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My name's Bryan Esslambre,
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I was born on Montreal in 1988.
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I moved to BC when I was 7.
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Had the basic childhood,
went to school and everything.
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Went to high school out in Surrey,
and that's where I found my passion for football.
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And I was doing great things with it.
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In my grade 12th year, my mother passed away,
which had a very big impact on my life.
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I started smoking a lot of weed,
and it just led me down a bad path
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to wasting money, not going to school and...
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basically all of the wrong choices that you're told not to make when you're a kid.
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And... I wouldn't change it, I would try and help other people from not doing those choices,
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because I am where I am because of what I did,
and it's made me who I am,
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and I'm not ungrateful,
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but I know that 5 years ago,
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I didn't see myself staying in a shelter,
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but I'm glad that I'm here
than rather out on the streets.
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It's honestly just a big learning experience.
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I mean, who wants to be in a shelter?
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They're not the worst living conditions.
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I can honestly say that, from what I've seen, down on the downtown eastside [of Vancouver]
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I know that you get your locker
checked on every day.
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If you have food, it's not allowed.
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There are constant bedbugs.
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Here they do clean it quite well,
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but living in a place with 60 other guys
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isn't really anything that people envision
for themselves.
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I mean, no one really thinks
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"oh, no one's gonna have their own bedroom,
no one's gonna have somewhere to sleep,
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no one's gonna have their own food
and be able to take care of themselves",
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but the wrong choices can lead you anywhere.
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Uh, my name's Trinity,
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and right now I'm living in a transition house
for women 16 to 24 years old.
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I'm from Yellowknife, Northwest Territories originally,
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and I moved around a lot when I was young.
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Since I was 16 I was pretty much on my own.
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And uh, I somehow made it to Vancouver
like a year and a half ago.
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And um, I was struggling with homelessness a lot,
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and I was in and out of SRO's [ single room occupancies ] and shelters.
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Like, a lot of the shelters had gotten shut down this year, so there was less,
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and I found that it was really hard
trying to get into a shelter,
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and so there were a lot of times where I was
sleeping in alleys and stuff like that.
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And I finally found this place, which, uh,
I'm allowed to stay here for a year,
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until I can get up on my feet.
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It's not as bad as the other places I've lived,
it's actually pretty nice here.
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The living conditions are... it's a clean place,
there's no bugs, there's no rodents.
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Um, my boyfriend that I'm with right now,
we've been together for about a year,
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and uh, he was also homeless on and off again
with me a lot of the times.
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Like sometimes I'd have a place and he wouldn't,
or he'd have a place and I wouldn't.
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Right now, he's staying at the Lucky Lodge Hotel,
an SRO, which is pretty atrocious.
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I'd say it's one of the worst places
either of us have ever stayed.
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Um, my name is Nick, I live in this shit SRO,
Lucky Lodge.
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As you can see, there's obviously
no sink, no oven...
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nothing really... circuit always breaks because
what goes on...
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because you can't have 2 things plugged in at once.
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It just goes out...
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there's like a huge insect problem.
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What they should do is just
tear the whole damn building down.
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I came out of detox and I just figured, I wanted just a new place cause I was homeless at the time,
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so I just got this place in literally one day.
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Shouldn't even be here in the bloody first place.
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They charge $10 a night for guests.
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It's outrageous, considering it's $400 a month
for this type of place.
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It's an SRO so it's not covered
under the Residential Tenancy Act,
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so you can't just go to, like, arbitration
and bitch at them.
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It's not under the same act,
it's a completely different tenancy act,
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so they can get away with anything
'cause it's run like a hotel.
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So the owners can make any rules they want,
and they enforce it.
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And the reality in the news,
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they just look at the idea of an SRO
as a broad generalization.
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They just say "oh, that's low income housing, single residential occupancy,
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a single human being could live in there"
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They always use the words "could" and "live", like totally it's more like surviving in this dump.
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It's a roof is what it is. A little privacy. That's it.
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Um, I have been looking for quite a bit of work,
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but it's listing this place
as your address on your resume,
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people immediately reject it
just because it's a shelter.
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So, it's not a hindrance...
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but I do know that people would accept like
a post office box better than a shelter.
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I would be in a very different place if I had even just stuck with my sport,
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but I'm trying to get back into it now.
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I'm working on my education
with the programs they have here.
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And a lot of people are in my corner
trying to make sure that I turn out alright.
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Um, my hopes for the future is, y'know, I'll make it
as an artist somehow, y'know.
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Whether that be with painting or with film.
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Um, and to also have my own place I could call home,
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that y'know, I could have like family and friends over
whenever I like,
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and it's clean and safe.
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I'm grateful that I found this place.
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It was a nice place to find,
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but I am looking forward to the day
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that I can get out and then give back,
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and hopefully help people not end up
where I ended up.
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[ Captions by: the Radical Access Mapping Project,
On Un-ceded Coast Salish Territory, 2013 ]