Posted on 06/13/2019 9:21:04 AM PDT by simpson96
IN A SENSE, Damian Monda grew up in The Jungle. But in the 1960s, it wasn’t yet an infamous homeless camp, Interstate 5 hadn’t been completed, and it wasn’t even known as The Jungle. It was just a neighborhood of abandoned old homes.
But there were homeless people there, even then.
Damian and his brothers and their friends would hike down the hill from Pacific Tower, where his family lived in the doctors’ quarters, to explore the empty homes. Entering them was like a dare.
“It was dangerous and it was cool, and we were always afraid that we would run into somebody,” Damian says.
And they did. At first, they avoided homeless camps, but one day, Damian talked to a homeless man. The man didn’t seem scary. He asked whether they had food, so Damian started sneaking out canned salmon his dad had caught to give to the man.
Throughout his life, Damian has watched The Jungle grow and morph, the abandoned homes replaced by tarp tents. A licensed pilot, he even could see it from the sky as he flew into Renton, before the camp was cleared out by order of the mayor.
Today, Damian goes to homeless camps several times a week and, some weeks, every day. The Jungle has become more of a concept: There are now little Jungles all over the south side. One woman who lived there says, “There’s a Jungle and a half.”
Homeless people know Damian, and they know his wife, Debbie; the pair brings instant coffee, hot chocolate, sanitary wipes or Debbie’s signature banana-nut bread.
Damian and Debbie are not associated with any organization. They’re Catholics, but they don’t do this as part of their parish, and they don’t witness to anyone. They’re not “bleeding-heart liberals,” they say.
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.com ...
How do you catch canned salmon? Whenever I go salmon fishing, I’ve always had to use a hook and catch them live.
Canned salmon? They want booze or drugs.
Poorly written sentence by the "journalist".
You can them the same as any other garden produce or meat.
some people would call them enablers.
We’re in Washington state just below Seattle, right now. Tent cities everywhere.
What a Fairy Tale this is.
Pg. 2, …… and then Snow White appeared and the homeless through down their hypodermic needles and modeled their lives after the 7 dwarfs.
Commend them for what they are doing. Having said that, just like my churches proison ministry I serve, you have to be careful and remember who you are around. Among other recomendations the 4.5 hour orientation I had to attend highly recommended we pray with our eyes open.
Yeah, thing about the homeless, many WANT to be.
There’s nothing like being attacked by a knife wielding drunk when you’re trying to serve them food to bring a person down to earth again...
Sadly, most homeless want to be that.
I’ve read that in Los Angeles they built apartment buildings where they could live, but one of the conditions was “no drugs”/ The homeless did not like it and didn’t want to live there.
True story, it was a few years ago, but I remember it reported in the paper.
Lot of shelters people get attacked, stuff stolen, have to go through drug testing, etc. They prefer to not stay in a shelter, feel safer and less rules on the streets.
I wasn’t talking about shelters, this was a program where they would get their own little apartments.
You are feeding them and making it worse.
Feels good but, it is actually inhumane, amoral and immoral.
Those pepple are the descendants of leeches, fools and lazy azzez.
Put it to them and give them a fishing pole so they can work for their food and an axe for firewood but, never, ever feed anything feral...
You mean like Dopey?
They are already there.
Threw, through, Thru...
“...Homeless people know Damian, and they know his wife, Debbie..”
Their funerals will be sad.
Meant to say:
“Those pepple are the descendants of leeches, fools and lazy azzez of Plymouth Colony , circa early 1600’s...”
I remember a Bob Hope war comedy. The supply ship with the beer goes down, Hope figures out the currents, and finds a cove full of beer cans.
Perhaps a cannery ship went down off the coast, and Damian's father "caught" such cans of salmon before the tide change?
Either that, or the father actually did the home canning thing - pressure cooking Ball jars of the salmon he caught.
That’s how my dad canned salmon: a steamcanner on the stove, and the kitchen table full of Mason jars.
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