EVERY night for the last two years, 64-year-old Alfred Johnson goes to sleep on pieces of cardboard spread on a wooden bench in one corner of a tent being used as a waiting area for outpatients at the St Ann’s Bay Hospital.

Each morning, he neatly packs away the pieces of cardboard and a box which contains his few possessions of clothing and a precious blanket given to him by a kind Samaritan.

The piece of plastic he ties at the front of the tent to prevent the dew and rain from wetting him is neatly tucked away and he clears out for the day to make room for the outpatients.

“Is right here so ah sleep every night, rain or shine,” Johnson told the Sunday Observer as he pointed to one of several benches in the back of the damp tent, which was soaked from a recent downpour of rain.

After taking a shower in one of the hospital bathrooms, he gets dressed to begin his daily voluntary chores of “helping out” around the facility. According to Johnson, he helps out with anything, from emptying the garbage bins to writing down the names of patients in the order they arrive at the pharmacy to fill their prescriptions.

“Me help do every little thing and sometimes me even go to set down the names at the pharmacy ’cause people come from all over to get here before the pharmacy opens,” he told the Sunday Observer.

When those unofficial duties are completed, Johnson said he sometimes walks into the nearby town to mill around or occasionally travels to Falmouth, like he had done earlier that morning he spoke to the Sunday Observer to get a new National Insurance Card.

Johnson was among the many senior citizens who have been living at the hospital for years after being abandoned there by family. However, he was discharged sometime in 2008 after “living” on one of the wards for nearly six months.

According to Johnson, he became homeless after persons in his Stewart Town community in Trelawny chased him from the house he had lived in for years, when he could not produce official proof that the house had been given to him by the owners, now deceased.

To confirm his claims, Johnson produced his voter identification card, which expires in 2012, as proof that he lived in Stewart Town up until 2007.

The soft-spoken Johnson also produced a copy of a tax receipt for a piece of land which he said his father left for him in Jackson Town, also in that parish. But like the house in Stewart Town, Johnson said he has also been unable to lay claim to it.

“You don’t know the disadvantage I have been under by people who put me out of me house and tek away all me things,” said Johnson.

“Although the devil is fighting me, I am glad that the hospital people not forcing to put me out, ’cause I have nowhere else to go,” he added with a sad and almost empty gaze.

Johnson does not have any clear memory of how he ended up in the hospital. He, however, recalled that sometime in November of 2007 after sleeping in bus stops and markets, he lost consciousness one night after smoking marijuana. When he came to, he was in the hospital suffering from symptoms associated with high blood pressure.

He said he was later told that he was taken there by the police.

But when he was fit to be discharged from the hospital, with nowhere to go Johnson said he was allowed to remain on the ward.

“Since them was not treating me for more than high blood pressure me used to come out of the hospital a day time and go out to St Ann’s Bay and come back,” he said.

But near six months later, according to Johnson, the hospital caught on and he returned one evening to discover that he had lost his warm bed to someone else.

“I started sleeping in a little waiting room at the front of the ward and they never really trouble me ’cause me use to help keep the place clean,” he recalled.

But that was short-lived after the nurses began complaining that he could not remain there.

“I just decide that I would just move into the tent and that is where I have been since,” he said.

The neatly attired and fairly well-spoken Johnson said he gets his clothes washed in the hospital laundry room and he is often given meals by hospital staff.

“Some of the workers will give me food and in turn I help them out around the place,” he said.

Other times he relies on picking up coins from off the ground on the hospital compound. Laughing for the first time since recounting his story, Johnson said once he collected $19 in coins which he used to purchase Cash Pot and won.

“Sometimes me hungry and don’t have nothing to eat, but thank God I have never been hungry to the point of death,” he said soberly.

Johnson said he has fathered several children but some of them he was never told about until they were adults.

Two of the ones he raised, Johnson said, have died. Another daughter is somewhere in the United States but he has not heard from her.

Once a promising upholsterer, Johnson said he really wants a place to call home as he does not know how much longer the living arrangements at the hospital will continue.

“I want to have somewhere to live so I can continue to do my upholstering trade and so I really need some help,” he pleaded.

He is, however, adamant that he does not want to go to the infirmary.