Gabriella Duncan was a “privileged” orphan. “The day before my 7th birthday I went into an orphanage in Albuquerque and I stayed there until I was 18. I got piano lessons. I got to grow up on a farm and learned a lot about the old, old ways of the earth.” She says she was never adopted because of a handicap. “I took a lot of care. Nine times a year I failed out of houses because I hated wearing my [leg] braces. I could walk; it’s just that I waddled. I’d kick people when I didn’t like them.”
When she left the orphanage, “they gave you $30 and said goodbye. I ended up getting married and had three children. Later I became a treatment foster parent and raised 180 kids before I moved to Albuquerque. I liked the hard kids.”
She became a teacher in 1989, and Gabriella taught “really tough, hard-behavior kids and kids out of the prison system. They’d come in the door and you could tell they hadn’t slept the night before. A lot of them were homeless. But they wanted to go to school, so just feeding them when they came in the door, [was] something to get them motivated. I’m really proud of a lot of them. You just have to keep telling them, ‘I love you. It’s okay. Eat something. Let me hug you.’”
“Now I mother the rest of the world, because I have no one to mother right now. Tent City 4 is my little baby. I have a lot of friends that are in and out of there, just going to check on them and letting them unload, mostly the therapist-type stuff, which is why I don’t live in community, because then I become a 24-7 therapist. I live in a van instead.”
Gabriella’s van is usually parked somewhere in Rainier Valley. She volunteers for the Hillman City Collaboratory as its community ambassador. “My last outreach was two giant crates of apples, really nice ones. I got those and onions and bell peppers and we served a big meal last Sunday and then gave away a lot.”
Gabriella is also an artist, musician and writer. She makes jewelry from found objects. “I keep finding keys everywhere. About 300 of them came to me. Everytime I give away a key, the prayer is that someone gets a home and every time you touch it, you think that.”
She’s writing a book called “Throwing Friends under Busses” about homelessness in Seattle. A poem from the book was published in Metro’s Poetry on Buses on May 5.
Her advice to people about homelessness? “Just love people and cook them good food. Talk to them. Listen. It’s not contagious. It’s not going to pollute your energy if you hear somebody’s story that’s sad. It can make you appreciate your own. My poem ends like that: ‘We’re all here to make you appreciate what you have.’”
“Throwing Friends Under Buses”
People surviving needing
warmth sitting like
little ducks under their
mothers wings
the bus symbolic
of movement and
life is
sometimes
a human coffin
for those barely alive
I respect the drivers
passengers glide to a job
those of us who are
homeless
remind them
how good they have it
— Gabriella Duncan