California's other face: homelessness

MOJAVE, California - In rural California, thousands of homeless people
camp in orchards and derelict packing plants, along railroad lines
and river banks, in remote canyons and even in abandoned mine shafts.

Americans are used to encountering homeless people in their towns and
cities. But few realize that homelessness is also prevalent, if much
less visible, in rural areas.

In Kern County, California, a sprawling jurisdiction about the size of
the state of Massachusetts and encompassing rich Central Valley
agricultural land as well as barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, as
many as 6,000 homeless may live at any given time, care providers say.

They include Mexican farm workers, from among the 30,000 who come each
year for the summer harvest season and squat in orchards or fields or
along canal banks or live many to a room in broken down "welfare motels."

But 600 to 700 Viet Nam War veterans live in the desert and mountains,
in caves, mine shafts and canyons. Many have post-traumatic stress
disorder and problems related to drug addiction, according to Marie
Aylward-Wall, homelessness co-ordinator for Clinica Sierra Vista, a
non-profit community health provider based in Bakersfield, California.

"Many of these people suffer from diabetes and hypertension but have
received no health care for years. Perhaps 70 per cent of them test
positive for Hepatitis C. These people are extremely skittish and
difficult to reach. It takes time and patience to win their confidence
so we can provide them with services," she said.

Network of drug labs

Kern County also has a large network of methamphetamine labs, mostly
in the desert, that attract small settlements of chronic drug abusers,
who can be dangerous when approached by health outreach workers,
Aylward-Wall said.

"There have been some scary incidents when outreach workers stumbled
on meth labs without knowing it," she said.

The drug is cooked in holes in the ground and collected regularly by
couriers for distribution in the cities.

Adding to the combustible mix living in the wild are survivalists and
right-wing extremists, liable to attack black or Hispanic health care
workers who approach them.

For Steve Schilling, executive director of Clinica Sierra Vista,
treating homeless people has clear public health benefits.

"Any population that is unscreened and unserved and inaccessible
presents a risk for speeding the spread of dangerous diseases in this
country," he said.

Last November, county police cleared out three camps of homeless
people living along the Kern River, demolishing their makeshift
shelters and dumping many of their possessions in rubbish containers.
Some complained they lost their medicines and valuable identity papers
in the sweep.

According to Patricia Post of the National Health Care for the
Homeless Council, the incidence of homelessness in some rural counties
is proportionately comparable or greater than in Los Angeles, New York
City or Washington D.C.

Estimates of the homeless population of the United States vary, but
many experts put it at between 1 million and 2 million. About 9 per
cent are thought to be in rural areas.

Never seen a doctor

"Proud people with a long history of self-reliance, the rural homeless
are reluctant to seek help, are far from established support services
and hard to reach," Post wrote in a report published last December.

The report found that two-thirds of the rural homeless had jobs,
usually part-time, short-term or seasonal and without health benefits.
Some 64 per cent were high school dropouts.

In one recent survey, 32 per cent of male agricultural workers in
California said they had never been to a doctor's office or a clinic.
There are 1.3 million agricultural workers in California, 91 per cent
of whom were born in Mexico, according to the California Policy
Research Centre at the University of California at Berkeley.

In Kern County, Clinica Sierra Vista outreach workers try to find
homeless people in need, making regular forays into remote areas with
a mobile clinic staffed by volunteers.

One recent Sunday found a team of six headed by Dr Tomas Rios, who
regularly volunteers his time, parking the mobile clinic near a chapel
in the middle of the Mojave Desert.

The first patient to show up in the unrelenting heat was Mario
Estrada, a 53-year-old immigrant from Guatemala who has been living
for seven years in a derelict motor home in the middle of the desert,
surrounded by abandoned cars and other garbage, without electricity or
running water.

A quick test showed Estrada's blood sugar at near-crisis level. Rios
gave him some medication but advised him to seek more extensive
treatment quickly.

"The medication I gave him will buy him some time but he needs to
follow up. There are signs of damage to his eyes already," he said.

On one Sunday, the mobile van found a 47-year-old diabetic farm worker
living in the desert with gangrene up to his knee. The team took him
to the emergency room, where his leg was amputated.

Another time, they came across a 33-year-old pregnant woman living in
her car in the desert with two children. Her blood pressure was at a
dangerous level. They rushed her to the hospital, but she lost the
baby.

Aylward-Wall said 1,500 Hispanic people had been lured to the area by
a land scam several years ago. They had forked out thousands of
dollars, which for many represented their entire life savings, to
unscrupulous developers who gave them glossy brochures of lush
agricultural land. When they arrived, they found nothing but desert.

Many have drifted away but some families still remain. One favourite
game of the children is catching rattlesnakes and painting their names
on them.

The developers settled a lawsuit for US$580,000 and entered a plea
bargain under which one agreed to serve a year in jail and pay a
US$10,000 fine.