When I got off the street in Hilo, Hawaii in 2021, I had been houseless since summer 2012. I had about $6,000 saved and I was getting $563 a week from PPP with a distant end date.
During that time of the Covid response after I moved to Hilo there were few public services available. Even the local gym was making newcomers wait two weeks. I had already planned to get off the street in 2021, but I picked the exact time because of an infection that lingered on the last Hawaiian island I wanted to visit to write four books of haikus on four different Hawaiian islands in four consecutive years.
When I was in Kauai in 2020, I slipped and fell in the rain before sunrise and wound up with a bad staph infection in my leg. At the YMCA in Lihue one of my friends cautioned me and said he knew somebody with a wound like that on the battlefield and they lost their leg. My natural treatments didn’t heal it, so the doctor prescribed an antibiotic in Hilo.
Cream and pills were working, but the sun scorched my skin and I was getting radiation poisoning. I rode a bike and it was peeling off my knuckles unlike ever before, so in January 2023 I asked one of my homeless friends about an inexpensive hotel and the one she suggested worked out. I paid by the week for several weeks, then moved mauka to a weekly rental and wound up signing my first lease in a decade.
PICS IN WORDS 