Podcast Transcript: A Youth Traveler Carves Her Own Path

Time: 8:27 | Size: 7.9 MB
 
RAVENNA:  [Music]  Welcome to Youth Speak Out, a podcast series from the Family and Youth Services Bureau.  I’m Ravenna Motil‑McGiuire. I recently interviewed Maggie, a 19-year old who was passing through Washington, D.C. with her accordion and her boyfriend Raphael. Maggie left home at 16 after her parents divorced and slept where she could with friends and in an abandoned school. She’s completed a year of college and now travels the country in her van. 
Maggie rejects the label homeless.  But her story will be familiar to anyone who works with runaway or couch surfing youth. We present Maggie’s experiences and opinions in her own words to demonstrate how a person’s complex, self-identification can be a barrier to seeking help.
MAGGIE:  No, I am not homeless. I live in a van. It is a house.  It is a mobile home. I can go anywhere I want, anytime in the continental America or Mexico or Canada. I haven’t been to Mexico or Canada yet. But I can pretty much go anywhere I want at any time. I can pretty much sit in my van and have a different view from my porch anytime. 
RAVENNA:  How did your family feel about you staying at all these other places? 
MAGGIE:  Oh, they were terrible. They felt terrible about it.  They were like, “Oh, my God. What have we done wrong?” But they were still just like bickering all the time. I just didn’t want to be around that. 
RAVENNA:  How much do you make on average busking? 
MAGGIE:  Not ... here, it depends where I am. In New Orleans, I know spots to busk. And I can make ... on weekends, I can make like a hundred, between $100 and $200 a night. 
RAVENNA:  But here not as much? 
MAGGIE:  No, but I think it's just because I don't know really where to play yet. I mean, I play in all the subway stops.  But like at Union Station, they wouldn’t let me play in the actual place. And I made like $30 or something in Union Station when I was playing by the actual escalator. But when I moved outside of it, then they would have to actually go over to me. And so I didn’t get nearly as much money.  [music]  I have a car insurance bill. I have to pay for food and stuff like that.
RAVENNA:  And you have your ... you have a cell phone. 
MAGGIE:  I do have a cell phone. I’m on my mother’s plan. It costs like $15 a month and she pays it. 
RAVENNA:  So you just stay in touch with her about that. 
MAGGIE:  Oh, yeah. I actually have a really good relationship with my mom and my dad. Much better than it was a few years ago actually. 
RAVENNA:  Why wouldn’t you want to stay in a shelter? 
MAGGIE:  Because it’s full of insane people. I really wouldn’t want to stay in a shelter of any kind. Like I have a place to stay. I have a bed. My van has a bed in the back of it.  Like half my van is a bed. And I don’t need a bed. I don’t need food. I can make my own money, get my own food and I have my own bed. So why do I need to go to a shelter? 
RAVENNA:  You want even a spot that you could pop in and take showers? 
MAGGIE:  That would be the only thing, would be to take a shower. I don’t really need a shower that often. Actually, the entire culture, I have not seen it in Washington, D.C., but dirty kids or traveling kids, train kids, anything like that, you know, folks that wear like brown and grey and black and olive green, they have dogs. They have banjos.  They hop trains. They beg for money. They busk for money.  They ... I don't know. They breathe fire or they do acrobatics or something. And they’re basically the closest thing that America has to gypsies. 
Certainly like I’ve seen it’s kind of like a liberating kind of thing.  You can be a dirty kid and like a runaway kid. But if you’re like, I don't know. You said runaway kids and I imagined like scared like 14-year old girls like huddled in a gutter alone, like wrapped in a blanket. 
RAVENNA:  If you wanted to get a place of your own, do you think that you would have the resources to be able to do it? 
MAGGIE:  In New Orleans, absolutely. Like I could afford rent and bills and stuff just by busking. Just because, I mean, it’s just really profitable. People go there expecting to see buskers and they just give buskers money. 
RAVENNA:  Do you and Raphael have like a one-year, a three-year, a five-year plan? 
MAGGIE:  Oh, he wants to go back to school. I’m probably going to go back to school. But I would like to go to Europe first. I’m probably going to sell my van for whatever it’s worth to get my passport and ticket and go to Europe, then come back and go to school. Like go to college and take a bunch of courses and languages. But supposedly like traveling the country, people speak different languages just as good as that. So really I just want an English degree.
RAVENNA:  So what can a youth worker do for a young person like Maggie?  Jai Somers, Street Outreach Coordinator for the Florida Keys Children’s Center says that traveling youth need to be met on their own terms. 
SOMERS:  Our approach has always been to regard the youth that we work with as travelers. Our philosophy is based on the concept that every human being is a traveler in life. And at our outreach programs, our roads, our paths, have intersected with a young person who is walking their own or traveling their own. And during that intersection, we can connect with others and cross these lines to share with them, to enhance each other’s adventures, to reconnect with life lines, to participate in a collective journey.
We’ve met youth like Maggie, both on outreach and having them also just come into our drop-in center. If I were meeting Maggie on, let’s say she’s playing the accordion on the street, I would certainly introduce myself. And I would give her a basic pamphlet about our resources. And if she would allow me to engage her a little bit further, I would start to get to know her.
The youth we’ve worked with have had a broad range of experiences. But it has been one of the more common ones that a young person is traveling across the country in a van or she mentioned train hoppers also. We’ve met plenty of those, just on an adventure, exploring the world and trying to find out who they are and where they’re going and so on and so forth.
As a street outreach worker, I would be concerned whether or not her “mobile home” is actually and thoroughly a safe and secure place for her to live. Does it have locks on the doors? Are the tires going to blow out before she gets to the next city? Is it registered? Does she know where to park down here so she doesn’t get it towed? If she does, what happens then?
There’s information that I would want to hopefully gather from Maggie so I could help her make smarter choice if that’s the case. If it is a safe and secure living situation, that’s fantastic. She’s actually lot better off than a lot of youth I’ve worked with who’ve traveled through here.
So if we’re working with a young person who absolutely refuses to identify as homeless, has no interest in emergency shelter situation, doesn’t feel the need to access community resources, we respect that. However, our role in that case is to make sure that they know what exists that we can do for them or other agencies could do for them if they so choose.
It’s an empowering approach versus an approach that disregards the dignity of this young person and their own strengths in terms of choosing and living their life.
It’s hard to be a young person. Our role as outreachers and drop-in center [employees] and so on needs to be able to inform youth of resources that exist, of the risks that are potential experiences regarding those choices.
RAVENNA:  To learn more about how to engage street youth and travelers like Maggie, visit the National Clearinghouse on Families and Youth online at ncfy.acf.hhs.gov.

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