.....A Shower of Hope for the Hopeless.....
A heartwrenching sight seen every day in cities worldwide is that of able-bodied people sleeping in the street by night and begging by day. These people include the middle aged, who may have had lives and families but now are forlorn and forgotton, resigned to leading miserable lives until they die. And there are the young people who should be working to build a future. Instead, they have no aspiration except to beg or steal for a livelihood for the rest of an unkind life because experience has shown them that there is no hope of finding employment. Shamefully, this problem of human refuse is endemic not only to poor locales, but also to the richest cities on earth.
A claim that one sometimes hears from people of fortunate circumstances, is that these people are themselves to blame for their predicament due to lack of effort to find employment. However, finding a job is not an easy thing for anyone, and is virtually impossible for someone who is dirty, unshaven, smelly, wearing filthy clothes. No employer is so altruistic as to hire a "bum".
The mission of the SHOWER Project is to give street people a real chance to find a job.
By providing facilities where street people can use the bathroom, take a shower, wash their clothes, and receive messages from employers, the SHOWER Project is a source of opportunity for the hopeless.
Every SHOWER Project location will provide bathrooms, showers, sinks and clotheslines for laundry, an area to receive and distribute donated clothing, a phone only for receiving messages from potential employers on behalf of job-seekers, and a bulletin board for job announcements and employment related messages. The project facilities will be compact in design (about 500sf) and have no other features than the ones mentioned above. They will be intentionally designed so that there is no room to congregate or socialize in order to avoid potential problems. The facilities will be very inexpensive to setup and operate, with each having only one fulltime employee. The SHOWER Project will avoid any affiliation with religious or political groups in order that all will feel welcome.
The long-term goal of the SHOWER Project is to establish locations in major cities worldwide. The first facilities will be constructed in San Jose, Costa Rica. For more information, follow the links below.
