Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Two Cape Cods: Hidden Poverty on the Cape and Islands - Part 7

Tom Meszinger is homeless. He makes between twenty-five and thirty dollars a day playing the harmonica on the streets of Hyannis. When people place bills in Meszinger's cup, he has to ask them the denomination because he lost his vision to glaucoma several years ago.

Tom Meszinger: "I sit out here and play the harmonica, little cup on the ground. I'll shake it occasionally, to time, and it sounds nice. People like it, they appreciate it, and they throw money at me."

Meszinger moved to Cape Cod with his wife and family in the late 1970s, giving up his vending job with the Commission for the Blind.

Meszinger has spent most of his life legally blind, but he had some vision when he first arrived. He took landscaping jobs and cooked in restaurants. Being on Cape Cod, he even bought a boat, to fish.

Tom Meszinger: "Commercial fishing, I couldn't make no money. I didn't know how to fish and the fishermen wouldn't teach me nothing. So I called my father up, I said, 'Pop,' ? now my father is a Great White hunter and he can fish, he knows everything ? I said, 'I got a fishing boat, come out and teach me how to fish.' He says 'OK.' So we go down to the ocean there where I had it docked, and I got it tied, and it's out of the water. There's no water under the boat. He said, 'Oh, I know where your boat is. I can see it right there. He says, 'you dope, It's low tide.' You can't tie it to the pilings."

For the past month, Meszinger's lived at the NOAH Shelter in downtown Hyannis, which has fifty beds. At the NOAH Shelter, he gets two meals a day and a place to sleep.

No one knows how many homeless people are living on Cape Cod and the Islands. The NOAH Shelter housed more than 500 different people last year. But untold others live on friends' couches, in motel rooms, and in tents in the woods.

Once a year, volunteers assemble to count the homeless. They do it by walking through the streets and marking down the number of drunks, the disabled, and those who are simply down on their luck. They knock on car doors and motel rooms looking for families. And they tramp through the woods looking for campsites, just like homeless outreach worker Tom Naples does almost every day.

Tom Naples: "This is an active site ... see the grill ... I always check to make certain no one is in it. Find a body one day, ya' know? Here's a mattress ... nice Coleman tent, bottle of Vodka ..."

More than once, Naples has found himself checking someone's wrist for a pulse.

Tom Naples: "Not just in the woods, they're under the bushes in Main Street. In a parking lot where we are right now at the Salvation Army. People sleep here. I've found people here. They're everywhere, in places you wouldn't imagine.

Naples is the guy that keeps an eye on things when the NOAH Shelter closes during the day. He lets people warm up in his car and takes them to treatment, if they're willing. Lately, he says, he's seeing more families.

Tom Naples: "I've come across several families that are homeless. Cost of living, you know how it is, cost of gas, food, electricity, the whole nine yards. It's a hard thing to do, even for a someone like myself who has a job. It's Cape Cod, it's a tough place to live, you know. The cost of living is high. For paradise. Ha-ha. You know. Let's face it, people think of Cape Cod as paradise."

One of the success stories on the streets of Hyannis these days is Glenda. She calls herself "Aunt G," and she is a recovering alcoholic. When she met Tom last September, Glenda was sleeping under a bush at night, across from the Salvation Army.

Glenda: "I call it the condo because we've had to have a few people in there, bring people in with us."

Glenda: "I met Tom down at the green one day. He came down to just to talk to people and see what they were all doing. Ha-ha. I thought, yeah, I thought he was a cop, and at the time ? I was drinking back at that time ? I kind of got upset with him, told him to get out of here. And I come to find out, yeah, that he's out here helping people."

Naples encouraged Glenda to clean up and he and his employer, the Community Action Committee of Cape Cod and the Islands in Hyannis, found her a room in a local motel to live in through the winter.

In 2005, a group of organizations and activists, including the Community Action Committee, released a thirty-six-page document entitled, "A 10-year Plan to End Homelessness on Cape Cod and the Islands." The goal is lofty, but its supporters are committed to trying.