ENTRY DESCRIPTION
MARY ELLEN



Mary Ellen has been on the street for almost as long as she can remember. “I left home at eleven,” she told my dad and I. “I raised myself. Yeah, I ran away….Actually, the apartments are torn down now, but I used to sleep in hallways and stuff. And, yeah, I … couchsurfed. I didn’t have any friends.”

Now a middle-aged woman of fifty-four, Mary Ellen is hoping, soon, to be able to find a place to stay. “I’m, ah … I try to get off the streets. I try every day now. Yeah, I … you know, when I was … I don’t know what I’m doing. But mostly in the summer I … I don’t know if it’s some sort of drug I got into….I’m getting into fights every other day.”

Mary Ellen admitted to us that she suffers from a mental illness. “I’m kind of emotional I guess,” she said, “but I’ve been having emotions. I have bi-polar personality disorder. [I have] mental illness. When I was six years old I did six months in a hospital.”

When my dad asked Mary Ellen where, in Toronto, she stays when it gets cold, she replied, “I sleep at University [Avenue] … ah …in the Out of the Cold.” (Out of the Cold is an emergency program for people experiencing homelessness that provides shelter, sleeping mats, and food during the cold, winter months.)

Although Mary Ellen has several children, she has no contact with them. “I have five children, but they don’t talk to me.” And so, just as she was when she was a young girl of eleven, Mary Ellen is homeless and alone.

AUTHOR
Leah Denbok is a 17-year-old grade 12 student at Collingwood Collegiate Institute. For the past four years the Leah has been mentored by the National Geographic photographer and Fellow Joel Sartore. When Leah was only 14-years-old, Joel said of Leah, "If she sticks with it I think she is well on her way to becoming not just a good photographer but a great photographer. And I'm not kidding." This past August Leah was invited to exhibit her photography at Christ Church Cathedral during the Supercrawl event in Hamilton. Afterwards, the internationally known street photography, Alex Zafer, posted a comment on Facebook in which he said of Leah, "This is a young woman with an obviously high EQ, mega talent, and a terrific eye for humanizing homeless people on the streets who are so often looked upon, or looked-over as subhuman." After graduating from high school Leah intends to study photojournalism at university.











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