Amanda Lindsay sits on an upturned bucket and looks around at her new home.

Her fifth home in three weeks.

It's a clearing in a wooded area behind an old factory, and she's waiting to pitch her tent.

Lindsay, 41, is homeless. She carries everything she owns with her.

Some of her possessions are on the ground: A pair of socks, empty pop cans and wine bottles, a bicycle helmet, a piece of wire, dozens of clean needles in their clear plastic cases.

Lindsay has been part of a "tent city," in which homeless people gather together to draw public attention to their poverty.

They camped in Kitchener's Victoria Park and were told to leave. Then in front of the former courthouse near Queen and Weber streets. Then Sandhills Park in the city's Cedar Hill neighbourhood. Then behind an old leather factory on Madison Avenue.

And now, a place without an address or a street, hidden from public view. The goal is to live undetected and in peace, said tent city leader Julian Ichim.

Every time the group moves, it loses people. There are eight to 10 tent city dwellers left, from the original 20.

Lindsay has been homeless, off and on, for about five years.

She doesn't like shelters "and they don't like me," so she sleeps outside, even in winter. Or occasionally in the homes of friends, when they allow her.

She doesn't dwell on the difficulty of living outside.

Instead, she is consumed by the emotional losses in her life.

"I still haven't dealt with the fact I lost both my grandmothers, and my aunt and uncle and my dad, in five years,"she says.

"I cut her fruit up. I blended it (so she could swallow it). I walked her up and down the stairs," she says of one grandmother.

She weeps as she talks about it, wiping her face with a dirty T-shirt.

Lindsay grew up on Mill Street in Kitchener, the eldest of four siblings. She looked after everyone and was cooking meals by age seven, she says.

Today, she is estranged from the rest of her family. She's not invited to family celebrations. She says one of her children called her "nothing but a junkie."

By contrast, the people in the tent city "feel like more of a real family."

When she gives out clean needles, which she gets from health-care organizations, "I'm Mama to most," she says.

Lindsay watches out for young, homeless women who join the group. If an older man is paying unwanted attention to a young woman, Lindsay diverts him with the offer of taking drugs together, even though being alone with him means "I'll put myself in harm's way."

She has used crystal meth, pot, and opioids that are prescribed for pain.

The crystal meth "eats at your body," she says. "It's rotten stuff."

She decides to leave her site to visit a friend for an hour or two. She painstakingly packs everything important into a wheeled shopping cart, tying it securely with a piece of string. She pulls it behind her on the journey.

She says the chances of her unattended possessions being stolen are higher at a shelter than they are if she leaves them in the woods. But either way, it's a risk.

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"People steal so much from me, so I hoard more," she says.

On the way to the friend's house, she reaches inside her bag, looking for the top of her pop bottle. She pricks her hand accidentally with a used needle she had picked up. She wipes the wound half-heartedly with a piece of used tissue.

She talks a little bit about her past life.

Lindsay was a cleaner who worked at night. "I've cleaned banks, schools, factories, nursing homes." And years ago, she ran a daycare.

"I haven't always been useless," she says.

Since the tent city started, government officials have come around with applications for permanent housing.

Lindsay would like to get her own place, but she doesn't hold out much hope. She's already on the waiting list for affordable housing. She has been on that list for years.

But if she has to choose between going back to a shelter and a tent in the woods, she chooses the tent every time. Even though the tent is cold and wet at times, and even though she is vulnerable, as a woman on her own.

"I can't handle people," she says. "Everybody's greedy and selfish. I help everybody out. It doesn't come back."

Out of doors, "I don't have to deal with as many animals," she says.

"The four-legged ones are nicer than the two-legged ones."

ldamato@therecord.com

Twitter: @DamatoRecord

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