She hadn’t spoken to her father in years when her late grandmother reached out to tell her that he struggled with severe mental illness and had become homeless… In 2012, she gathered “tidbits of my father’s health status and living arrangements” and went looking for him on the streets of Honolulu…
In between helping to care for her father, pursuing a law degree at the University of Hawaii, and being a wife and a mother to two young boys, Kim still finds time to reach out to the homeless community and brings books to children in the Kakaako homeless encampment, one of the city’s largest.
She is working on a photo book, which she successfully Kickstarted in January, to chronicle her journey with her father, as well as the lives of other homeless people in Hawaii. She plans to use her Kickstarter funding to distribute USB bracelets to Honolulu’s homeless, so they can have wearable, digital copies of their important documents.
Regarding the big policy issues surrounding homelessness, Kim wrote that, “I oddly accept that the homeless condition will never completely go away. … But no matter what the circumstances are, the most important thing to remember is that they are people. And people deserve to be treated with respect even if they’ve hurt you.” …
All Things Chronic 
This is lovely.
I once wrote a post about my mom; she had a house even after she lost her sanity, but that was unimportant to those who saw her wandering the streets digging through trash cans.
The tenderness in these words and pictures is startling.
(Maybe I will return my post about “the squirrel lady.”)
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