CAUTION: Some content may be offensive. Our hope is you’ll get mad enough to do something. The reason we post that disclaimer is for stories like this. Amanda’s story is not an easy story to watch. But it’s an important story that must be shared.
Why? Because the reality is often harder to accept than fiction. Media shares a story about homelessness and nonprofits share another when the truth is often overlooked. Homelessness is complicated just like people are complicated. The real stories of people experiencing homelessness don’t always fit into the paradigms we have been taught, or they show that homelessness is much worse than we imagined.
Please try to have some compassion when viewing Amanda’s story. It’s easy to judge others, but each and every one of us has made bad choices or reacted wrong to choices made for us because if the environment we were in. You never really know the reasons behind a person’s actions until you have made similar experiences.
Amanda is a pregnant homeless woman on the streets of Philadelphia. Just typing that made me upset. Not at her. Judging Amanda is easy. I am mad at the generational cycles of poverty and homelessness that continue in this country.
Children often mirror what they learned from their parent’s behavior.
I can tell you as someone who has been connected to homelessness on many levels for the last two decades that more often than not people in some state of poverty or addiction and homelessness were born into it.
We have a crisis in this country. 1 child in every 7 will be born into poverty in the United States.
Amanda is trying to stay clean. She is in a methadone program and connected to other social services. She services by food stamps and begging for food and money!
I have huge respect for Amanda for having the courage to share her story. It’s an important story that needs to be told because there are many homeless girls and women on the streets trying to survive any way they can.
Whenever I tour a program that offers homeless prenatal services, I am overjoyed someone is there to help and upset that such services even have to exist! No one should be on the streets homeless, and especially no expecting mother should have to sleep on a sidewalk!
