...and I got handcuffed just for being there.
And etc.
So anymore when someone tells me something ‘crazy’ I take the time to check their story before I make up my mind about it.
She might not have been able to understand how SS could pay her piecemeal, but again money is money and an account is an account. It’s not like, if this came to a court, the court would have required her to pay back $X to get $X + $Y.
THIS is probably the thing that got her sent to the shrinks.
The longer I live, the more I see things that are either divinely driven or demon-driven.
You had a good mom. If you took in my mom then one day you’d come home to find everything sold off to pay for drugs.
Amen.
Bad things do sometimes happen to people.
The very first ‘homeless person’ we saw living on the streets of one major USA city....this was back in about 1972 or 3.....anyway, she was there every day with her worldly possessions in a couple of plastic garbage sacks. My then-boss asked her up to his office. He spent several days with her...going through her jumbled piles of old papers. The result? It did very much appear that yes, she had been cheated out of money (by her lawyer in some sort of trust situation as I recall). Now, she was homeless and gradually losing her grasp on life
Another woman on the streets.... was there begging on the same corner for years and years, right near the big, ornate City Hall. It was so obvious that the mayor appointed the daughter of a former mayor to help solve the homeless crisis with ESPECIAL mention of this one woman. I happened to go by her every day and so we took up conversing. She was maybe 80 percent sane, she appeared to have some drug problem which I presumed contributed to those days when she was not as well connected with reality. At any event, she was mostly “there” and so we could chat. She had been abused by her husband or boy friend...which set her down the path she was on, alas. I managed to make arrangements for her (long story)...to receive free rent in a BRAND NEW nice apartment ... being run by a church charity... (for which I would contribute, again a long story)....I ran back to the lady on the corner all excited with the good news I had to share with her. Rents were very high in town and vacancies were scare. There was zero chance this woman could have gotten into a place to live on her own. Nevertheless, she immediately turned it down. She said she did not want to be enclosed in any building with other people, I guessed that was another consequence of her having been abused (indoors) by her former. ANYWAY, I explained that she was to have her OWN apartment with a door she could shut and lock if she wished, and that it was a very nice unit with indeed a good view... and that there was a church assistant downstairs to help her with any problems and that also the building had security, too, so she should be safe there. She refused to even walk three blocks to go look at it.
That was the end of my amateur social welfare caseworker career, ha!
But it again illustrates the difficulties some of these ‘street poeple’ have in their lives. Obviously, the rest of them are just lazy beggers who do not deserve help.
BUT SOME of them genuinely do have problems worthy of some help, if only....if only....
This WashingtonDC lady sounds quite similar to the two women I mention above, someone who maybe, just possibly, may have had some cause for winding up where she is today
maybe. May God Bless, I don’t have the answers.
Four adult children? And not one had a spare sofa for Mom?
...
They did. Read the story.
Wanda Witter has grit, real honest to goodness grit.....and yes, Wanda should write a book about the humongous agency known as Social Security and the Bureaucrats within....the group of homeless women whom she knew and trusted should also be in ‘the book’. A more than interesting story....
There is a homeless guy who keeps a 5*5 there full of plastic bags. It is very clean and orderly inside. He simply sits in there sometimes and stares at the walls. I've talked to the manager about him in conversation. He always pays his monthly fees and is nice. I've seen him out and about around the area but my conversations with him have been brief and uneventful.
The stores made it very clear that she had dropped out and away from her children. Two of them tried to get her to live with them.
You cannot force someone to do what you want
Not the first “rich” person to prefer living on the street. Be sad but don’t be surprised if we hear she’s back on the street in a few months. I suspect this really is about mental illness more than anything else.
Della Brown
Queensryche
You’ve got a cardboard house
Live there all the time
Keep your memories tied with string
The face that many once adored
Twenty years gone maybe more
Somewhere you lost the dream
Mama watched your every move,
But now you’re all alone, oh yeah
She’s been gone for awhile
Daddy left some time ago,
Fading years pass too slow
He’s the only one, could make you smile
Oh, you’re still crying
Big city bound
Gonna make your mark
Read your name in the lights
All the ads and people say,
Beauty lets you get you way
Tried your best to prove them right
But living on the streets ain’t bad,
Sad people make you glad
Pardon me, could you spare some change
Oh, you’re still crying
Street corner girl
Watch the crowd go by
Fill your tin can with life
Summer days tend to slip away
Like your men you couldn’t make them stay
Hard to choose, whiskey or a wife
Sometimes you wonder where’s the end
Where you goin’ where you been?
Happiness seems so hard to win
Most never care to find
Della Brown sees it al the time
Looking for that man
To make her smile again
Oh, you’re still crying
Written by Christopher Degarmo, Geoff Tate, Geoffery Tate, Scott Rockenfield • Copyright © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC
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