Hymen's seafood in Charleston, SC

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image showing Hymen's seafood in Charleston, SC

ScarletNighthawk on January 2nd, 2022 at 17:55 UTC »

I wish the poor and/or homeless didn’t have to rely on businesses for their basic needs, but it’s incredibly awesome to see businesses do this. Always revives my faith in humanity.

Yum_Kaax on January 2nd, 2022 at 18:00 UTC »

Hymen?

moonlightavenger on January 3rd, 2022 at 02:43 UTC »

Some of the comments are very disheartening. I hope that the management did this with good intentions.

Reminds me of a day I went to lunch on a McDonalds (I was in university and it sucked out my will to live) and there was this guy in the parking lot, asking for food. This happened in Brasilia, Brazil's capital, by the way.

I had an awful morning that day and seeing that guy sitting in the curb, under the sun (completely cloudless) it just stirred something in me. I approached him and asked if I could buy him a lunch. He looked tired as fuck and he didn't really light up with happiness, but he thanked me.

It was one of those Mc Donald's with the outside tables within a fenced area, so I took our food outside and called him to sit with me, but he said that he wasn't allowed. I thought that it made sense, and that the employees would do that sort of thing, especially considering the kind of entitled assholes that live in that city. So, I handed him the food over the fence.

Well, he sat on his place in the curb and I sat at the table. Not five minutes later a police car drives into the parking lot. Man, the motherfuckers called the police on him. That pissed me off. I took my food and walked over while they were talking to him (one guy and a woman) and I said I was going to have lunch with my friend. I didn't even think at the time, that I could be getting myself in trouble.

Now, I don't think that they'd beat him, or take him in (it's not the customary with the police in that city), but they were going to make him leave.

Now, the interesting thing was that I knew the woman cop. Because during internship I got assigned to the ER for the HRAN (the regional hospital for the north wing of the city) where the police often took detainees. She told me that they were called because he was disturbing patrons. I said I was the client and that he wasn't disturbing me. That the parking lot was a public area and McDonald's couldn't tell us we couldn't stay there. If I wanted to eat my crappy hamburger sitting in the curb with my friend, I could.

Well, they agreed and the male cop went into the store and eventually just left. I sat with the guy and we ate together. We had a conversation. He told me that the cops often understood that the problem was that 'store owners' treated the homeless like crap because the snooty jerks that lived in that stupid city (politicians and the worse vermin to walk the earth: their advisors) didn't want 'dirty people' by the stores they liked to shop at. But the cops had to do something and most of them just didn't have the patience. They usually just shooed the homeless away to close the call and be done with it. And that was what they usually said. That they were 'disturbing patrons'.

We ended talking about the places where he would sleep, for example. The city has underground passages under the axis and the parallel roads, with no crosswalks (it's a really pedestrian-unfriendly city) and those are dark places with faulty lighting. They often got filled with people sleeping in cardboards and drug abuse and sexual assaults are rampant. He said that he often spent days without food because most restaurants wouldn't let him forage for food in the waste bins because they would 'make a mess'. Just, what the hell? I don't consider myself a saint or anything, but keeping people that barely make it from day to day from trying to scavenge a meal from the trash is low.

I convinced him to get himself checked in the Universitary Hospital (public) and he was there the next day the person that was in charge of ER was one of my teachers and she later told me that he was there and that they got social services involved and they would get him to a shelter along with a full chek-up.

So, what is the moral of the story? Note that in Brazil any person (national or not) can walk into a public hospital and be seen by a doctor, be inserted into the health system, and have their problem tended to the best capacity of the professionals available. But that person never sought that sort of help, which was his right as a person in Brazil. I don't know if it all worked out for him, but I also know that he also has a right to an education. But he never got to use those benefits. He talked about himself as though he was just a thing that belonged in the streets.

TL;DR: These people need to be reached out to. You can't expect them to come to you. They don't think that they are worth it. They don't understand that they should be helped.