You won’t catch homeless plumber complaining

Life isnt easy for Perry Origer.

Hes homeless. He gathers cans at night to recycle for money along with the rest of Mantecas homeless population. Hes constantly trying to protect his belongings from thieves.

And yet despite all of that, you wont hear Origer complaining much about his lot in life.

On the contrary.

The Manteca native who spends his days along with others in Library Park, or places nearby says that he has it better than most because of connections that he has in the community that occasionally earns him a shower or lands him on a couch when the temperature plummets.

Its not exactly the life that the one-time plumber had hoped for at age 50. He has been homeless on and off for the better part of a decade, but he knows that things could be far worse.

Im lucky that I know people and have friends because a lot of these people dont have a place to stay, he said. In the winter, when its cold, if you dont know people its really hard to find somewhere to go.

Those connections, however, dont erase the difficulty of being homeless.

After the Manteca City Council passed an ordinance that effectively outlawed panhandling at intersections in the community, finding ways to earn money became even more difficult for the often overlooked community of homeless males. He is unable to turn to the HOPE Family Shelter or the single-mom oriented Raymus House.

That presented only two options: either find a way to get to the shelters in Stockton or start scrounging for recyclables at night in order to make enough money to buy something to eat the following day.

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You won’t catch homeless plumber complaining