Georgia spoke with us after a difficult few weeks. She explained why she feels more comfortable sitting in the Inn From the Cold parking lot than at a restaurant. After our conversation, we took a walk and Georgia pointed out the names of different flowers we passed on the street.
I just actually saved a really good friend’s life yesterday. I’ve had to save my husband twice. But yet, no matter how many times I try to overdose, it doesn’t happen. I don’t know why.
It’s not easy. What we go through, it’s not easy at all. It’s a day to day struggle, not just with our addiction, but with police, with bylaw, with the way we get treated. I don’t even feel comfortable going into a restaurant to have a meal, going out on a date with my husband, because I get looked at like I don’t belong there.
It doesn’t matter how well I dress,
how well I look, because they know
me from the street. I don’t belong.
The discrimination we get on a daily basis is disgusting. And it hurts. It hurts a lot of people. I refuse to go into a restaurant. I will go into a restaurant once a month, and that’s with Sandy. That’s it. I won’t go into a restaurant otherwise.
We’re not just drug addicts because
we choose to, we’re drug addicts due
to things that have happened to us
all throughout our life.
Not just from teenage years and wanting to be rebellious, but from earlier years. And people don’t understand. And they don’t care to understand. They don’t care to know. They just see homeless people and they put us in this bubble, and we don’t fit in their bubble. So we don’t fit, per se in society as a whole. And it’s not fair. It hurts.
That’s the office [at Inn From the Cold]. That’s where we used to camp out, where we all felt safe. So we would camp there, where we felt safe, right. As a group. But everybody had their own little spot, everybody was all clumped together.
We had our own little sections and stuff
but we all felt safe, just knowing that
somebody else that we knew was close by.
Plant hope. I like to colour. It calms me.
That’s me and my hubby devouring a McCain’s Deep and Delicious cake. We’re not married but we’ve been together six years, off and on. We’ve been through a lot. I moved here in 2006 from Victoria, and he moved out here from, he logged all over and stuff, grew up in Ontario and stuff, Vancouver and all over the place. Sandy actually got us that cake.
We used to hang out under the stairs. When it rained we’d put a tarp underneath the stairs so that we’d stay dry and then we’d sit there and do drugs, colour, talk, just hang out.
People drive by, they say rude stuff, they honk, they throw stuff. It’s been getting worse.
We felt comfortable when it rained.
We felt comfortable just kind of
hanging in there.
Sleeping quarters at the Inn. That’s where the men slept. There’s way more men’s beds than there is women’s. There are only eight women’s beds. Because there’s [Alexander Gardner] for women as well.
There’s lots of feelings and auras being
in the place. Not just from it being
a shelter, I pick up a lot of other stuff.
I don’t know if it was a school building at one time, but something about it…
All my crap. A bunch of bottles, backpack, rolled up mat, shoes.
That’s us collecting bottles at the bottle depot. They’re making that a red zone area now. They’re trying to stop people from doing that, because apparently we’re putting stuff on the highway, but yet we’re not on the road. We’re off the side of the road. But because people are stopping and dropping stuff off to us we are obstructing traffic. And that’s how some of us make money to take care of our habits or whatever, to eat, clothing, whatever, you know.
You cannot even collect donations at the bottle depot down here, and they will ban you. The one on Kirschner, it’s been going on for a while, and now they’re trying to red zone it.
So if you’ve been asked to leave
a few too many times, they’ll actually
red zone you from that whole block, like
you won’t even be able to go to that
bottle depot, let alone go down that road.
So who decides that?
The police and bylaw. It’s not a law written anywhere, but police and bylaw are coming up with this. Because there’s all sorts of different spots down Kirschner where people will sit. There’s four or five spots down Kirschner. You’ve got all the Yuppies.
Some jerk was shitting on the bottle depot steps, some people broke into the bottle depot, crapping on the businesses’ door steps around there. We know who was doing it. The same person did it at the Inn as well.
That’s my tent. That’s where I sleep. That’s my bike. It got stolen.
That was me looking up at the trees, lying down. I was taking pictures of the sun coming through the branches. Looking up.
Another one of our bottle depot spots.
Little hut. That was outside Chandler after they’d been shut down and
we weren’t supposed to be there anymore.
But you know, we felt safe, obviously
we felt safe so we didn’t want to leave.