Shilo Lynn of Allenstown read on Facebook recently that residents in the area had given food and money to a woman in the downtown village of Suncook.
The woman had been spending an inordinate amount of time on a bench under a street light, alone, barefoot and wrapped in a blanket. Sometimes she’d be sitting, other times sleeping.
Then Lynn and her friend, area landlord Don Bibeau of Hooksett, drove past the woman on their way home from dinner and Lynn chose to do more. Maybe, she thought, the woman needed some clean clothes. Maybe a place to sleep, a shower, a hug.
Bibeau turned the car around and the two friends embarked on a two-day journey of goodwill to provide the woman with some basic necessities so, perhaps, she could at least try to get back on her feet.
“We pulled right up to her,” Lynn said. “She looked up from her blanket and tears were running down her face. I asked if she was lost and she said no. I asked if she was hungry and she said no. She put her head down and started walking away from the car, and I said, ‘Okay, that’s it.’ ”
In the end, after Lynn provided the woman with food, clothing and shelter, Bibeau drove her to New London, near her hometown, where a representative of the area’s welfare department secured a room for her at a local hotel, at no charge.
Lynn captained the two-crew ship of mercy and empathy, and that’s why she’s the Monitor’s latest selection for Hometown Hero status.
She declined to name the woman, respecting her privacy. Lynn is a community health worker at Catholic Medical Center in Manchester, and that helped her better understand the woman’s plight, allowing her to walk around for a while in her shoes.
She’s learned, through her profession and education, that there’s a difference between an individual who’s transient – or temporarily without a stable environment due to circumstances – and homeless – a more permanent condition in which a person has nowhere to go.
Facebook posts called the woman homeless, and although the two terms have a subtle difference and are used interchangeably by many, Lynn has no tolerance for those who mix them up.
Lynn, it turns out, was correct. She learned that the woman had been abused by a family member at her home in Warner and left in desperation. She grows angry when people place labels on others without taking the time to speak with them.
She spoke to the woman and quickly realized something had happened that put her on the street.
“My blood boils when people use the term homeless,” Lynn said. “It only took me a couple of minutes to realize that she is not on drugs, she is not homeless. When I look into her eyes, you can just see sadness, sorrow, ‘Please help me.’ She is in trouble.”
Lynn’s intolerance and tendency to have her hands in various causes – she’s out front in the battle to push the Attorney General’s Office to put more effort into cold cases – ruffles feathers in town.
“People don’t like me in town,” she says. “I am a big mouth and I get things done and I don’t do it for the attention. I don’t know why I don’t fit in. Maybe it’s because when I have something to say, I don’t sugarcoat it.”
Regardless, the kindness she showed a few weeks ago, confirmed by her friend, Bibeau, was hard to criticize.
“We walked her to the porch and Shilo asked her name,” Bibeau said. “And then Shilo asked her if she could get a hug. (The woman) told her, ‘I need a hug.’ It was two or three minutes long. I could feel the hug from a few feet away.”
The woman slept on Lynn’s couch that night. She took a shower the next morning. Lynn gave her a haircut and fresh clothing. Later, Bibeau drove her to New London, where a hotel waited. Lynn and Bibeau hope she’ll reunite with her family at her home in Warner. They don’t know where she is now.
“I hope I pushed her to a better place,” Lynn said.