Publish Date: 03/01/2001
Story Type: SOCIAL WELFARE
Byline: WINNIE CHANG
Unlucky victims or feckless idlers? Until voters make up
their minds about who truly deserves help in Taiwan's
complex society, the issue of the homeless is unlikely
to become a priority for Taiwan's welfare programmers.
The woman has been standing in the misty winter rain for three-quarters of an hour now, holding the same stiff, almost military bearing throughout--one forefinger pointing upward, eyes raised to the sky, her mouth constantly churning out inaudible, indecipherable words. She does not seem to feel the cold, she sees no one, hears nothing, displays no sign of fatigue. She is totally lost in a world that others can only guess at. What is she saying? Who is she talking to? Perhaps she is asking Buddha why she has ended up this way--a mentally ill woman whose only home is the street.
Passersby hurry in and out of the newly built MRT station behind her, averting their gaze from this filthy, smelly woman in rags. Who is she? Where does she come from? How did she get herself into such a wretched predicament? Does she have no family or loved ones to turn to? Nobody seems to care. And if you were to ask the poor woman herself, she would probably be unable to tell you, either. She cannot even remember when was the last time she took a bath.
One block away from the MRT station is Taipei's famous Lungshan Temple, a must-see attraction for every first-time visitor to the island's principal city. Inside, a totally different dialogue with the heavens is taking place. Pious worshippers, men and women, young and old, bow before a statue of Buddha, offering thanks for the good life. They ask Him not to forget to extend His blessings to their children and their children's children. Finally, before taking leave, they pray that He will also look after the many "friends on the street"--the homeless, in other words--whom they have encountered on the way to the temple, and help them find release from their miserable plight.
Wanhua, the temple's neighborhood, has been one of the favorite hangouts of Taipei City's homeless for years. Chen Ting-shun, the social worker in charge of homeless affairs at the privately run Creation Social Welfare Foundation's shelter, explains why. "Wanhua is a very old community with lots of temples, and the residents tend to be very traditional. That means there are lots of part-time jobs for the homeless, the kind that even low-waged foreign laborers can't do: parading statues of deities through the streets on their shoulders or performing religious dances at temple fetes, acting as attendants at traditional funerals, or maybe lending a helping hand at weddings."
Wanhua is attractive to the homeless for another reason: the many local temples are generous with food donations. "Every week, every month, there's a banquet in a temple somewhere in Wanhua, for all kinds of religious reasons," Chen says. And Wanhua's temples provide a convenient resting-place. Things got to the point where Lungshan Temple was degenerating into a night hostel for the homeless, but a few years ago the administrators realized that the situation was getting out of control. Today everybody has to leave before the temple gates are shut at night. The homeless have other alternatives, though. "Parks are everywhere in Wanhua," Chen says. You'll find one every couple of blocks, be it big or small."
Other places where the homeless gather can be found in Luchou, Panchiao, Sanchung, and Wuku in Taipei County. These places are attractive for much the same reasons as Wanhua. The homeless population of metropolitan Taipei actually consists of people from all parts of the island. "Taipei is full of opportunities," Chen points out. "In the eyes of Taiwan's homeless, there's something for everybody here in the big city."
How many homeless are there? It is difficult to be precise, because there are various official figures that fluctuate in accordance with local definitions of "homeless." According to Lin Wan-i, a scholar of sociology and now deputy chief of Taipei County, five years ago a survey found close to 17,000 homeless people in the whole of Taiwan, with more than 15,000 of them concentrated in the Greater Taipei area. His definition of "homeless" was extremely wide. Ho Chi-sheng, former director of the Creation Social Welfare Foundation's shelter for the homeless, is not aware of any more recent data. From his own observations, based on a much narrower interpretation of what it means to be homeless, he estimates that there are now probably only about 5,000 genuinely homeless persons islandwide, 90 percent of whom are in Greater Taipei.
It is no coincidence that most social welfare service centers catering to the homeless are found in old traditional communities. "By setting up a center here, we're easily accessible to the people we want to help," Chen Ting-hsun says of the shelter the Creation Social Welfare Foundation founded in Wanhua. There, homeless persons are offered meals, use of a bathroom, secondhand clothes, medical attention, counseling, employment advice, and anything else that might help them survive or even, for the lucky few, put street life behind them for good. Since the geographical area of Taipei County is much larger and more scattered than that of Taipei City, the county government offers more than just its main service center in Sanchung. Its outreach service regularly tours the hangouts of the homeless in a custom-made vehicle that provides washing facilities, food, and clothes.
These centers are struggling to win acceptance from the surrounding communities. In the well-known haunts like Wanhua, the locals are predominantly Buddhists who believe that being charitable will help them gain entry to the Western Paradise. Even there, however, although residents have become accustomed to the presence of the homeless, they have no desire to play the role of friendly neighbors. "They don't want an incinerator in their backyard, either," Chen says. "It's just the same."
In 1997, the Creation Social Welfare Foundation's service center for the homeless was asked to vacate the premises it had rented for the previous three years, forced out by protests from local residents. Ho Chi-sheng, the center's then director, tried to negotiate with them. He said that he would make sure the center's occupants behaved themselves. He forbade his charges to drink, make trouble, or bum around. He had them help clean the community's public spaces, and requested them to wash regularly and dress tidily. To avoid disturbing the neighbors, he even changed the meal arrangements, serving food to the homeless in a park far away from the community. "All in vain; they still wanted us to go," Ho says ruefully. "Then we discovered that no one in Wanhua was willing to rent us a place."
The Creation Social Welfare Foundation eventually scraped together enough money to buy a small building in Wanhua, which it fitted out as a new shelter. It has been in its new premises for three years now, but it still has to be circumspect in its activities if it wants to avoid upsetting its new neighbors. "We're fully aware we aren't welcome here either, but where do they want us to go? These people need help!" says Chen Ting-hsun, who has been the center's only social worker since Ho Chi-sheng left two years ago to work for the Taipei County Government's outreach service center for the homeless.
The problem is that most people in Taiwan believe the homeless have only themselves to blame for their situation and therefore do not deserve to be helped. "That's the stereotype," Chen says. "They're lazy, filthy, drunk all the time, emotionally unstable, violent. In a word, they're disgusting. They're parasites."
Yang Yun-sheng, the only social worker with responsibility for the Taipei City Government's homeless welfare service, has witnessed the general public's lack of sympathy for years. In his experience, it is generally understood that these people are in a mess because of a lack of affordable housing, incomes that are too low to cover basic living expenses, and too few services to help them overcome setbacks. But very few people have any real understanding of what makes these derelicts give up everything they once owned and loved, including themselves, and make the street their home.
"Some factors are unique to the individual, but there are also historical, political, and socioeconomic factors at work," Yang says. According to him, over 90 percent of his charges are men in the forty-to-sixty age group with not much education. Apart from the mentally and physically sick, and victims of domestic violence, there are also some veterans who came to Taiwan in 1949 with the KMT government. Some have no relatives in Taiwan to turn to for support. Others are deserters and therefore have no papers. The consequence is that they may not apply for a veteran's pension or receive care at the various veterans' homes run by the government islandwide.
In recent years, Yang has noticed that a growing number of people with marketable working skills are losing their homes through some traumatic change in circumstances, often the result of an economic downturn. After it became legal to hire laborers from abroad in 1990, most traditional manufacturers assembled work forces drawn from the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam, paying them less than Taiwanese would demand. This naturally threw many local people out of work. "The fact that a lot of manufacturers are now going bust or moving to mainland China or Asian countries in search of cheaper overheads only adds frost to the snow," Yang says.
Over the past two years, social workers have also started to find white-collar workers living on the street. Usually they are well educated, and they held managerial or better positions in the company that formerly employed them. "You'll even find people who used to run their own businesses," Chen Ting-hsun says. "They're often difficult to recognize as homeless, because they may still be wearing suits and ties."
Both Yang and Chen predict an increase in the number of homeless people who are victims of drastic social and economic change, as Taiwan develops into a mature industrialized country. Pressures, particularly financial ones, are sapping the system of family ties that used to support people in times of adversity. At present, there are only a handful of sad stories about aged, frail parents being dumped on the street or rummaging through the garbage in search of food, but their number will increase, and with each increase the tale will become a little less shocking, a little less of a spur to make people stop and think about where things are going.
"Times have changed," Chen observes dryly. "Nowadays it's hard enough to support your own immediate family, even with two paychecks, let alone having to take care of your parents. Some old people deliberately chose to become homeless. They know that the law obliges children to take care of their parents, and they don't want to be a burden."
There have been homeless people in Taiwan for a long time, but even just a few years ago they were still mostly regarded as criminals, actual or potential, by the police. Under martial law, and even afterward, behavior that in common parlance would be described as "bumming around" was forbidden. In 1994, however, the Taiwan Provincial Government finally decided that society had a duty to help and protect the homeless. It was acknowledged that the majority of them do not wish to become vagrants, but are forced on to the street by a variety of factors. The old law was repealed and a new one regulating the welfare of the homeless replaced it. For the first time, the plight of the "friends on the street" became a social welfare issue.
But because there was little money available, and perhaps too because of the general public's long-held suspicion of the homeless, little was actually done once the new law had been promulgated. A few shelters were opened in different parts of the island, but they can accommodate only limited numbers of the homeless and provide them with basic necessities. The majority were left to roam the streets of Panchiao, Sanchung, and Wanhua.
In 1997, the Taipei City Government passed a law bringing care for the homeless within the scope of its social welfare program, and Yang Yun-sheng was hired to do the job. Giving succor to the homeless has long been a stated goal of the Taipei County Government's social welfare program, but only in 1999 did it get around to offering outreach services, and even then only after enlisting the help of private nonprofit organizations, such as the well-known Buddhist Tzu Chi Foundation.
Ho Chi-sheng, now the director of Taipei County's outreach service center, is considered one of Taiwan's most senior and experienced social workers specializing in the needs of the homeless. He believes that the ranks of those with nowhere to go but the street can be reduced, given the right policies, but he feels strongly that both official and private welfare centers must change their perceptions of what helping the homeless involves. "Offering homeless people some food, a hot bath, and a change of clothes only brings them short-term relief," he says. They soon become dependent on such handouts, and once that happens they will never be motivated to improve their lot.
"What we need is a social welfare network that helps homeless people overcome their personal obstacles," Ho goes on. "Such a network would give them counseling, help restore their self-confidence, offer them medical care, provide them with legal assistance if necessary, arrange affordable housing, and give them the professional skills they need to get back to work. The ultimate goal is to remove them from the street and help them lead a regular, decent way of life." One reason he left the Creation Social Welfare Foundation, in a separation that was entirely amicable, was that he could not persuade its president to agree with his thinking on this issue.
Yang Yun-sheng admits that services for the homeless are not being administered with the necessary sense of aggressiveness, effectiveness, and urgency that fuels some of the island's other social services. He is nevertheless sympathetic to the problems facing workers in this field. "Everything has a priority, even social services," he says. "The homeless issue just hasn't become a priority yet." He thinks the public's biased attitude has a lot to do with that. He also points out that the money available for all welfare programs is limited.
But the amount of money available to help the homeless is small indeed when compared with the funds lavished on other beneficiaries of Taiwan's social welfare programs: abused children, battered wives, the elderly, the mentally retarded, the "vegetables." The Creation Social Welfare Foundation was recently informed that it would not be getting a grant from the Taipei City Government this year. At present, it does not know where the money to pay for the food its shelter provides will come from.
No money means no food; it also means inadequate staffing levels. There is never enough money to hire more than one social worker for any given service center. Since 1997, Yang Yun-sheng has been that one worker for the Taipei City Government's homeless service center. The situation with regard to private shelters is even worse. Creation's Chen Ting-hsun has to prepare three meals a day for more than eighty people, leaving him little time to visit other vagrants still on the streets. "You can hardly ever find him, because he's always either cooking or out shopping for food," Yang says.
Welfare regulations have so far done little to benefit the homeless, something that Ho Chi-sheng finds frustrating. Take the process of applying for benefits, for example. People over the age of sixty-five who have no place to live and no relatives to turn to for support may apply for a pension. "According to the law as it stands, suitably qualified homeless people have to apply for a social welfare pension in the city where they're registered as resident," Ho explains. "But most of the homeless people in Taiwan are in Taipei, miles away from their hometown. It only makes our job more difficult. We don't have the authority or the money to offer them pensions. The best thing we can do is send them back to where they came from. But sooner or later, we'll see them wandering around the streets of Sanchung again."
The most exasperating thing for Ho was the discovery that Taiwan's organized crime syndicates are now manipulating the homeless, and the law seems powerless to prevent it. According to him, many vagrants have been enlisted to help with various illicit undertakings. "Once I saw a homeless man being beaten up by a group of gangsters," he recalls. "When the police came, they said they couldn't do anything, because there were no culprits on the scene and no one came forward as a victim of the assault."
There have also been cases of homeless men being "hired" to marry women from mainland China so their wives could come to work in Taiwan. In most cases the men involved were passive participants who received only token amounts of cash as a reward. "The minute they got the money, they blew it on drink," Ho says.
Compared with the United States or nearby Japan, Taiwan does not have a particularly serious homeless problem. Some observers, however, believe it is only a matter of time. Most social workers will say they have done their best with the resources available. To make his life easier, Chen Ting-hsun has trained some of the homeless in his center as auxiliary helpers. "We encourage homeless people to work," he says. "That's the only way they get paid. Instead of finding jobs for them somewhere else, the center hires them by the hour. Contrary to what most people think, they're very reliable and hardworking. That tells you they're not a hopeless bunch; they can be helped."
Winnie Chang is a freelance writer based in Taipei.
Copyright (c) 2001 by Winnie Chang.