In late April, I didn't know where to start reporting for the "Homeless in Orange County" series that was published in The Chapel Hill News on Sept. 7, 9 and 14.

At the suggestion of Chris Moran, executive director of Inter-Faith Council for Social Service, I began by eating lunch at the IFC Community Kitchen, on the corner of Rosemary and Columbia streets.

I was nervous the first time I carried my tray to a nearly full table in the dining room. I didn't know anyone, so I pulled out an available blue plastic chair and sat.

Some people quietly continued to eat or finished up and left. But even on that first day, two people asked me why I had come and what I wanted to know and volunteered a little about themselves.

At my table was a youthful 24-year-old man with short braids and diamond studs in both ears. He had grown up in Chapel Hill and Durham and gone to jail for a misdemeanor offense, he said. He had been looking for work for two weeks and was growing frustrated. He said he was struggling to focus on being a strong man and devoted to God instead of using drugs or committing robbery.

But he didn't want me to dwell on his problems, and he didn't want to tell me his name. He told me the room was full of talent and he broke into a free-style rap.

I found a number of people who are homeless or used to be homeless who would talk with me about homelessness over a meal, on the Chapel Hill streets, in the women's transitional shelter, and at meetings in Hillsborough about the new shelter program there. But only a few were willing to give their first and last names and permit me to attribute their comments to them in an article. Only a few agreed to be photographed.

Some didn't want friends or family to read about them being homeless. A couple of women had safety concerns.

I am grateful for those who did speak freely. Over the months, around other reporting assignments, I came back to them again and again to learn more. Their stories helped me to understand the complexity of homelessness and why solutions remain elusive.

The first man I talked with was right. Over the meals I shared at the Community Kitchen, I met several talented people. A young man from Durham can sketch quick, detailed portraits with a pencil. A Vietnam vet writes poetry. Others painted glass bottles with horses and flowers as vases for the tables when a volunteer taught an art class.

One of the homeless men that I interviewed at length wrote in an e-mail after the series ran that I had focused too much on the negative aspects of some homeless people.

He and a few others told me they were disappointed that the paper ran a lead photo of a homeless woman drinking beer behind a business on Franklin Street.

They felt it perpetuated a stereotype of homeless people.

I thought it was a fair photograph and had its place within the series. The woman had come to the newsroom several times and had agreed to have a photographer spend an evening capturing what her life was like on the streets. The photographer didn't know that she would start drinking.

Would it have been right for the newspaper to tuck away information about substance abuse even though it comes up time and again in interviews with the chronically homeless?

I wouldn't be comfortable with that. Just as I wouldn't have been comfortable leaving out that some suffer from mental illness and that social workers find it difficult to help people with either problem or both while they are living on the streets.

Just as I wouldn't have been comfortable leaving out that among the homeless there are people who work and seek out jobs. There are men and women who have succeeded in recovering from substance addictions. There are some who have found full-time jobs despite criminal records and want other people to be given the same chance.

Staff writer Cheryl Johnston covers Orange County government and the town of Hillsborough. Contact her at 932-2005 or cherylj@nando.com.