Hello

A homeless person

Miranda Crawford, 45, is a nice, caring person. She has two children at the age of 20 and 24. Miranda has been married one time but is now divorced. If only read this description, you would guess that it’s nothing special with Miranda. But it is. Miranda isn’t like everybody else, she is homeless. She has been homeless for 28 years. Sometimes she has tried to kill herself and sometimes others have tried to kill her, but she has always survived. Here is her story:

My name is Miranda Crawford and I am forty- five years old. I’ve been calling myself a bag lady since 1978.

My childhood was very good. I lived in a pretty wealthy family. The family consisted of me, my mom, my dad and my three siblings.

But when I was sixteen years old I met a boy. That boy wasn’t good for me and my parents told me that, but of course i didn’t listened to what they were saying. That boy pulled me into a world of drugs, sex and alcoholics. The more time I spent with him and on all the parties at the weekends, the more hopless became the situation. Me and my parents were always arguing and at the age of seventeen I ran away from home. Already after two days I longed for home but I couldn’t return. My dad would send me to the hospital and to a psychologist and I didn’t want that. So I stayed at the street. At nights I was sleeping in staircases and at the days I walked around in the city.

After a month or two I found others like me. Persons who also were homeless. Every single one of them were taking drugs so I started taking them too. After a while I found myself addicted. Every money that I got (from roaming the streets begging) was spent on drugs. And it continued like this for about eight years, until I met a boy called Alex. He wasn’t like everybody else. He was homeless and often drunk, but he really cared for me. I fell in love with him and after a month I was pregnant. I wanted to be married before the babys birth, so we quikly got married in a little church. When I was in the latest stages of the pregnancy I began to panic. I didn’t want the baby to live with me in streets so I decided to adopt away the child. It was a very hard decision to make but it had to be like that. When I had given birth to the baby (at a hospital) I wasn’t aloud to look at it or hold it. The doctors sent my baby away on the spot. I felt very bad about it, but Alex supported me. When Alex and I had been a couple for one year he started to hit me. It started with just a slap but it became more and more. On a number of occasions he threatened to kill me. I was so afraid of leaving him but I realized that I had to or else he actually would have killed me. So I left him and moved to another section of the city where I could survive. I had no money and I didn’t understand why I was alive, so I took as many pills that I could find. I don’t