How would I stay warm or cool or dry or clean?” How far would I have to walk to get a meal in the morning? What if you fell and broke your arm? What if you got a tooth infection?

I do that sometimes as I settle into my comfortable bed with clean sheets and blankets, heat in the winter, an air conditioner in summer and a great husband at my side and a dog at my feet. I’ve never been less than comfortable.

Thankfully, there are people who devotie their lives and careers to helping people in these unthinkable situations. They work at mostly small agencies that scramble each year for scraps of funding from federal, state and private sources to bring people out of homelessness and addiction and into treatment and a bed.

I and photographer Abby Pheiffer followed one such group for the past few months. Bethsaida Community, Inc. isn’t well known outside of Norwich. The agency runs the Katie Blair House, a transitional program that helps formerly homeless women, and the permanent Flora O’Neil Apartments next door.

Claire Silva, executive director of Bethsaida made everyone pay attention last fall when she wrote a dynamite grant proposal to a federal funding agency to bring $350,000 per year for five years to New London County to help 545 homeless women. Nine agencies are sharing the work in a partnership that should be copied by social services agencies across the country.

Check out our stories and photos in Sunday and Monday Day papers and Abby’s fabulous slide show and video presentation on this website.