Scott Klinger lives in Gardiner. For the last three years he has been volunteering with the Saturday Morning Community Breakfast and more recently at the United Community Living Center. 

When the Augusta Police arrest an unhoused person, they record the person’s address as “transient.” The dictionary defines transient as “a person staying in a place for a short time.” While many in power may hope that people living on our streets and in our woods act like transients and “move along,” the reality is far different.

Few of our unsheltered citizens are “just passing through.” Most are Mainers and a sizable minority were born here, attended Augusta schools and continue to live without shelter here in their hometown.

Next month, the Saturday morning breakfast at the Unitarian Universalist Community Church celebrates its third anniversary of building community and sharing meals each week with 70-80 people without secure housing. I have volunteered providing transportation to and from breakfast each week since we started. When we began, everyone called those who attended our guests.

While that feels a lot better than transient, it still doesn’t work well. Many of the people experiencing homelessness arrive early to help set the tables or stay late to help clean up. And increasingly volunteers and guests sit and eat together. Many of us think neighbor is a better descriptor, and better still is the word friend.

Words matter, not because they are politically correct but because they shape important policy decisions, like the one the Augusta City Council considered at its Dec. 4 meeting.

Over the last year, Mayor O’Brien formed a homelessness task force that invested time and money listening to business owners, homeowners, professionals working with the unhoused, and to those experiencing homelessness.

In March, the task force issued its final report, calling for a permanent year-round overnight shelter, among many other things. As a new shelter proposal was slated to be considered by the Planning Board on Dec. 9, City Councilor Kevin Judkins submitted a last-minute emergency resolution to place a six-month moratorium on any shelter project, undermining the diligent work of policymakers and citizens on the task force.

That resolution deadlocked in a 4-4 vote. While this blocks its immediate implementation, it can still be brought up again at a future meeting.

Judkins worries about safety and operating standards for shelters without acknowledging that any new shelter is bound by existing building codes adopted by previous councils and the state legislatures. It will also be bound by state operating standards for shelters, just like the Augusta Emergency Warming Center that has safely and effectively operated for the last three winter seasons.

Perhaps the real problem is not safety protections, but the words that we use to describe those among us who lack adequate shelter. Are they “transients” or could we begin to see them as fellow humans or even as neighbors who could use some neighborly care? The stories and life experiences of people lacking shelter are as complicated, challenging and beautiful as the stories of those of us blessed enough to have a home.

In October, Pope Leo XIV issued his first papal letter, titled “On Love for the Poor.” Pope Leo writes these challenging words worth considering in our current debate in Augusta: “Does [this] mean that the less gifted are not human beings? Or that the weak do not have the same dignity as ourselves? Are those born with fewer opportunities of lesser value as human beings? Should they limit themselves merely to surviving? The worth of our societies, and our own future, depends on the answers we give to these questions. Either we regain our moral and spiritual dignity or we fall into a cesspool.”

The choice is ours: what words will we use, and what choices will we make to protect one
another’s dignity and ensure that merely surviving is not good enough. We are all transients on this Earth after all. May we travel together as neighbors and friends.