For the 13th year in a row, the Rev. Eric Johns of the Buffalo Dream Center spent Thanksgiving week living on the streets. His goal is to raise awareness of homeless-ness and poverty and to raise money for Christmas presents and meals for people in need.
Johns’ latest stint as a homeless man, which ended Saturday morning, was a usual one for the pastor and his two cohorts — the Rev. Pat Fleming of the Amherst Church of the Nazarene and Keith Cauley, a formerly homeless man who now belongs to Johns’ church.
“We’ve done this so many years that we’ve grown used to some things,” Johns said after warming up with a cup of joe from Spot Coffee in downtown Buffalo.
“But we’ve had a lot of different things happen this year and met some new people,” he added.
For one, Johns and his companions spent a night in Niagara Falls to get a sense of what it’s like for the homeless there. To mimic what a homeless person would have to do to get to Niagara Falls, they collected cans and bottles and traded them in to cover bus fare.
Also this year, Johns broadcasted posts about his experiences via Twitter.
“Going to sleep on the floor of an old Catholic church,” he wrote Tuesday night. “Cold . . . stopped raining. . . . one mile walk for coffee,” was a post on Wednesday.
“A homeless dude is sleeping in my spot under the bridge. I have to sleep across the street. Doesn’t he realize that is ‘my’ spot?” he wrote in a tongue-in-cheek post Friday night.
Another first for the trio: bed bugs. They had the extra challenge of finding a place where they could wash their clothes and take a hot shower to try to get rid of the infestation.
But perhaps most troubling was what hasn’t changed.
The pastor said he saw several homeless men he knew from his previous stays on the street.
“We hung out with guys this year that we met last year,” he said.
He also said that, while in previous years the trio would spend nights under bridges alone, this year and last they were joined by the truly homeless.
He also met and heard about a growing number of people who are living out of their cars.
“Buffalo is unlike Los Angeles or New York City or Chicago or some places where you can drive down streets and see the homeless,” he said. In the Buffalo area, he said, “they’re hidden, many times in abandoned buildings and cars.”
Johns couldn’t say whether there are more homeless on the streets this year than in previous years, but he said there’s no doubt there are plenty of people in need.
“This week is to draw attention to the need,” he said. “The need is there in our community. We just want people to be aware that there’s people in need that are out there.”
Johns is hoping to raise money and collect donations for Boxes of Love, his church’s annual food and toy drive. The drive aims to give 5,000 presents to children in the region and to provide 3,000 people a Christmas meal.
Anyone who would like to donate can call the church at 854-1001. For more information, go to www.buffalodreamcenter.org .
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