Finding Home in the Promised Land: A Personal History of Homelessness and Social Exile

Finding Home in the Promised Land is the fruit of Jane Harris's journey through the wilderness of social exile after a violent crime left her injured and tumbling down the social ladder toward homelessness -for the second time in her life-in 2013. Her Scottish great-great grandmother Barbara`s portrait opens the door into pre-Confederation Canada. Her own story lights our journey through 21st Century Canada. She asks why Canadians fell into accepting diminished dreams, and ignoring the obvious-that trauma and poverty are inextricably linked, and it is social exiles who fall through the cracks. She asks why Canada, a nation of exiles driven to create their own Promised Land came to accept first poor houses; then soup kitchens, food banks, shelters, and silent suffering class of working poor? Why did charity, another word for love, become cold bureaucracy? She uncovers that sad truth, that the taxes and charitable gifts the prosperous among us pay as tolls to avoid looking at the poor, fix nothing. Instead, they fund a poverty industry that keeps the dispossessed in an exile thornier than any back bush squatter's camp. But she also uncovers a path out of the bureaucratic wilderness that could eliminate social exile in Canada.