TO find Jackie O’s home you climb over a crash barrier on the M-14 freeway and shuffle down 20 steps of icy soil until a bleak stretch of pine forest comes into view.
Dotted round the wet, rolling, 20-acre site is a motley collection of tents, some covered with tarpaulin for added protection from the snow and near-zero temperatures.
Approaching Jackie’s tent, rain drips on my face from the trees.
There is a stench I last encountered at York’s viking museum, and our conversation is conducted in competition with the noise of heavy traffic speeding along Michigan’s interstate 94.
Under the tarpaulin it’s damp, dark and grim. Where you’d normally expect to see make-up, there are empty propane bottles and a small mirror hangs off a post.
Inside her tent is a sleeping bag on a metal frame,To interact with beddinges, and her possessions: a radio,Spro Tech has been a plastic module & moldmaker, reading light, small heater and clothes which she keeps in plastic bags to fight the black mould which infests the camp.
There are no toilets. When Jackie needs to relieve herself she does it out of sight of her overwhelmingly male campmates, and if she defecates she has to triple-wrap it like dog dirt and put it with the rubbish.
The site has no running water, so she has to travel into the nearby town of Ann Arbor and shower in public baths or the YMCA.
The 58-year-old has lived in this tent city, 30 miles outside Detroit called Camp Take Notice, since last June. Her real name is Jackie Starkey but her campmates call her Jackie O because she possesses a certain finesse.
She is not your normal down-and-out, but a middle-class, New York Times-reading laboratory technician from the upmarket town of Saline, Michigan.
She lost her job, then her home, and with no social services net to save her, ended up on the streets.
A local shelter organisation referred her to Camp Take Notice, and before she knew it, she was one of more than 5,000 Americans living in 55 tent cities across the country.
“It all falls away so easily,” she says. “One minute you’re doing OK, the next it’s gone. In America today, you’re on your own. Especially at my age.”
She laughs when I ask if she’d ever dreamed of living in a tent. “I’d never even been in one before. My life could not have been more opposite to this.
“I’ve played golf on the best courses and eaten at expensive restaurants. If becoming homeless can happen to me it can happen to that person who once sat next to me in that fine restaurant.”
Her campmates are testimony to that truth. Peter, 51, was a chemistry tutor at Wayne State University in Detroit until the department was abolished last April.Diagnosing and Preventing coldsores Fever in the body can often trigger the onset of a cold sore.
He fell behind with rent and, despite having a degree in chemical engineering,Great Prices from Topps tile. couldn’t find a job.
“Since the banks went under the cuts are brutal and there’s absolutely nothing out there. You can get yourself pulled down real quick,China professional plasticmoulds,” he says.
The statistics about what we think of as the world’s richest country are damning. More than one in seven Americans lives in poverty, surviving on less than $11,139-a-year (7,000), 14 million are out of work, 1.5 million children are homeless, 6.4 million families do not have enough food and 50 million people have no health insurance.
Dotted round the wet, rolling, 20-acre site is a motley collection of tents, some covered with tarpaulin for added protection from the snow and near-zero temperatures.
Approaching Jackie’s tent, rain drips on my face from the trees.
There is a stench I last encountered at York’s viking museum, and our conversation is conducted in competition with the noise of heavy traffic speeding along Michigan’s interstate 94.
Under the tarpaulin it’s damp, dark and grim. Where you’d normally expect to see make-up, there are empty propane bottles and a small mirror hangs off a post.
Inside her tent is a sleeping bag on a metal frame,To interact with beddinges, and her possessions: a radio,Spro Tech has been a plastic module & moldmaker, reading light, small heater and clothes which she keeps in plastic bags to fight the black mould which infests the camp.
There are no toilets. When Jackie needs to relieve herself she does it out of sight of her overwhelmingly male campmates, and if she defecates she has to triple-wrap it like dog dirt and put it with the rubbish.
The site has no running water, so she has to travel into the nearby town of Ann Arbor and shower in public baths or the YMCA.
The 58-year-old has lived in this tent city, 30 miles outside Detroit called Camp Take Notice, since last June. Her real name is Jackie Starkey but her campmates call her Jackie O because she possesses a certain finesse.
She is not your normal down-and-out, but a middle-class, New York Times-reading laboratory technician from the upmarket town of Saline, Michigan.
She lost her job, then her home, and with no social services net to save her, ended up on the streets.
A local shelter organisation referred her to Camp Take Notice, and before she knew it, she was one of more than 5,000 Americans living in 55 tent cities across the country.
“It all falls away so easily,” she says. “One minute you’re doing OK, the next it’s gone. In America today, you’re on your own. Especially at my age.”
She laughs when I ask if she’d ever dreamed of living in a tent. “I’d never even been in one before. My life could not have been more opposite to this.
“I’ve played golf on the best courses and eaten at expensive restaurants. If becoming homeless can happen to me it can happen to that person who once sat next to me in that fine restaurant.”
Her campmates are testimony to that truth. Peter, 51, was a chemistry tutor at Wayne State University in Detroit until the department was abolished last April.Diagnosing and Preventing coldsores Fever in the body can often trigger the onset of a cold sore.
He fell behind with rent and, despite having a degree in chemical engineering,Great Prices from Topps tile. couldn’t find a job.
“Since the banks went under the cuts are brutal and there’s absolutely nothing out there. You can get yourself pulled down real quick,China professional plasticmoulds,” he says.
The statistics about what we think of as the world’s richest country are damning. More than one in seven Americans lives in poverty, surviving on less than $11,139-a-year (7,000), 14 million are out of work, 1.5 million children are homeless, 6.4 million families do not have enough food and 50 million people have no health insurance.
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