A mother driving with her five-year-old daughter in the backseat takes a wrong turn and ends up in a dark back alley, forever altering the young girl’s life. It sounds like the ominous beginning of dramatic film but quite the opposite is true – this is a real-life story about a little girl whose unwavering compassion for human beings serves as an inspiration to us all.
The little girl in the backseat of that car was Hannah Taylor, now a 19-year-old Arts undergrad finishing her first year at McGill. Taylor remembers that fateful day like it was yesterday. “It was December in Winnipeg so it was freezing cold and snow covered. I looked out my window and I saw a man searching through a garbage dumpster for food,” she says. “I asked my mother why he was doing that and she said he had to do that to eat.”
“I had never seen homelessness and I was struck by it,” she says. “My five-year-old heart just wouldn’t let it go.”
And when Taylor says she wouldn’t let it go, she means it. She questioned her parents almost daily for a year. Why did people have to live in the street? Where did they sleep? Wasn’t there enough food and homes for everyone? Why didn’t anyone help?
“I worried about this man and, as I learned more about homelessness in Winnipeg and in Canada, I began to worry about everyone living in those conditions.”
One night, Taylor – who had just turned six – asked her mother another question about homelessness as she was being tucked in for the night. “My mom said to me, ‘You know, Hannah, maybe if you do something about it, your heart won’t feel so bad.’”
And that set the wheels in motion, wheels that, 13 years later, show no signs of stopping.