Homeless.com

To look at her, you wouldn't know this 22-year-old has no home. Or that she's a writer, with a devoted Internet following.

By Johnny Diaz, Globe Staff, 7/26/2003

For moments of each day, Crystal Evans feels like she is part of "the regular world."

She makes calls on her cellphone, updates her online journal, and hopscotches the Hub with her monthly T pass.

But when the one-hour time-limit on a local library computer expires, when the sun turns to a salmon hue and she is alone, or when someone spits on her after she asks for spare change -- then she is reminded that she isn't just like everyone else.

Under her screen name -- "being--homeless" -- Evans, 22, describes the daily challenges of finding a bed, a warm meal, and a shower. Her cybernarratives of life on the city's streets have attracted 300 faithful followers -- some from far beyond Greater Boston. She calls her online journal simply: "Writings from the perspective of a homeless girl."

Sympathetic readers regularly post supportive comments. Others ask: How can she have a cellphone -- or a T pass -- as a homeless person?

Her story: She ran away from her home in Concord, N.H., three years ago, then suffered a brain injury during a car accident two years ago that left her with recurring seizures, short-term memory loss, and at times vertigo. She floated from housecleaning to nanny jobs, but with the seizures, she did not last long at any of them. Broke, she became homeless.

Evans didn't want to end up this way. Growing up in a religious middle-class family, she found life on the streets far from her reality. But now, estranged from her family after clashing with their fundamentalist Baptist ideals in an abusive atmosphere, she declares she would rather be homeless than living back with them.

Her entries, updated daily, detail her industrious days. She logs on to the Internet in Boston and Cambridge libraries, recharges her cellphone at outlets in McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts, and does volunteer work at a children's center. She carries a list of homeless shelters in her backpack.

Evans strives to capture the struggles of people in her world -- the discomfort of sleeping in used shelter beds, the fear of being robbed or attacked on the street, and the constant anxiety of not knowing where the next meal will come from.

She is determined to debunk stereotypes.

"Anyone can be homeless," Evans says on a recent weekday afternoon, sitting on a bench outside Boston Medical Center, where several homeless people stroll by and ask her for change. "All homeless people don't smell or sleep on park benches. We aren't all drug addicts or alcoholics. We aren't all mentally ill. We aren't all lazy. We are each an individual. Each of us has our own journey to go through as we struggle to survive homelessness. I believe the public needs to be more aware of homelessness and hunger. It is closer to home than you may realize."

For some homeless people, keeping an online journal is a way for friends to keep track of them.

For some who read them, the journals open windows to a reality foreign to their gotta-go lifestyle.

For Evans, the journal keeps her "sane" and centered amid a life of uncertainty.

I'm clean. I dress nice. I'm educated . . . But I am homeless. If you saw me walking down the street in the morning, you might wonder why I'm carrying a back pack and/or duffle bag with me.

One would be hard-pressed to believe Evans is homeless because of her appearance and because of some items she manages to afford, including a cellphone and a post office box near South Station. She says she pays for them from last year's tax refund and monthly disability checks from Massachusetts for her brain injury.

With her clean-cut look and articulate manner, Evans could easily pass for any young adult on a WB television show.

"She is an inspiration for her strength, kindness and compassion in the face of great difficulties," said Margaret McCabe Elenko, a Charles River Park resident who has read Evans's journal since its debut in March on livejournal.com. "I find it interesting that she makes the time almost every day to update the journal. You start to realize everyone has a story behind them. She had a brain injury from a car accident and as a result, she has a seizure disorder and it makes it impossible for her to hold down a job and an apartment. The point is that it could happen to any of us, really."

Before she came to Massachusetts, she sought assistance from the Brain Injury Association office in Concord, N.H., where counselors helped Evans complete the state forms for welfare and disability aid.

"Brain injury is very misunderstood," said Erin Hall, an association coordinator. "People don't realize that even if you don't see [the brain injury], there is a real issue with it, cognitively, and being able to multitask and stay organized. The major obstacle for Crystal is that she doesn't look like she has any type of disability She is very bright, articulate and outgoing. It was more that people didn't believe her."

While bouncing from shelter to shelter in New Hampshire and trying to get state aid, Evans researched the best areas to relocate. She learned Massachusetts was rich in homeless outreach as well as rehabilitation for brain injury victims.

"They had public transportation, many shelters, services for the homeless, free medical care offered through many hospitals and I knew I could qualify for Medicaid," said Evans.

And perhaps, go to college, maybe Harvard, a goal fueled by the story of Liz Murray, a homeless woman whose tale became a recent Lifetime television movie about leaving the streets for the Crimson corridors.

I'm really torn. Tuition is so expensive, but I might have a good chance at scholarships -- between my disability, my homelessness, and my volunteer work. I've gotta start looking into scholarships. BIG ones.

She began describing her homeless experiences in a notebook while staying in a Gloucester shelter -- a stop on the way to Boston -- earlier this year, and she discovered that libraries were among the few places where she could be productive and keep warm during the winter.

Just before the spring, she made her way to the Hub, hopping among shelters, including Rosie's Place and The Pine Street Inn. Because of her post office box address, she was able to get a Boston public library card, and on the libraries' computers her notebook jottings became an online journal.

"Every day more and more people were adding me to their friends' list. People were interested in what I had to say. Some had been homeless themselves, others worked with the homeless and some were just curious people," said Evans, whose journal insights highlight some of the injustices of being homeless: the purple bruises that mar battered women's faces at shelters and the sight of lonely and lost elderly people who don't have any relatives to help them.

Online readers pepper her with questions.

"I found myself answering the same questions over and over: `Where do you shower?' `Where do you do your laundry?' `Where do you sleep?' " Evans said.

So she did what many expensive corporate websites do: Set up a "Frequently Asked Questions" list.

On laundry: Evans goes to Youth On Fire, a Cambridge drop-in day center for homeless youth ages 14-24.

Showers: one of the South End shelters or the Cambridge center.

Food: homeless shelters provide at least one warm meal a day and some programs provide breakfasts.

E-mail: Boston-area libraries such as the South End branch of the BPL. Sometimes, she says, she uses the MIT library.

Evans spends parts of her days volunteering at children's centers such as the one at Children's Hospital and the Ronald McDonald House in Brookline, a nonprofit organization providing a home away from home to families who have children with cancer. By volunteering, Evans says, she will have something on her resume when the day comes when she is able to work again.

"She is very outgoing. She is very bright," said Andy Richards, executive director of the McDonald House, where Evans colors with children or answers the phone a few hours a week. "She is working hard to get what she needs. She is probably doing it in ways most homeless people wouldn't."

It's those insights that have helped her cultivate pen pals on her website, one from as far away as the other Cambridge -- the one in England.

"It is a shame that it has become such a cliche to say that someone is an inspiration, because Crystal really is," said Helen Wright, a database assistant at the University of Cambridge who has closely followed Evans' web logs.

Last month, after reading about Evans' hopes for having some clean bed sheets to use at the shelters, Wright shipped her a new batch of sheets through a Target catalog.

"I thought this would be a good thing for her to get, because it's important for mental health [and] well-being to feel comfortable in the place where you live, and the fact that Crystal hasn't been able to do this for a long while makes it even more important."

All I want is a place of my own. But I have to wait -- like thousands of other homeless people across the state. In the meantime, I'll keep applying for housing, attending activists meetings related to homelessness and poverty, and I'll keep writing and sharing my experience of being homeless through my journal. I do want to return to work in the future . . . I'm smart and I don't want to let the `undamaged' parts of my brain go to waste.

Johnny Diaz may be reached at jodiaz@globe.com.