Since late December, I’ve been going to the homeless camp near Safeco Field called The Jungle on the weekends. I’ve been going there roughly every other week. Sometimes its weekly, sometimes its three weeks between visits to the camp, but on average it’s every other weekend. I have a friend I work with, Emily Thompson. We try to get other people to help us, but it’s always just the two of us. We have a GoFundMe page. We got some early donations from my aunts and uncles, as I have a huge family on my dad’s side. The donations have kind of dried up though.
I know that helping the homeless isn’t the most attractive cause out there, most people look down on the homeless. Helping the homeless is something that I care a lot about though. They are among the most bottom class of society. Nobody chooses to be homeless either. Being homeless is very costly, not just to the community, but the homeless individuals as well. The toll it takes on their physical and mental health is immense. The toll it takes on their relationships is immense. From a community stand point, it’d be cheaper to house the homeless than to leave them on the streets/camps.
For me, I’m one of those who believes that shelter/housing is a human right. Having shelter/home should not be dependent on having a job that pays decently. Shelter shouldn’t be dependent on having money. Like healthcare, healthy food, clean water, clean air, loving freely, education and so forth, shelter is a basic human right. Homelessness is not a failing of the individual, it is a failure of our system of governance that isn’t based on universal human rights. I’ve always been obsessed with saving the world, and helping the homeless is just one way for me to try and create the society and world I want to see. It’s why I love working with Emily Thompson, because she has a strong passion for universal human rights.
Money doesn’t grow on trees, but if it did, Emily and I would at the very least build those tiny houses for everyone at the jungle camp. If time was an infinite resource, we would both go to all the other homeless camps in Seattle and build them little houses until society as a whole steps up and makes housing a human right that must be provided by the city/state. If money and time were infinite though, I would give so much to other groups, especially MSF (Doctors Without Borders). Reporters Without Borders, Sea Shepherd, Planned Parenthood are a few other groups too, but there’s a lot more, too many to name, that I wish I could give to on a monthly basis.
If you follow me on Twitter, my primary avenue of social media, you’d know I care about human and animal rights on an insane level. I know about the refugee internment camps Australia has. The ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people in Burma. The military junta in Thailand. The occupation of Kashmir by Pakistan and India. Israel-Palestine. Turkey’s persecution of the Kurds. The killing of indigenous people’s in Honduras, Brazil and other Latin American countries. The murder of teachers in Mexico. The oppression of the Tamil people in Sri Lanka. The civil war/genocide/drought in South Sudan. The Saudi butchering of Yemen. The conflicts in Gabon, Central African Republic, Somalia, Nigeria, Niger and more. That’s just human rights stuff. So long story short, human rights is a deep passion of mine.
However, as I said, money and time are not things that I have an infinite supply of. I can’t be everywhere at once, or funding every group and operation in the world. So my way of making the world a better place is going to the homeless camp known as the jungle, in Seattle, and giving them food, water, socks, hand warmers, hand sanitizer, soap, shampoo and many other things with Emily Thompson. So being that Emily and I don’t have Bill Gates type money, if anyone cares a lot about helping the homeless and can donate money, whether it’s $5 or $50, we would super appreciate it. The more donations we get, the more supplies we can get for those at the jungle.
Here’s our GoFundMe page https://www.gofundme.com/feed-the-jungle-seattle?u=12909278
adamkendall2 