Of all the indignities endured by the homeless, chief among them is living among the filth of the streets often without the possibility of a shower. That reality was driven home to San Francisco resident Doniece Sandoval during an encounter with a young homeless woman. “She was crying, and she kept saying over and over to herself that she would never be clean,” Sandoval explains. “I knew that her words meant a lot of things I couldn’t fathom.” She thought to herself, “Maybe on the superficial level I could do something.”
Sandoval began researching what kind of opportunities San Francisco’s homeless have to take a shower. The facts were bleak: The city’s 3,000-plus homeless share about 16 showers. All but one of the facilities with a shower are clustered in the heart of the city, which means hundreds of homeless people would have to travel to access them. “They’re not giving away free bus tickets,” she notes.
Sandoval’s solution? To bring showers directly to the homeless through a fleet of municipal buses, renovated to house two private showers. Sandoval says she’s not the first to come up with the idea: About a dozen cities around the country have projects that bring mobile showers to the homeless, including Los Angeles, Seattle, and Portland. Speaking with organizers of those projects in other communities only emphasized the importance of such work: “They all told me the same thing,” she says, “stories of transformation–that the homeless that they work with said…they felt human for the first time in a long time."
via These Mobile Showers To Offer The Homeless The Dignity Of Cleanliness
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