'Stories of the Street' author helps readers remember the human lives behind Phoenix homelessness

Michael Demangone is a medical student at the University of Arizona’s Phoenix campus. He’s also the co-author of a new book called “Stories of the Street.”

It’s a collection of the stories he and his fellow students have met as part of the university’s street medicine program. The Show spoke with him more about it.

Full conversation

MICHAEL DEMANGONE: We take some wagons around with supplies, and we just go meet people who are living on the streets and. And see if they have any health care issues that we can address. A lot of it looks like wound care. There's like a menstrual health team, but we're trying to just meet patients where they are. We're trying to give them some supplies that can help out.

Sometimes we give out basic, you know, prescriptions for antifungals, things like that. We change their bandages or their wounds, and you'll run into people of all different walks of life, and we'll talk to them. We'll chat, and then we'll see if we can maybe even refer some of those people to get better care.

SAM DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, and so, as one might imagine, and as you alluded to, in the course of doing that work, you end up talking to folks.

Could you give us an example of one of those conversations you had in your experience before the book project even existed that resonated with you?

DEMANGONE: Yeah. I mean, there was one man who had, like, a hernia that he had had for a very, very long time, was never able to get, like, help for that hernia. And so here he is walking on the streets, like downtown Phoenix. It's extremely hot. He's got this massive hernia. And it's something that needs, you know, to be fixed surgically, but he just doesn't have the resources.

It's not, you know, he says he maybe has lost a little bit of trust in the health care system. Can't afford it. And so you kind of just sit there and you have to just take all this in. Knowing that there's not always a whole ton that you can do other than just listen and comfort the person in this issue.

I think that's kind of when I learned a little bit, too, about the power of listening as well, is sometimes you just have to comfort people through listening and seeing them and loving them, and that's all that you can do. And it sometimes sucks, but it's a reality of health care.

DINGMAN: Yeah. So this gets into one of the things that's really powerful about the book, "Stories of the Street," because on practically every page of this book, we hear a story of like the one you just described about this gentleman with the hernia. But we also get a lot of other biographical information about them.

We hear stories about how their marriages came to be and then in many cases, fell apart. We hear stories about jobs they had that were going really well until they weren't. We hear people being very frank about substance abuse issues that they've struggled with that have led to really debilitating car accidents. And all of those things kind of, for me as a reader, go into creating these very nuanced portraits.

DEMANGONE: I think that was definitely the goal was to humanize people, to see these people as people and not projects. And I knew going into it that, you know, I had my own biases, and I was going to view the homeless or maybe why somebody was on the street for a certain reason. But the reality is, the more I talk to people, you realize there's a billion variables by someone is living on the street and how they get there.

But there's also just these lives behind these people as well. Everybody has a story worth hearing because the people living on the street are just that. They're humans. We forget that. We forget that they had a childhood and they had an adolescence, and they might have gotten married multiple times and they had multiple different jobs, and we can easily just forget that.

You know, people are people when we simply label them and we just see them as a need. Some of them you'll be able to relate to. Some of them you cannot relate to at all.

DINGMAN: Yeah, well, that's interesting, Michael, because some of the stories are very inspirational. There are also, though, some folks that we meet in the book where it's just sort of a devastatingly human portrait of a person where there's no easy narrative.

I'm thinking in particular of there's one person in there that you talk to who was in a marriage for a long time, and he tells you that eventually members of his family had to take out a restraining order against him. He also says that he was raised to never cause harm to women. That that was like, core to his upbringing. He doesn't get into what did or did. He just kind of places both of those realities alongside each other as he's narrating this story.

That was a very intense read for me, I found, because here's a person who, it seems like, you know, I'm speculating a little bit, but in the narrative of his family, must have done something that made members of his family feel like they were in danger.

Here's a person who is sitting there saying, you know, that his values are that he wouldn't do anything like that. And also, here's this person who doesn't have a place to live right now and needs some medical care. And it really kind of squarely frames why this is such a difficult thing to reckon with people's humanity and how that's magnified when it's somebody who is unhoused.

DEMANGONE: Yeah. And I think you're kind of trying to make sense of all these things, and it's very complex, and sometimes it doesn't make sense. And there's not all these, you know, wonderful Cinderella endings. You know, it's life. And I think even in that way, we can resonate with it where, you know, maybe some people are on the street currently because they have done something wrong, and maybe, you know, they, you know, they've at one point in their life to something terrible, and they're trying to reconcile that.

We all have that in us, whether we are on the street or not. I think we all have times where maybe we, you know, have values that we don't live up to. The street maybe exacerbates it or we don't get to see it always. But, you know, humans can be humans, whether they're, you know, in the ivory tower or whether they're living on the streets of Phoenix, Arizona.

DINGMAN: Certainly. Certainly. Yeah. I mean, I have to say that's what it made me think about, is all of a sudden those very human things that we all share get magnified in this way and judged in a different way.

DEMANGONE: Yeah. A lot of times it's, like, easy to see how, like, I have the same imperfections a lot of people have on the street, you know, when talking about maybe pride or maybe talking about, you know, how I haven't treated somebody the way that should be treated, but when somebody's, you know, quote, unquote, homeless, you just think, ah, that must have led to that.

When it's like, in a lot of ways, I'm like, it's way more complex than that. You know, I've struggled with the same things that these people have struggled with.

DINGMAN: Right.

DEMANGONE: I've also been very blessed in my own life to have support systems that haven't fallen through. There are individuals, you know, we come across who have had former amazing careers, and, you know, we try and label them as homeless or have done something wrong or something to deserve being homeless, and that's usually just not the case. It's just so complex.

DINGMAN: Yeah. Yeah. That makes me think of in one of these portraits. In the book, we hear somebody say that he raised, I think it was three daughters and bought them each a house.

DEMANGONE: Oh, yeah. It kind of reminds me of, like, the widow in the Bible, where she gives, like, her two pennies, and it's like she gave everything that she had. It's like some people, they are limited on resources, yet they're still so selfless. And sometimes they become homeless because they're so selfless. Like, they give their daughters all houses. They think of others before themselves. And so that story just, yeah, it resonates with me because I think of how many times, like, man, I wish I was more like a lot of these individuals who were living on the street, you know?

Yeah. And I think that's, like, a sense I never really thought about when I was just passing by people who are homeless. I'm thinking how many virtues and how many wonderful things they have about them that are just on, you know, that are not seen.