Ann Webb, an American Homeless in Paris

This could be the nightmare of an American tourist in Paris. However, in the morning, this same tourist would find himself at the hotel, savoring both his “croissants” and a regained reality. Ann Webb doesn’t get to wake up. For more than three months, this 43-year-old nurse’s aide from Portland, Oregon, who basically came to Paris to visit the city of her dreams, has been sharing the daily unenviable life of the Parisian homeless.

She looks like them. Her eyes betray a feeling of immense weariness, she has a stoop, she wears big shapeless clodhoppers and carries a hypermarket bag. All over her coat, her shoulders are covered with two cheap pullovers. The story she’s telling us about how she’s having the first real meal she’s had for ages is mind-blowing. Although the way it started was very common. It all began with a vacation desire.

What’s more classic for an American nurse coming from a humble background who has been working hard for a long time? At the age of 14, she was already helping her grandmother, who was a home nurse. Later on, Ann graduated and received her diploma as a nurse’s aide. She started to work for 12 hours in a row and then began to juggle two jobs. She got married, lost a child to leukemia, divorced, lived in a rented room, and had to make it work with only one salary. She couldn’t stand all this violence around her any longer, “all those people carrying knives, or guns, and using them. Especially those back from Iraq.”

THE CANCELLED FLIGHT

During many months, dollar after dollar, Ann Webb saves money to treat herself in autumn, when the tariffs are lower, with an escape to Europe. A plane ticket to Spain, a week spent in a residence in Marbella. Trusting the tariffs off the internet, she saves $900 for the way back. She has $1000 left to live, makes a little detour to Madrid and Barcelona, then reaches Paris and stays there for a few days. In New Orleans, a town she lived in for a while and that she appreciates, she was always told that there was a true bond between the City of Lights and the French Louisiana’s former capital city. Whoever likes one automatically likes the other one.

So, coming from Spain, Ann arrives in Paris at the Austerlitz station on November 10th, 2008. She finds the French people much friendlier than the Spanish ones. Is it because of Barack Obama’s election? “The Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, so beautiful and the welcoming people. It was exactly the way I had pictured it all.” What happened afterwards wasn’t expected, though. Ann starts to run out of money, except for the little savings that would be used for the way back. On November 11th in a cybercafé, she digs up a website of one of those big online agencies that sells tickets at reduced prices and finds a Paris to Portland plane ticket for $549. The departure is on November 17th, but on November 14th she gets mail from the travel agency. The Air France pilots – worried because they don’t want to work until the age of 65 – are on strike. The flight is cancelled.

Ann Webb hasn’t taken out the $50 insurance that could have protected her against such risks. The price of the other ticket she is offered has doubled. She doesn’t have enough money to go back home. “My heart stopped beating,” she tells us. Her deep and intense eyes are getting wet and it looks as though she is living again the pain she then felt. “I knew I was stuck in Paris. With almost no money left. In a country whose language I don’t speak. I was terrified.” Nevertheless, the American lady keeps hoping. A strike can’t last for so long after all! The price of the ticket will lower again. But it won’t. Time passes by and nights spent at the hotel are expensive. Her prepaid card is empty. All of a sudden, Ann stops talking. She confesses her fear to be thought of as “the slightly blockhead American who never left her hole before.” That’s not so wrong after all, she immediately admits. “It’s true that I probably was a little naive. I certainly hadn’t saved enough money before I left …”

The very last of the money she has is spent over two nights at a cheap hotel where she tries to calm down and think. She has no savings left in her country. Her parents are dead. Her rare friends are broke (even though one of them, an ex-roommate, has sent her €70, or $88). Her car is a wreck that wouldn’t bring in a lot of money. In the nurses’ agency that hired her, personal matters are never approached. No need to try and solicit them…

The very last solution is the American consulate. Security controls there are drastic: tickets, lines, and at last a civil servant behind her shelter-window. Very unfriendly. Ann, who is in tears, tries to explain her situation. She wants to go back home, but she doesn’t have any money any more. Totally panic-stricken, she misunderstands the clerk and wrongly hears, “Now that you are in France, you must go to the French embassy. Next please.” Once out of the consulate, she asks a passerby. Where is the nearest French embassy? As an answer, he bursts out laughing.

“I was shocked, traumatized. The embassy couldn’t help me. All the next night long, I did nothing but walk.” She wanders about in this Paris for tourists – the Eiffel Tower, Louvre, Rue de Rivoli – that she discovered in a kind of bygone times. Her food is made up of a sandwich and an orange that she found in the street. “I very quickly understood that I had to walk. Otherwise, as a woman with blonde hair, I could run the risk of being attacked. As soon as I was stopping, there were men, homeless too, who were coming towards me … I was feeling vulnerable.”

OUT IN THE COLD

Exhausted, she falls down onto a bench by the Seine at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. Big rats come out of a bush. “I worked for some time in a pharmaceutical lab. I was taking care of the rats. Once the experiments were over, I couldn’t kill them. I was asking every time if I could take them home with me.” They show her the way, she thinks. A blind hiding her from human eyes. Several nights in a row, she slept in these bushes.

Two weeks spent living on the street out in the cold. The nurse’s aide starts to locate the free soup distributing places. Everywhere she goes, she tries to explain that she wants to go back to the United States, but with just three French words and a strong American accent, she’s hardly understood. She shares a tent with a Czech woman. She gets sheltered by an “Asian lady” who also went through the same misery, but this woman wants Ann to leave because her husband’s back from a journey.

Some luckless companions, a little more “gentlemen” than other people, “many Arabian sirs” give her a few tips to survive on the street. Stacking up layers of clothes, wearing gloves and a bonnet, having a change of socks in a little bag, which also has to get changed, trying not to look like a homeless. They show her the subway stations that are open all night, the air vents in the ground from which the hot air comes out … the place “where you can get a sleeping bag, clothes, have a shower, read your emails…” the American enumerates, so surprised by such possible help. “I could even have a free haircut and color! In the United States, it hadn’t happened to me for ten years. I had to become a homeless in Paris to get this!” she says, smiling for the first time as she speaks.

The homeless, Ann finds out, are quite numerous in Paris. Much more than she could have imagined. “Thanks to the help they get, we can’t even guess that they are homeless, they go unnoticed. As for me, one day, while I was sitting on a bench, an American asked me how to locate the French drugstores. I told him about the green crosses. He thought I was a tourist. I didn’t have the courage to tell him the truth.”

This doesn’t mean that her street memories are a bed of roses. Far from it. At the Eastern Station (Gare de l’Est), a group of Afghans offer her a warm place to sleep … if she agrees to have sex with two of them. “Having said that, in the United States, I would have been threatened with a knife and coerced to do it. Here, I just said no, and they let me go.”

STREET SOUP

One of the associations in charge of the homeless accommodations asks her what her opinion is of Bush. She clearly doesn’t like him. Her homeless profile is quite different from most of the usual ones, and that’s why a volunteer suggests to her to seek asylum. Ann shows us the form she received from the police headquarters in Paris that she was about to fill in before understanding what its content really was and realizing that she would be considered a traitor to the American nation.

There is also the very special day when men tried to rip her pants off of her. She manages to escape, but has to go through the entire city just wearing her underwear under her coat to get another pair from an association. On that night, completely exhausted and at the end of her rope, she stands in line to get street soup. When her turn comes, there isn’t any more of it. She bursts into tears. People comfort her and find some leftovers. “I said to myself that if I managed to get out of this situation, I would come and lend them a hand. In the United States, I was a volunteer for the Red Cross; I was helping people to build temporary shelters after the floods.”

A homeless (“a Cuban who wanted to marry me, attracted to my passport”) guides her to Emmaüs. She finds out about the night accommodations and feels at last “a little more secure.” It is, however, impossible to rent a room for the next few days, one has to phone the 115 (the emergency number for the homeless) every time. It’s quite hard for her to express herself on the phone and tell her incredible story, and even harder to convince people that she lives in utter destitution. “You are an American tourist,” is the sentence she hears over and over again. “We do not help American tourists. You should go back to the United States.” Some guy named Mohammed, another man living on the street, explains to her that it is her right, that she must insist and meet a person in charge. Every time this means forty minutes of lengthy discussions ending up with no result. “Exhausting.”

Early January, Ann Webb can at last stop walking the streets all day long. There’s a free place in an accommodation and social rehabilitation Emmäus center, open 24 hours a day. Celia Morgant, a social worker, remembers a very physically and morally tired person, “as all those living on the streets often are.” She is the first American ever welcomed. Once more, understanding each other is difficult.

Ann Webb shows us the austere room she’s sharing with another woman from the street. There’s a basin, two small-sized beds, and two tiny wardrobes. During the day, her roommate is asleep on her bed with all of her clothes on. She snores like a chainsaw, “but she’s nice,” the American sighs. This lady’s clothes are piled up at the bottom of her bed and on top of them is a cart. Ann Webb still can only carry with her the little suitcase she’s had since she left the United States.

SPEAKING AT CROSS PURPOSES

When the Le Monde gets in touch with the American embassy in Paris, it’s a complete astonishment. Elizabeth Gourlay, the consul, immediately welcomes us. “We were not aware of her story. We would never let an American citizen, unable to go back home, live on the streets in France, especially for Thanksgiving and then Christmas!” Ann Webb’s unbelievable story starts with an incongruity that sparks off stupefaction at the embassy: exempted from a visa since she was leaving the United States for less than 90 days, the American tourist should never have been allowed to take the plane to Europe without offering proof that she had a return ticket.

Another source of interrogation: her visit to the consulate. What happened the day Ann Webb came? Did she not understand what the clerk told her because of her panic? Was she mistaken and went to the shelter in charge of the visas needed by the French tourists instead of the shelter in charge of the information for American citizens, which led to a misunderstanding with the embassy’s civil servant?

She normally should have been repatriated within three or four weekdays. A common procedure that is organized usually around three times a month, and twice a day in August, “most of the time, these are people who came with the miles accumulated on the card they get from their air carrier, but who don’t have a sufficient budget to live in France.” In case no relative could be contacted, the services of the American state can advance the price of the ticket and keep the person’s passport until they get the refund. Thanks to our intervention, Ann Webb is invited to go to the consulate the following day at 9 o’clock.

IN THIS COUNTRY, EVEN THE HOMELESS HAVE A BETTER QUALITY OF LIFE

Ann can’t believe her ears. “Of course it’s obvious to me now, I should have insisted when I was at the embassy. But I had been dismissed. It was helpless. I simply thought they could do nothing for me.” Is she going in the next morning? “It’s too late now,” she dryly replies, to our biggest surprise. “I lost everything in the United States. My room was rented to someone else, my job certainly is someone else’s since I didn’t come back on time, my car was impounded. I would be a homeless over there too. How long would it take me to save and be able to refund the price of the plane ticket?”

Maybe her fate is to stay in France now. “I say to myself that maybe I didn’t go through all this for nothing. There must be a reason.” The experience she got from living on the street has changed her “vision of life and made [her] humble.” “I now know that we’re all the same.” She met some Algerians, Russians, Ukrainians, Africans, and Afghans … she cries, then laughs. “I’ve always wanted to experience different cultures!”

Ann’s dream is presently to find a job here in France. Even if it’s complicated, even if she has to learn the language, to move heaven and earth to get some official identity. “I’m so impressed by the lack of violence. The only policemen I have met are here to keep watch on the Eiffel Tower, I never meet anyone carrying a knife. I can leave my bag on the floor in a shop and find it again! Believe me, America is not like people from here picture it. Life is so expensive that you need to work hard for everything. You can’t imagine … when Bush was elected as the president, it all became different than when it was the Clinton administration. Everybody needs two jobs to be able to take care of one’s family. The “Land of Opportunity” is over!”

Homeless in the United States? She wouldn’t survive it, she assures us. If she has to be homeless, she might as well be homeless in France. “In this country, even the homeless have a better quality of life.”