Looking for a home

I was at the corner of Yonge and College, one of the busy intersections in Toronto, and most people were simply zooming past me. That’s when a young girl with a smoke in her hand, stopped and turned back to look at what I had. She was really young so I wasn’t sure what to say. But I stuck with the basics and showed her the Bhakti Yoga. I had just read a beautiful note by Vijaya Prabhu about the ‘Dos and Don’t of Book distribution’ where Prabhupada explained that he wanted everyone to see pictures in his books as it would make them more curious. So I started to show her pictures and then requested her to take the book. All the while I was talking she kept appreciating the book but was looking at me with an empty stare and I could not quiet make out what it meant. When I requested her donation, she simply said ‘I am homeless’. I had a complete loss of words as the words just pierced my heart with shock. Gathering my wits I asked her oh, so do you believe in love or look for it. She gave a most definite yes and so I requested her to give me even a coin if she had it. She put a hand in her jacket and pulled out a begging coffee cup and gave me a coin that she had collected from begging. I gave her the book but could not check my emotions as she walked away. A quick look at some statistics showed that over 5000 homeless people in just the most affluent and industrial city in Canada. Actually who has a home in this material world, we were all living in homeless situations even when inside an apartment/house with what seems like a family. Had it not been for Srila Prabhupada’s powerful books and the magnanimous shelter of devotees, we would also be lost in the smoke screen of maya, wandering aimlessly through this life. Just like that little girl walking up and down the street with a smoke.

Srila Prabhupaa Lecture SB 6.1.25 Jul 1975 : Sanatana-dharma means when the sanätana-jiva, living entity, tries go to back home... That is our real home. Here it is not home. We have taken America as home. How long it is your home, sir? Say, fifty years, hundred years, that's all. Not this kind of home. So that home is eternal. That is called, therefore, sanätana.
Source Toronto.ca : If you include homeless people in Toronto’s correctional facilities, provincially run Violence Against Women shelters, and health care facilities, there were an estimated 5,086 homeless people in Toronto on the night of April 15, 2009, almost unchanged from the estimate in April 2006.
CBC News : Survey counts 5,052 homeless in Toronto
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/story/2006/06/23/to-homeless20060623.html