They all have stories. They will recount their particular histories if you are interested, and if you respect them. But they may not tell you the whole truth. Some are independent people, tired of society; they say they feel good about the way they live – that it's a choice.
Others are addicted to drugs or alcohol; their hands shake as they hold out plates for food. Still others have been broken by crippling disease or incapacitating mental illness. They are ex-cons who skipped parole, moms and dads who left families, and veterans who never quite got off the battlefield. All have this in common: they have gone outside. To them the world is divided into those who are in and those who are out. Most want back in, but getting there requires a climb up from the bottom. And that climb can look pretty steep.
Over the course of a month, photographer Jim Stem and writer Tim Ohr spent their Sundays with these men and women – the homeless, and the caring people who strive to help them.
AJ isn't with us anymore.
On a cold Saturday night in December, the space heater in the utility shed where he lived threw off sparks, starting the fire that eventually took his life. If his death made the newspapers, people on the street didn't see it. No one paid for an obit. Instead, his homeless comrades lit candles and spilled beer at an impromptu memorial site.
AJ's friends nicknamed him "the reader" – he plowed through two or three books a week. Even though AJ was in his 50s, he didn't need glasses. He said he read because he had nothing else to do.
He also said that he was a military man, and that he'd worked in special ops for the CIA. He regretted what he'd done. And he worried that the government had a hit out on him. Paranoia or truth, we will never know.
AJ was a tunnel rat in Nam, just like I was. But when I tried to find out his last name – when I wanted to know AJ just a little bit better – I couldn't. We don't know AJ's last name, just his face.
AJ isn't with us anymore.
AJ's friends put up this memorial on the corner of E. 15th Avenue and N. 51st Street in Tampa, where he spent his days reading. AJ, whom Kristin Taylor befriended early in her work with the homeless, died in early December when a fire broke out in his shack. From Samoa to
Tampa
Imagine having 12 children. Most modern-day parents are boggled by the financial and emotional expense of having just one. Kristen Taylor and her husband David Staszak have four children of their own, including Mariah, now 23, who was born with Spina Bifida. And yet the couple adopted more. Eight more.
"It brought peace," Taylor says now of the day four years ago when she officially adopted the children, most of whom she'd cared for since they were infants.
Yet Kristin Taylor has found a way to open her heart even wider. The founder of T.H.O.R.N. Ministries, Taylor has spent her Sundays serving meals to the homeless for the past seven years. It has been a long, circuitous route, but Taylor says she's had one guiding principal since she started her work. "Everybody," she says, "can do something more than nothing."
A motivational singer with her own Christian recording label, Taylor was asked by a friend to perform at a Catholic youth conference in western Samoa in 1995. The trip changed her life.
In Samoa, she met people with leprosy, elephantitis and a range of birth defects. The sufferers were without medicine, wheelchairs or supplies. Looking further, Taylor discovered that no one was addressing these people's needs. So she took action.
Jordan, a Samoan boy born with an open facial cleft, became her first extended case. Once Taylor got home, she tried desperately to line up help for Jordan in the U.S. through charities and proceeds from her own records and concerts, and finally raised the necessary funds for medical assistance and transportation.
Jordan passed away en route to the airport.
"When he died," she says now, "it was devastating for all of us."
After taking an aid trip to Jamaica and Haiti (where she "fell in love with serving the poor"), and frustrated by how long it had taken to help Jordan, Taylor decided to start giving assistance on her own. She began collecting wheelchairs and crutches from wherever she could find them: a hundred wheelchairs from the Shriners; crutches, one at a time, from neighbors' closets; some of each from dumpster-diving. Soon she had enough supplies to fill a 20-foot container, but no money to ship them anywhere.
Taylor sent a letter to the Prime Minister of Samoa saying she would dedicate her life to his people if he would pay to ship everything she had collected. Send me your foundation papers, the Prime Minister wrote back, and I will pay.
In the fall of '95, Taylor registered a 501(c)3 called T.H.O.R.N. (Thankfully Helping Others Real Needs) Ministries. On the form that she sent to the State of Florida, Taylor wrote that she would feed the homeless around Tampa. "Just to balance out the international work," she says.
Taylor worked tirelessly on the Samoan Project, as she calls it, making constant pilgrimages back to the country, each time with a new batch of supplies. But it was two years before she first began to serve meals to Tampa-area homeless. She wanted to fulfill her 501(c)3, yes, but Taylor had other motivations when she hit the street on Thanksgiving,1997. She wanted to bring her work home.
Taylor's children, perhaps a little too comfortable in the luxury American kids sometimes enjoy, were baffled by her two years of work in Samoa. So she dragged the kids along to feed the homeless that Thanksgiving morning. At the first stop, they locked their doors out of fear and stayed inside the car as she served meals to the gathering men and women outside. After a while, she heard the locks pop and the doors open. Slowly, her children came out of the car to help.
It was a lesson for the kids, but the question lingered: What would these people eat the next Sunday? Having fed them once, Taylor found she couldn't turn her back and let them go hungry the next week. So she and her kids fed them the following week … and the week after that.
They haven't stopped yet.
Today T.H.O.R.N. Ministries feeds upwards of 1,000 people each Sunday at three spots in Tampa. They also serve two meals on Mondays and Thursdays, and a meal in Largo. They have served over 400,000 meals, a staggering accomplishment for an operation that began with one person's concern.
What Kristin Taylor, her family, and the T.H.O.R.N. volunteers have done begs a question: If one thoughtful person can do so much, what would be the effect if each of us did something more than nothing?
At the bunkhouse, Taylor's daughter Rachel Staszak, 12, dishes out food to a few hungry men, including Frankie (second from right). Frankie has been helping remodel Taylor's Riverview home, which she's about to put on the market. Though Frankie is an alcoholic, Taylor says he does good work. "Frankie works all day," she says. "And if he has his beer at the end of the day then he has his beer. You just gotta love them where they're at – I want God to love me where I'm at, so that's how I'm going to treat them."
Alexandria (left) works in the kitchen on Sunday morning helping to prepare the food that T.H.O.R.N. Ministries will serve later that afternoon. The family wakes up around 8 a.m. and cooks until noon, using whatever food has been donated to them over the last few days. The rest of the food T.H.O.R.N. Ministries serves is prepared by volunteers, though there is no organized schedule. Whoever can make something does. "We've never run out of food," Taylor says. "It always just works out."
Taylor dances with Jimbo at the bunkhouse in Ybor City. They've known each other since she first started serving meals to the homeless. "He always dances with me," she says. "He just thinks that's the greatest thing in the world. He's my poster boy."
Taylor, left, and Jan Farmer pray over William while serving the first meal on Columbus Avenue and 50th Street. When he arrived, William had an infection in his mouth, his jaw was swollen, and he was in pain. Taylor and her group couldn't do much for a man in his condition, but offered some ibuprofen and their prayers, which lifted William's spirits. The following week he ended up in the hospital, was prescribed antibiotics for his jaw, and recovered.
An unidentified man dashes off to find a place to eat after being one of the first served at T.H.O.R.N. Ministries' downtown Tampa stop.
Danny, a homeless man who eats with T.H.O.R.N. Ministries on Sundays at the bunkhouse, gets his feet cleaned by Taylor. After Danny's feet were fixed up and medicated, she gave him a new pair of shoes and socks.
Taylor's husband David Staszak says the blessing before the meal near the Greyhound Station in downtown Tampa. The man bowing his head in the foreground declined to give his name. T.H.O.R.N. Ministries
16148 Boyette Road , Riverview, Fl 33569 813-653-4496 or thornministries.org.
This article appears in Jan 19-25, 2005.