‘There was no one to give me a hug’

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This article was published 26/10/2015 (3637 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Dougie Bruce didn’t let his volunteer census-taker get one question in before his life story came cascading out, amid tears, laughter, a little flirtation and an impromptu powwow song in honour of a mother he never knew.

“I got no family. No one was there to help me,” said Bruce, who said he was born in 1970 and became homeless at age 12. “I survived my own way.”

That way, said Bruce, involved selling drugs as a teenage gang member, spending some time in jail for robbery and earning scarred knuckles from fighting, among his many reminders of violence. He said he’s seen a woman get raped at the McLaren Hotel, lost his best friend to suicide and cries when his thoughts turn to his only daughter.

“I’ve got an addiction problem, an alcohol problem,” Bruce said from a back office of the Main Street Project. “I make my own decisions. I’m still here.”

Bruce was one of the first wave of people to sit down for Winnipeg’s first-ever homeless street census. The 24-hour blitz began Sunday night at downtown shelters, including the Main Street Project, the only one that doesn’t mandate that clients be sober.

The census, called a point-in-time count, mirrors ones done throughout the United States. In order to access the former Conservative government’s new $600-million round of homelessness funding, cities across Canada must conduct their own counts this year. That’s in part to offer baseline data so the effectiveness of programs can be measured and to get a better snapshot of the homeless population. The count is also a key first step recommended by the city’s new 10-year plan to end homelessness, unveiled in April 2014.

In Winnipeg, which has a stubborn homelessness problem, only the roughest estimates exist. The city’s plan to end homelessness pegs the number at about 2,750. That includes people staying in shelters such as the Main Street Project, living in single-room occupancy hotels such as the McLaren or the Yale, or couch-surfing with friends and family. Most homeless people are like Bruce — male, indigenous and between 25 and 49 years old.

Sunday night, the 300 volunteers, armed with granola bars and smokes to offer as thank-you gifts, asked, as best they could, 19 simple questions to as many shelter clients as they could. How old were you when you first became homeless? Why did you first become homeless — addiction? Eviction? Domestic abuse? Where do you get your money from? Did you grow up in foster care? Are you a veteran? What services do you need now?

Today, volunteers will visit 40 locations across the inner city — soup kitchens, ministries, libraries and drop-ins — to survey the people they missed. This evening, volunteers will walk the streets, following 27 separate routes through the core area, talking to every person on the street.

The results of the street census will be available in about a month, but organizers know any final count will likely still be an underestimate.

“We know we’re going to miss people,” said Christina Maes Nino, a policy expert with the Social Planning Council of Winnipeg and one of the street census’s organizers. “What we don’t know is who and how many.”

Homeless people tend to make themselves invisible as a survival strategy, and it’s especially tricky to identify the couch-surfers, those with temporary but insecure housing. Even at the Main Street Project, it was clear how hard administering a short census can be.

With the Winnipeg Jets game on the television, volunteers gently pulled up chairs next to residents in the lounge in the Main Street Projects transitional-housing wing. Some ploddingly answered questions they’ve likely been asked many times before. But one man, busy playing solitaire with a mug of milk at the ready, told a volunteer he wasn’t interested in being surveyed.

‘I’ve got an addiction problem, an alcohol problem. I make my own decisions. I’m still here’

— Dougie Bruce

Around the corner, in the fluorescent-lit offices, Bruce barely let his census-taker, sitting ready with her clipboard, get a word in edgewise. But he managed to answer many of her 19 questions nonetheless. He was born in Thompson. He’s Anishinabe. He was in foster care and group homes for nearly all of his life.

“There was no one to give me a hug every morning… No Christmas presents. None of that for me,” said Bruce, using grand gestures to punctuate his points. “They just grabbed me and took me away…”

But Bruce also allowed that he’d had pretty good luck with women, especially as a young man.

“I’ll be honest with you, I had a good woman,” he said, turning his forearm to show a tattoo of the name “Linda.”

On his other forearm was the outline of two roses, one for each of his parents, said Bruce.

“Someday, I’d like to meet my parents,” said Bruce, before launching into a hushed powwow song. “Someday when my time is up.”

maryagnes.welch@freepress.mb.ca