Judy Turner spent Wednesday morning looking for people who didn't necessarily want to be found.
She looked in Rocky Point Park, found some near the SkyTrain station at North Road in Coquitlam, and one in an abandoned building off Clarke Street in Port Moody.
It was all part of the region's homeless count which began in 2002 and has happened every three years since.
This was Turner's second year doing the count, where volunteers like her team up with a homeless outreach worker to go out and try to get homeless people to fill out an anonymous questionnaire about their background and the kinds of services they'd like to see provided to help them get off the streets.
It's not always easy to convince people to fill out the surveys, Turner said.
For that reason, the volunteers carry bags of chocolate Easter eggs and cigarettes to offer as a friendly gesture to those sleeping rough.
And while local count organizer Sandy Burpee said that the actual homelessness numbers wouldn't be finalized until June, he said that he felt this week's count in the Tri-Cities was a success.
"In the end, you're totally dependent on people you haven't met showing up to do the count, and they showed up so I'm quite happy," he said.
In 2008, the Tri-Cities homeless count surveyed 94 homeless people, a number Burpee conservatively estimated to be about half of the area's homeless population.
"As with 2008, the outreach workers didn't encounter all of the people they knew were homeless," he said. "And some people just didn't want to be counted."
That figure also doesn't include the "hidden homeless" population of the Tri-Cities, he said - people who sleep in their cars or on other people's couches as a way of life.
And if the counters come upon a sleeping homeless person, their instructions are not to wake them.
But, in all, Burpee said, homeless rates are dropping in the Tri-Cities due to the success of church mat programs, which, he said, increase someone's likelihood of eventually getting into permanent housing threefold.
Fin Donnelly, MP for New Westminster-Coquitlam and Port Moody, was also out on the homeless count Wednesday, telling The Tri-City News at the Trinity United Church headquarters that while homeless numbers appear to be dropping across the region, there is still a lot of work for governments to do.
"These people have come together to recognize a need in the community that wasn't being serviced by government and it's unfortunate that we have to rely on volunteers to do this," he said. "And, if you take a step back, it's unfortunate that we have, in a community like this in as wealthy a nation as Canada, people that are homeless."
