How I became a homeless

                It was about month ago, one of my floor mates talked about starting a non-profit organization for the homeless people in Harrisburg. I was very intrigued by his idea thus told him that I would like to help him to do so. However, as the semester passed by, we both were consumed by the busyness of school works and our plan never got started.

                One very normal college day, I was hanging out with my best friends. It was a Friday night so I was hoping to hang out with them till late night; however, one of the friends suddenly told us that he needs to go. I turn my head to the person and realized that it was Andy. Andy and I are very close friends who always plan fun activities together; therefore, I was disappointed when he told us that he needed to go.  I asked him the reason and he started to tell me about an interesting thing he has been doing for the past month. Andy (and sometimes few other guys too) committed himself to go to Harrisburg every weekend and hung out with the homeless there. When I heard it, I was reminded about the non-profit organization I wanted to start so I asked Andy to take me there.

                My first interaction with the homeless was quite awkward. I never tried to interact with them; therefore, I could not easily associate with their situation. Despite the awkward atmosphere, I endeavoured to talk to them and finally became a friend of them. On the way back to the campus, I talked to Andy about my plan for a non-profit organization and he liked it a lot. In the car, we decided to really work on it.

                Andy and I gathered together and had to come up with specific goal that we want to achieve and we decided that we want to educate the homeless people so that they can get jobs. With the goal in mind, we believed that the only way to reach the goal is to start a non-profit organization in which our values and thought about the service is prevalent. However, as we researched more about starting a non-profit organization and as we were learning more about the complexity and risk involved in the process, we came to a conclusion that starting a non-profit organization is not a good idea. Due to the sad reality we were depressed. While we were in a sad mood, something snapped in my mind and I told Andy: “Andy why don’t we start living like them? So that we can draw people’s attention and ultimately raise money for them?” And there we started our journey.


Issac Won