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Over the past six months, 650 CKOM Senior Reporter Lara Fominoff spent time with several people who are homeless, or recently considered themselves homeless. Each of their stories and experiences is unique.
In Part 2 of our four-part series “Stories from the Streets,” we meet Michael Bourgouin, a Saskatoon man who has been homeless for more than a year.
On a bitterly cold January evening, a man with a dark beard wearing several jackets, pairs of pants and hats approached a parked school bus on 20th Street in front of City Centre Church in the Riversdale neighbourhood.
He asked to be let inside.
The bus doors hissed and opened, as Biz Nico, who runs what’s been dubbed the Warming Bus, asked how 37-year-old Michael Bourgouin was doing. Bourgouin was then asked by a volunteer whether he wanted ham and bean soup, or beet and beef borscht, and was handed the bean soup in a plastic bowl with a bun for dipping.
“They’ve been a big help being kind enough to care about people that can’t always afford a meal, I guess,” Bourgouin said. “It helps when you can come to a bus like this where you have some really nice people that feed people with stuff they get donated.
“I don’t think they’ve ever fed me anything that I didn’t like,” he added.
By his account, Bourgouin had been homeless for one year and 2 1/2 months.
“I guess out of that year, maybe 3 1/2, four months was spent inside off and on at a friend’s place or (with) family. The rest was pretty much outside,” he said.
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Bourgouin said he slept wherever he could find a space; sometimes it was in a shelter, other times it was outside. He ended up homeless after a family fight over money taken to support his drug addiction.
“It was pretty much because of my new drug habit. I kind of quit smoking Mary Jane and traded it for the all famous meth habit. It wasn’t even my meth habit that landed me on my dad’s bad side,” he said.
“It was more or less the odd snagging of the money here and there to be able to feed my habit. It’s not like I didn’t think he was going to not notice; I knew he would. And I knew eventually it would come to what it did.”
He said he wasn’t married and had no children, which allowed him to have a routine of sorts during the daytime.
“I usually go bin-picking, but I call it knick-knack picking … most of the things I do find. I only go looking to support the habit. Otherwise I might not bin-pick at all,” he said.
There were certain areas where he was a “regular,” and others he stayed away from after being chased away. The items he found he tried to sell wherever he could.
He wanted people to know he wasn’t what many people might think of a homeless person, describing himself as a “pretty happy-go-lucky person.”
“I’m not the kind of person who robs or steals or jacks what he needs. I don’t do that anymore,” he said. “Something that gets my goat going is the people that ‘Hawkeye’ somebody like they’re going to steal something when they’re not.”
After Bourgouin finished his soup and bread, he picked up his backpack and gathered his blanket, and was offered some baked goods to take with him. He said he wasn’t sure where he’d stay for the night.
“I’m probably going to head back up to my usual chill hangout area near Prairie Harm Reduction,” he said.
That’s where he had street friends and he knew outreach workers.
“Most of the staff are pretty cool. They’re nice and helpful,” he said.
He said eventually he would make the decision to stop using drugs — but it wouldn’t happen anytime soon.
“Time’s the only thing that will tell when that happens. I have no clue when that will be. I know it’s going to be in the next few years,” he said.
