In yesterday’s blog post, I wrote about meeting a drug addicted, homeless girl in Dickinson, North Dakota.  I offered to give her a ride to go get something to eat, and she accepted.  On the way to Wendy’s I asked her if she wanted me to take her to a women’s shelter.  She didn’t want to go to a women’s shelter.  I believed that it was a combination of outstanding warrants, and still wanting to use drugs, that made her not want to go to the women’s shelter.

This young lady was very pretty.  She wasn’t able to stay mentally focused, or keep her mind and thoughts on track.  I believed that she was possibly currently high, and that drugs probably were to blame for her mental disorientation.  After she was done eating, I dropped her off right back where I picked her up, just across the street from the low rent apartment building where I live.  She was going to go back to her hiding spot somewhere outdooors to spend the night, so I gave her my black hooded sweatshirt and $10.

The following day, which is today, I had to go do some self-employed construction work that I had scheduled for Tuesday morning.  The work went more quickly than I expected, for once.  I was almost half way through with my work by 11:00 a.m. when it began to rain too hard for me to continue.  I packed up my equipment and I went back to my apartment.

Last night, this morning when I was getting ready for work, when I was driving to work, and when I was working, I was thinking about that homeless girl.  I was glad that it started raining, that I could go home, and that I could look up and call the womens’ shelters.  I looked through my guide to Dickinson, North Dakota booklet, and I could only find the domestic abuse shelter listing.

I called the domestic abuse shelter, and they did in fact admit homeless women.  I explained that the homeless girl that I met did not want me to take her to the women’s shelter partly because of outstanding warrants, and her current drug addiction.  The women’s shelter said that they don’t turn women in to law enforcement, but they would have to asses any woman who came to the shelter to see what kind of help she needed.

I went looking for the homeless girl that I met, and I thought that it would be miraculous if I found her.  After about twenty minutes of driving around my neighborhood, I couldn’t find her.  I thought that she was probably in someone’s apartment or house getting high.  I gave up looking for the time being, maybe I would see her walking around in the evening.

I was hungry and I had been thinking about getting a club sandwich at the Paragon diner, so that is where I headed.  As I was driving west on Villard, I saw some person sitting down on the curb behind a bank building.  I made a right turn into the parking lot and it was her.  I said that I was going to the Paragon to eat, did she want to come, and she did.

She was tired, tired looking, and probably not high at the moment.  She said that she slept outside last night, and that it had been cold.  I told her about the women’s shelter, and they said that they wouldn’t turn her over to the police or anything.  She said that she had been given the women’s shelter address a couple of hours ago.

After we were done eating, she didn’t want to go to the women’s shelter, she wanted to go to her probation officer, then she didn’t want to go her probation officer.  There was quite a delay and drive around, because she kept changing her mind.  She was scared to go to both her probation officer, and the women’s shelter.

Finally, near the women’s shelter, I had to call them because the directions she had been given were unclear, or she was trying to not find it.  When I drove up outside, she wouldn’t go in.  I was trying to coax her and negotiate with her to just meet these people, but she wouldn’t go in.  I was trying to reason with her that she didn’t want to sleep outside again in the cold and the rain, but she wouldn’t go in.  Finally, I said to her that now that she knows where it is, she can go there if she needed to.  Then I dropped her off at her probation officer downtown.

I called the women who I had now spoken to twice at the women’s shelter, and I explained that she was too scared to go in.  They said they knew, they saw us parked outside.  I said that maybe she will come back tonight when she gets cold.  I gave what information I had about her, so that they would know who she was, and let her in.

What I didn’t write about yesterday in much detail was who this person was.  I am not going to blab too much about the details of her life, but I did ask questions to try to get a picture of who she was, to get many pieces of a puzzle.  What I learned about her yesterday, and what I learned about her today, I tried to make sense of it, to put it all together.

Like most attractive women, she was being a little difficult.  On the way to go get something to eat when she was hungry and hadn’t eaten anything, she was better behaved.  After she was done eating, she acted like a typical attractive woman.  She would say, “What? What’s up?  Why are you smiling?”  I would answer, “I like you, you’re pretty.”  She would say, “There are all kinds of pretty women, thousands of them.  You are going to have to find some other reason to like me, that’s not a good reason.  I have all kinds of other reasons for people to like me.  You guys are all the same, I’m pretty.”

I said, “O.K., I admire you because you told me that you won the state championship in high school tennis.  I practiced tennis every day for years in Florida, and I never made it very far in even the district preliminary tournaments.  I am envious of you, I am jealous of you, that is something to be proud of , I would be proud of that, I would brag about that.”

Anyway, knowing her first name, and that she won the high school tennis championship in the state where she came from, I was able to look her up on the internet, and I saw her picture in the newspaper, it was her.  This was quite an accomplishment.  She must have been super athletic and super coordinated.

She had a mom, dad, sister, family, childhood, played sports, and she was good in sports.  I think that she might have said once to me very quickly that she played sports in college.  This is really a terrible thing that the course of life events has taken this beautiful young lady away from her family, friends, people who care about her, to where she is broke, unemployable, drug addicted, and homeless in Dickinson, North Dakota.