Frances de Silva and Thomas Cavasos talk about finding a home (or not) and spending Christmas on the street.
Over the past few months, I’ve written about a couple of homeless Ottawans: Thomas Cavasos, who, with his cat, Phoenix, can typically be found in his wheelchair at the northwest corner of Elgin and Lisgar streets; and Frances de Silva, who was living in a canoe on the Rideau Canal when I first met her. A subsequent story I wrote about her canoe being stolen ended with the kindheartedness of some readers who offered to gift her a new canoe. She currently lives in a tent along the Rideau River.
In anticipation of my ridealong with the Salvation Army’s Outreach and Housing Services team, I reached out to both Thomas and Frances to learn how their efforts at finding housing were progressing, and how each feels about a homeless Christmas.
Frances de Silva
The wet snow-covered and steep path leading to Frances’s tent appeared more challenging than my traction-less Blundstones wanted to hazard, so I simply called down to her. “Frances,” I shouted, “it’s Bruce. Are you there?”
“I was just about to come up,” she called out from inside her small tent. “I’m just going to change and feed the ducks.” At the sound of her voice, a half-dozen or more mallards swam and waddled ashore for their midafternoon snack. Soon after, Frances appeared, fed them, and easily ascended the path.
“Nice boots,” I remarked.
“Aren’t they?” she replied. “This woman, a customer, came out of Giant Tiger one day, looked at me in my sandals and asked what size boots I wore. Then she went back inside and bought me these.”
Frances is no closer to getting a place of her own than she was a few months ago, because she doesn’t want to live in social housing and rebuffs efforts by groups such as the Salvation Army to reach out.
Evening Update
Meanwhile, she says she’s fine in her tent in temperatures down to -11 C. Coincidentally, she’s met a nearby homeowner who rents out rooms in her house, and has told Frances that she can stay with her if it gets really cold and she has a spare room to offer.
A homeless Christmas, Frances says, is quiet after about 6 p.m. on Christmas Eve, when stores and businesses close for the holidays. Last Christmas, when she was camping out at Lansdowne Park, she got turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy from Whole Foods. This year, she says she may go to the Independent grocer at Billings Bridge on Dec. 24 and buy a cooked chicken to have for Christmas. And she’ll text and share videos with her daughter, Ashley, who lives in Toronto.
“Christmas is different than other days,” she says. “There’s a feeling in the air. More solemn, more quiet, a little more meaning to it. Last year at Lansdowne, they were playing all this Christmas music, and I was the only one really around, walking along, and there was a bit of wet snow, wet like this, and I was having a jolly old time.”
Thomas Cavasos
I caught up with Thomas at the Centretown Community Health Centre on Cooper Street, where he was charging his wheelchair. He shows me a notice he received from a city bylaw officer five days earlier, telling him he can’t stay at his corner anymore because he’s a nuisance and has to leave within 72 hours.
“Where am I supposed to go?” he asks.
Unlike Frances, Thomas desperately wants help finding a place to live, but he’s given up on the idea that any agency or bureaucracy will offer it.
“They claim there’s a list, some kind of ordering list? I don’t believe it.”
Thomas uses medicinal marijuana for pain, and has a doctor’s certificate allowing him to use and grow it. So he’s baffled at the suggestion that he might have to live in a place where he can’t smoke on a balcony or anywhere close to the front door.
Instead, and with the help of a friend, he recently started a GoFundMe page, hoping to raise $200,000 to buy a small plot of land somewhere and build on it. He’s an avid gardener, and says he learned from ChatGPT that if he can build a home within a year, any funds he raises for it won’t be deducted from his Ontario Disability Support Program payments.
“Turns out that ChatGPT has been more useful in a half-hour conversation than the last three years’ worth of housing workers, social workers, outreach workers and politicians.”
He describes Christmas, meanwhile, as one of the worst days to be homeless. Nothing is open, including public washrooms. “No washrooms, no warmth.
“I’m only in pain when I’m awake,” he adds, “so I’m going to try to sleep thorough it as much as I can. I’m going to (lie) down wherever I can and I ain’t getting up.”
