No forwarding address
Local ‘streeter’ talks to Uptown about the realities of life on the streets
Marlo Campbell



Considering she’s spent the last 12 years living on and off the streets, Elizabeth is a surprisingly upbeat person.

She says she’s always been that way — not into what she calls the “pity-me bullshit.”

She’s been a baker and worked in a daycare centre, she’s camped and fished her way across Ontario, she’s hopped trains and hitchhiked, and she’s panhandled and busked. She used to squeegee but hasn’t since it became illegal. She doesn’t like getting hassled by cops.

Although raised in Winnipeg, Elizabeth was adopted in her late teens into a wealthy family and lived with them just outside Toronto for two years. For a while, out in B.C., she lived out of her ’74 Chevy van.

“Rent was insurance,” she says.

Elizabeth considers herself more of a traveller than a ‘streeter’ and says some people have described her as a gypsy.

She carries herself with a West Coast kind of attitude, although her look is harder: army shorts and a black tank top, two studded black leather wristbands, several chunky necklaces, a facial piercing, and a low-slung suede hip belt with lots of pockets for gear. She also wears a black cap she tips at people as she says goodbye.

Elizabeth describes homelessness as an “addictive lifestyle,” but she also calls it a “fast-paced, short-term life.”

Last year, three of her close friends died.

• • •

“I haven’t felt like I’ve had a home since I was 12,” Elizabeth says.

That’s how old she was when she left her mom and stepdad’s house. She only says that the situation was “crazy.”

She couch-surfed for the next year, managing to stay in school. She made it through Grade 8 and halfway through Grade 9.

By that time, she had made an enemy of a girl who had a lot of friends. She says things in Winnipeg got “obscenely dangerous.”

“I decided, ‘Fuck this. I don’t know anything about my dad.’ So I went to find him,” she says.

Elizabeth tracked him down in Vancouver.

She had expected he’d have a fridge full of food and a bed for her. Instead, he was living on East Hastings Street in the rundown east end of downtown Vancouver. He had a serious drug problem.

Elizabeth stayed out there about a year, and she speaks candidly about the experience.

She remembers seeing men passed out with tourniquets still tied around their arms and tells the story of the night one of her dad’s friends asked “How much for the girl?” When her dad got mad and told the man Elizabeth was his daughter, the friend offered to pay double. Enraged, her dad gave the man a severe beating.

Elizabeth decided she’d rather hang out with her pot-smoking drinking buddies in Winnipeg.

When she returned at 14 she was told she could stay at home if she got a job or went back to school.

She says she wasn’t in the right head space to do either, so she left.

• • •

Elizabeth is somewhat unfocused but very insightful. She says a lot of street kids are searching for something. But the searching becomes the reality, and the longer you’re on the street, the harder it becomes to re-integrate.

• • •

Khyro (it’s pronounced ‘keero’) is Elizabeth’s dog — a cross between a German shepherd, a rottweiler and a blue heeler. She’s extremely well behaved, and Elizabeth says she feels a lot safer since she got Khyro seven years ago. The two seem inseparable.

She trusts Khyro’s instincts. They hitchhike together, and Elizabeth refuses the ride if Khyro doesn’t want to get into the car.

Hitchhiking can be dangerous, particularly in B.C., where Elizabeth says friendly RCMP officers will sometimes pick up female hitchhikers and drive them through certain dangerous stretches of highway because so many young women have disappeared there over the years.

Elizabeth says she’s run into a few situations in which she’s had to use violence to defend herself.

“If there’s no other way out, I got no problem causing pain,” she says.

Living on the streets demands toughness. Elizabeth laughs about her first few months on the street, saying she wasn’t liked because she was too cheerful.

“You’re not allowed to be nice — that doesn’t fly,” she says, smiling.

“If someone steals from you, you beat the shit out of them. You can’t take shit once.”

• • •

Elizabeth thinks Winnipeg is a hard place to be on the streets.

“They only call it ‘Friendly Manitoba,’” she says wryly.

Elizabeth believes there’s a huge crystal meth problem here, and she thinks that’s why there have been so many bike thefts and car thefts lately.

She appreciates that existing resource centres have limited funding but calls the services here “pathetic.” She believes that there aren’t enough of them, that they don’t advertise enough and that they’re not equipped to help people just passing through. She rattles off a list of things travellers need: socks, water, food that doesn’t need cooking, laundry facilities, showers.

She thinks Winnipeg definitely needs a needle exchange. She’s found needles deliberately left pointing upward in the parks where she and her friends go to drink, and she’s worried Khyro might step on one. You can hear the disdain in her voice when she talks about junkies.

Finding a place to sleep is relatively easy. Elizabeth says most streeters she knows avoid homeless shelters because they’re geared toward older people. Instead they sleep on rooftops, in doorways and in abandoned buildings. Church steps are good.

She scoffs at Winnipeg’s blue key program — in which people can buy keys that can be given to panhandlers and exchanged for food and services at local institutions — and she calls social assistance “a joke.”

“If you can work, they think you’re smart enough to figure it out,” she says.

She thinks Winnipeg needs more counselling services for people who are trying to get off the streets.

For some it isn’t as easy just going out and getting a job. For example, Elizabeth has a friend who has a place to crash but no one to talk to.

“He needs caring and support,” she says. “It’s a huge step — getting out there and being independent.”

• • •

Elizabeth is now 24 and says she’s been trying to get herself off the street for about a year and a half. She recently moved into a suite with its own sink and toilet and is now on the hunt for a bar fridge and hot plate so that she’ll be totally self-contained.

She’s trying to stop drinking, or at least cut down. She’s making plans to finish Grade 12. She’s into stop-motion animation and is thinking about making a film — maybe something about street kids like her. She says she’d love to go to New Zealand and jokes about getting some kind of internship: “I don’t think they give those to streeters with no education.”

Then she qualifies herself, saying she’s got lots of survival experience.

• • •

Elizabeth talks in a loud voice and laughs a lot. She seems like the type who makes friends easily.

She says some streeters get so used to being independent that they don’t know how to accept help when it’s offered to them. Others start to think they’re indestructible.

“They think nothing can bring them down,” she says. “Then they OD or fall under a train.”

She says a lot of her friends didn’t make it to 25.

“But I’m going to,” she says matter-of-factly.