When the old beggar was a young girl and lived in circumstances no different than yours, she was the first one with a joke.

A girl with a backpack and tennis shoes. Hair short, ankles thin, can be no skinnier. She is at one second redfaced and close to tears, the next joking with a passerby. She is charmign and engaging. She was at one point the leader of a gang. The distributor of discipline. When a gang of older boys moved in the gang had left her. She grew out her hair and became a prostitute.

The girl's stages:
  Tomboy leader of a group of small children.
  Some of the children are taken to orphenages, come back.
  Most of them are gone at one point. She is kicked out of her place of sleeping.
  She begins to sleep in a place nearby a gang of young men. By and by she is domesticated by the boys. She meets joe in this stage.