Meet Jasmine

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(Every week I serve as a Chaplain at a homeless center in Atlanta as a part of my graduate education.  I wrote this for our discussion group and wanted to share it with you. Names have been changed.)

Just a few weeks ago I was mid way through a Thursday morning of serving as one of the intake coordinators at the Homeless Outreach and Advocacy Center in downtown Atlanta when I met young woman that really surprised me. I have met a few dozen men and women since starting there a few months ago. I’ve viewed their records, shook their hands, asked personal questions, provided assistance, and generally feel very compassionate for each and every person that walks through the doors…understanding that by the time they see me, life has already beaten them up pretty badly.

However, until I met Jasmine, nobody honestly surprised me. Drug addicts, felons caught up in the system, chronically homeless, mentally ill, countless interactions with service providers listed on the computer screen, teeth missing, hands weathered, bad odor, clothes tattered – nearly every person I met made sense to me on some level.  No, I’m not saying they deserved homelessness, but after meeting them and getting to know them, it just made sense. Not Jasmine.

She looked like a pretty, fashionable, sophisticated young Spelman College or Georgia State student that would attend the church I pastor. When I saw her sitting in the lobby from the window near the computer, it did not register with me that she was homeless. I quickly judged her to be a volunteer or a friend of someone else in need. I randomly pulled the file of one of her friends that she was with, and, like most other guests, her friend made sense. She needed a MARTA card to a mental hospital, had more checks on her intake form than I had ever seen, and seemed to be familiar with how to survive while homeless.

I saw Jasmine next. She was new to the system. She basically had no checks on her intake form and just wanted a clothing voucher that her friend had told her about. Looking at her profile online, I could see that she had only been in the system for a few days after registering to stay at Gateway. After looking at her closely and talking to her face to face, it actually crossed my mind that she was pretending to be homeless for a school project or something because it just didn’t add up, but she wasn’t playing games – she was homeless.

After moving to Atlanta from Alabama with a female friend just a few weeks ago to live with her father, she said that he made several sexual advances to her friend (that she at first refused to believe) until he eventually offered both of them money to appear in a porn video together. She and her friend both left with nowhere to go. Her friend found a way back to Alabama, but Jasmine decided to try to make a way in Atlanta somehow. It wasn’t working.

She confessed that she had been wearing the same clothes for three days, that she had already lost most of what she owned, and that she had never been this low before in her life. She showed me a student ID from last year where she was an undergrad student somewhere in Alabama. I got her some reading glasses, typed up a clothing voucher, spoke with her about attending Georgia State and contacted the Admissions Office for her, shook her hand and watched her leave. I told my wife and a friend about her and just how surprised I was to see her there.