Lisa is homeless. At least right now, she’s homeless, one of up to 3,932 Oklahomans experiencing homelessness on any given day. And she is right here in Watonga, in plain sight, if you know where to look. Lisa doesn’t want give her last name or even an initial.
Sometimes she stays at her sister’s place, but things are too tight for both of them to live there right now. Maybe after her sister gets her unemployment filed and the checks start to come in, Lisa can go back. Maybe she can stay with friends or friends of friends for a while. And she is persistently in and out of rehab. Meanwhile, she is sleeping rough.
Today she is in an alley off Main Street. There is some shade and shelter from the wind. There is a dumpster nearby where Lisa scavenges for food, when she eats. “I’d rather do without than dumpster dive,” she said. It appears someone was taking out their leftovers today and gave them to her instead of throwing them in the trash.
She gets a government check, has since she was in her 20s. Most of it goes to her addiction to meth. She cycles through rehab, a system she calls expensive and a waste of time, hers and the people who try to help break the rollercoaster ride of addiction.
“I’m trying to break that cycle for myself, it’s really a hard cycle to break,” she said.
It has been this way for at least six years, she acknowledged. She’s been on the streets several times, but never really got the hang of it. Not like some she knows. She has been institutionalized as well.
Lisa is a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes. She has in the past looked to the tribe for assistance with housing and other programs.
“There is so many hoops to go through to get housing,” she said. “It’s not as easy as it seems. There’s a waiting list for every program that goes back at least a year.” So she doesn’t ask the tribe for a lot of help.
She will go to them for medical and dental assistance, and commodities.
Lisa said her habit is a lot more expensive than what she has to live on. But as long as it doesn’t control her, she said she is okay. “I mean it does control me, but in another way it doesn’t,“ she added.
At that point she got upset, perhaps by the questions, maybe by the man who keeps pedaling by on his bicycle. I ask if he is going to be mad at Lisa for talking. I don’t want her to get hurt. She storms off to a concrete ledge where she sits for a few minutes. After a little time passes, and the bicycle onlooker goes away, I rejoin her.
Life got a lot worse during the pandemic, Lisa said. She hated the lockdown, the quarantine that kept her even more isolated than she already was. During that time, she was often not allowed to stay with her sister, who was terrified of the virus, even though Lisa never had it.
Lisa acknowledges her lifestyle is her own doing. “It’s a choice, but it’s a hard choice,” she said. She blames some of her situation on what she calls oppression and discrimination. Having been made to feel like less, she accepts that judgement and lives in it.
“People want homelessness hidden, but it isn’t going to get any better. People do what they have to do. It’s going to get worse,” she said, lying back down on her pallet out of the wind.