Changes at the Bridge June 30, 2008

Monday, June 30, 2008

Here is the link for a Dallas Morning News article of Saturday, 6/28/08.  The article states that Metro Dallas Homeless Alliance, which runs the Bridge, has terminated its contract with PATH Partners, the contractor hired to offer social services at the facility.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-thebridge_28met.ART0.North.Edition1.4e0188c.html

Since it opened May 20, the Bridge has been sleeping 700 to 800 per night; it was designed to sleep 300. According to Mike Faenza, president and CEO of MDHA, “We have a tidal wave, and we want to succeed. The numbers of people, and their needs, and the risk, were so high. I felt like we could not have that second layer in between MDHA and these people, because we had to move very fast. Managing a contract was too cumbersome given what the situation was.”

Some people may see this as a setback for the Bridge, and I’m surely no expert on the inner workings thereof.  But I do want to offer some observations from my limited time spent there volunteering in the feeding program, run by the Stewpot, most Friday nights since the center opened.

~~As I entered the Bridge campus last Friday night, my friend, J., walked up to tell me happily that he i employed full-time within the Bridge now, and he was clear-headed as I’ve seen him in months.

~~My friend, Chris, was very sunburned Friday night from having worked all day.  When I asked if he’d wear sunscreen if I brought it, he said yes, but he seemed proud that he had gotten his bright red coloring from being employed.

~~Many residents were wearing blue badges saying “Resident.”  I learned from the Stewpot employees that the 100 beds for individuals enrolled in the Work-Live Housing (seeking employment) and/or Interim Housing (needing supportive services) have been/are being filled.  People have to meet qualifications and have goals for themselves to be in these programs.

~~As I handed a woman, D., her plate in the food line, her arm was weak;  she told me she’d had a stroke that week.  She’d just been released from Baylor, where she had been getting the medical care she needed.

~~A man in the food line a couple of weeks ago was so well-dressed he could have been an executive.  When I complimented him, he was pleased to tell me he was on his way to work.

~~After the Pavilion cots are filled (300), others wishing shelter from the streets are allowed to sleep in the courtyard of the Bridge campus.  This is currently, as stated above, an additional 400 to 500 people.  As I was leaving the campus around 7:45 PM Friday, these individuals were retrieving from storage nice, thick, single-size black mats, which prevent them from having to sleep directly on the concrete or grass.

~~Most importantly, when you talk to homeless individuals themselves, they are positive about what is going on there and feel good about the services and opportunities for growth that are being provided (and this is not always the case, believe me!)

The most important thing from my perspective is that things seem to be changing for the better among the homeless, both in individual lives and from an overall perspective.  I attribute this to many things, but mostly to the fact that the Bridge has lived up to its promise to have a welcoming, non-threatening approach to our homeless neighbors.  There was a fear (and I was one that expressed it) that many among the homeless population would not choose the shelter over homelessness.  If the Bridge’s and the city’s approach had been the traditional one of booting people back onto the street at dawn, then arresting them for being there, and/or of making them ‘clean up’ before they were given services, we would still be experiencing the stagnation and disastrous effects of those policies that we’ve seen in the past.

Here’s a quote from an article in the Dallas Observer of May 8, 2008:

“By federal definition, the chronically homeless are those unaccompanied adults who have a disabling condition (such as substance abuse disorder or a serious mental illness) and have been continuously homeless for a year or more, or have had at least four episodes of homelessness within the past three years… as [Mike] Faenza likes to tell his staff, the more times a person has been in jail, been arrested or beaten up, the more welcome he will be at the center. 

“We want this place to be very slow to reject anybody,” Faenza says. “You don’t have to be likable to deserve services. You can be aggravating and annoying and still deserve services….They are not going to act grateful. But you can’t lecture. You can’t coerce. You can’t shame people.”"

[http://www.dallasobserver.com/2008-05-08/news/dallas-the-bridge-homeless-center-s-progressive-approach-may-actually-make-a-difference/]

From my perspective, this approach seems to be working.  One thing I can say for certain, MDHA made an excellent choice in contracting with the Stewpot, the experts in providing homeless services here in Dallas, for running the feeding program.  With an expectation of feeding around 700 people per meal, and with the reality often approaching 900, the dining hall is running swimmingly.

KS

Street Voices: Sherry Parker, Poet June 27, 2008

Friday, June 27, 2008                                                                                                                                

Tonight at the Bridge while helping out with dinner, I was handed a privilege I never expected.  Poet Sherry Parker (see post on this blog April 4) put her poetry journal in my hands as she came through the food line, let me bring it home, and told me I could publish anything I wish from it.

The book she loaned me is a beautiful, red leather-bound journal given to her by Reagan, who has worked with Our Calling Ministries at the Day Resource Center for years and who befriended Sherry and discovered her talent. So, once again, the honor of putting Sherry’s words on this blog…

 

Between Blisters and Falling Stars                                                                                               

by Sherry Parker

 

Between blisters — and falling stars –

     I will outlast the rain:

Another calling

     from somewhere far –

I’m not playing,

     yet, again…

 

Sunrises do come –

     Promises disclosed…

A brand new day –

    All is silent.

A beautiful picture

     transposed…

 

The blister will heal;

     The rain will end.

The sun will rise again.

 

Still, there will be silence.

 

[copyright Sherry Parker, 2008]

‘F’ Is For ‘Family’ June 18, 2008

 

 Current Journal                                                                                                                                 Wednesday, June 18, 2008

 

‘F’ Is Also for ‘Finding Oneself Fascinating’

One of the things I find a little grating is how we modern-day writers tend to find ourselves fascinating. Our tendency toward navel-gazing and over-sharing can be too much.  That said, I’ll proceed to do just those things, so forgive me.  This is an essay I recently wrote about my family, and I hope it makes a point that relates to the homeless, which, after all, is meant to be the focus of this blog!  KS

 

‘F’ Is For ‘Family’

 

When I look back on my childhood, I admit that there were some challenges.  My parents’ marriage was tumultuous, it ended in bitterness and rancor — some of it public — and, in my teens, I had a stepmother who, though supportive in many ways, essentially went to war with me, which almost did me in (and I don’t think the battle did much for her peace of mind either.)

 

Yet my life growing up I remember mostly as wonderful;  more and more, I see how good it was.  We were not rich, but my parents were interesting and hardworking people.  I doubt my dad would want to claim this moniker, but, in his way, he was a feminist.  When I was four, he built me a race car of my own.  It was gasoline powered (wonder what the price of gas was in the early fifties?), and he even dredged out a race track behind his Texaco service station where I, wearing my mandatory helmet, routinely drove my little car round and round, pedal to the medal, with a family of boys who were professional race car drivers.  I had my picture in the local paper, and, although my aunties predicted doom over such an activity, to me it was fabulous.  My only frustration was that my car’s engine had a governor on it so it couldn’t go reeeeeaaaly fast.

 

When I was six, Dad got me a pony, and, as a family, we traveled around Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina and Virginia to horse shows.  Mother sewed the elaborate costumes required for showing;  Dad and I trained and showed horses together over the next eighteen years.  Horses were my world, and the absorption with them kept me ‘off the street,’ so to speak, for a very long time.

 

Mother was a career woman, a pianist, who had a radio show with her brother called “The Romantic Young Baritone.”  Staying home wasn’t her gig, so she became the accompanist for a ballet studio and sometimes took me with her, plopping me into dance classes for eleven years (sort of against my will, but I can keep good rhythm as a result) and dragging me to every symphony concert and ballet that came to Knoxville.  My Life in a Tutu was probably a good counterbalance to my Life in Boots, Jodhpurs and a Racing Helmet.

 

So, despite the strain in my parents’ marriage, I remember our house always being full of people for Bridge and Canasta parties, which ended with everyone around the piano singing show tunes while my mother played.  I love those memories.  I had a gajillion cousins that lived close by, some rich and prosperous, some poor as church mice, but we all got together every Sunday after church at my grandparents’ house for a big Sunday lunch cooked by Grannny Maude, my mother’s mother, who I was crazy about.  

 

Granny was a strong country woman who was a ground breaker in her way.  Her sixth child, my Uncle Jack, born at home like all the others, received a brain injury from a difficult birth which left him with tremendous and evident mental and physical disabilities, including cerebral palsy.  In those days, the only acceptable answer was to ‘put him in an institution.’  But she refused.  And I can only begin to appreciate what a battle that must have been in the 1940’s.  Instead, she kept him with her until she died in the 1970’s and, scandalously, always took him in public, which was unheard of at that time.  There was no such thing as Politically Correct in those days, so she and Jackie were regularly publicly ridiculed.  “Isn’t that awful?  She shouldn’t have him out in public…people like that shouldn’t be seen…” etc.  But Granny didn’t care, or, if she did, she didn’t waver.  He was her child, and she wasn’t about to put him aside somewhere out of sight.  Before she died, she extracted strict promises from my aunts and cousins to have Jackie live with them, which they did.  What a gutsy broad she was.

 

I see homeless people downtown who have grown up very poor, like some of my cousins.  They’ve lived very rough lives, and so did many of my cousins — the ones I played hide and seek with on Sunday afternoons in my Granny’s orchard.  There are people living on the street downtown who are maybe not as severely disabled as my Uncle Jack, but nearly so.

 

I am always asking myself:  what makes the difference?  It’s a complex sociological formula, I’m sure, involving geographical location, the decade, people staying in one place rather than migrating, and a myriad of other factors.  Yet somehow the ingredient that rises to the surface in my mind is this one:  family.  

 

I have cousins that ended up multimillionaires and cousins that lived in mobile homes the size of a camper and were always in trouble with the law, usually for public drunkenness.  But these cousins helped each other, even adopting each other’s children, and that camping trailer was staked down on my Granny’s farm in the country outside Knoxville long after she died.  Nobody ever ended up on the street for long.  There was always a relative somewhere in the Tennessee hills that would take you in and, in the space of fifteen minutes, come up with a meal that would feed the five thousand.

 

When you see the pain in the lives of people who are homeless, it challenges some pretty basic assumptions about your own life, at least for me.  One of them is worthiness.  I think deep down inside of us we have to believe that somehow we deserve what we have in order to have some peace of mind about the relative splendor in which we live.  And when you see good people who’ve had really hard lives living on the street, where do you go with that?  God’s will?  Karmic justice?  Or can we, as many would like to, lay it all at the feet of personal responsibility?

 

For me, it’s a mystery and involves a far bigger picture than we are able to view from right here where we are.  I’m not willing to make too many assumptions about other people’s lives, whether they deserve what they got, whether or not any of us is ‘worthy.’  I’m just purely and simply grateful for what I’ve been given, which is a very great deal.  And the greatest of the gifts I’ve received is family, past and present.

 

KS

Unity, Harmony and Constructive Dissent June 5, 2008

Thursday, June 4, 2008

Unity, Harmony and Constructive Dissent

It’s strange where one’s challenges come from in caring about people in Dallas who are homeless.  In the past, they’ve usually come from seeing the terrible vulnerability of people living on the street, or from fighting city hall, or in the pain of hearing homeless people negatively stereotyped.  There’s a joke in our family.  According to my daughters, ‘If you want to stay on Mom’s good side, don’t criticize us, her grand kids, or the homeless.’  Indeed, a new potential friendship of mine recently took an abrupt detour into the ditch when the man called the homeless ‘people who don’t want to work and just try to get everything free.’

Still, over the last few years I’ve come to understand that the need of some people to pigeonhole and denigrate the homeless — that need is in itself a kind of poverty.  And, if I really watch my own thoughts, I too am guilty of stereotyping — I may be ‘judging the judgers,’ but it’s judgment nonetheless!

Also, over time, I’m learning to come to terms with the tremendous challenges that many homeless individuals have lived with much of or all of their lives:  generational poverty of a crippling variety;  long-term abuse;  incomplete education;  the wounds of war;  physical, emotional or mental disabilities without the benefit of the remitting medical care many of us take for granted.

Though it’s early days yet, it seems to me thus far that the new direction for the homeless in Dallas signaled by the opening of the Bridge is so much more positive than anything I could have envisioned at this stage that I find myself continually catching my breath in relief, after years of anguish.  We have a state-of-the-art facility about which the homeless themselves, or at least the ones I’ve talked to, can scarcely find anything to criticize.  Not only is it a one-stop shop for services, it is welcoming and non-threatening refuge, giving people a safe place to be, 24 hours a day, without being harassed — something they have never, in this city’s history, had before.

What most often blindsides me these days, then, is when there are significant differences between those of us who play on the same team — those in the homeless advocacy community.  I was talking to a friend about it this week, a pastor who has run a street ministry for several years, and we agreed — those differences can be excruciating.  I ask myself why.  Is it because the homeless take such a drubbing in society already, and, when you find people who share your sympathy with them, it feels like such an oasis?  One thing for sure, it’s a lot more fun to do what we do — whatever that is — in the company of and with the support of others of like mind and similar spirit.

So it particularly troubles me when people who love the homeless take potshots at other people who love the homeless, using ammo that’s seriously flawed.  When such criticism becomes necessary, at least it should be based in fact and taken first to those whom it concerns.  There’s enough work to do on the problems of homelessness without squandering our energy and resources by criticizing each other falsely and unfairly.

For example, I overheard someone in the homeless advocacy community this week make audacious and untrue accusations about the funding for a recent and important initiative, accusing a service provider of ‘taking a cut’ off public funds, when in fact, the opposite is true — the provider is underwriting part of the money for the initiative.   I happened to know the numbers on this issue — and to be certain of the integrity of the provider — and, when I politely presented the facts to the accuser, the numbers that person was scattering about carelessly and presenting as fact suddenly added up very differently.

Why do we do this, attack ‘our own’?  Is it because we are passionate about a cause and fear more injustice will be perpetrated?  Or maybe we see our role in the situation changing, and it frightens us.

Whatever the motive, the issues surrounding homelessness are extremely complex, as complex as the individuals who comprise the homeless population.  Just as there is not one profile of a person who is homeless — or of a person who lives in north Dallas, or of an urban dweller, or of a south Dallas resident — neither is there one group, one role, one answer, one approach, which can alone solve all of the problems associated with homelessness.

If we are going to team up with our homeless neighbors to facilitate a process by which they can rebuild their lives, we will need all of the resources at our disposal — and then some.  What we don’t need is infighting, backbiting, labeling, accusing or to be flagrantly flinging about false information.

It’s not that we have to be unified or that we must speak with one voice.  In diversity is strength, and vigilant, constructive criticism is always and absolutely essential.  

We need not unity, but harmony.

True, there are minor glitches as the Bridge undertakes its new role and settles in to its enormous responsibilities, but what is being done there is light years ahead of what we’ve previously done as a city.  It appears as if Dallas may be emerging as a national model for ‘doing it right’ for our homeless citizens.  Isn’t that exciting and what we all want?  What an awe-inspiring change from being the Sixth Meanest City in America!  

To me, it seems that Metro Dallas Homeless Alliance and the Stewpot have taken on the daunting task of running the Bridge, providing a refuge for all who need it, and feeding all who come to eat — and are meeting the immense demands of that task extremely well.  I hope all of us who have worked with the homeless in various capacities in the past can embrace not only the beauty in the diverse faces we see in the food lines at the Bridge, but also embrace the richness of the myriad approaches brought by everyone who loves those faces and longs to see them free of the tyranny of street life.

KS

 

Article today in the Dallas Morning News: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/060508dnmetbridge.3ac8372.html

Also see LA’s Homeless Blog, “When the Community Aligns”,  http://www.lahomelessblog.org/archive/2008_05_18_archive.html

 

Wrestling and Other Conversations May 31, 2008

Saturday, 5/31/08

Last night after the evening meal at the Bridge, I left the dining hall and was wandering around the campus when a couple of guys said hi, and I stopped to talk, sitting down beside them on a low concrete wall by the pavilion.

One man, Cullen, who seems very well-educated, has entered a work-to-housing program at the Bridge.  His friend, Joe, had spent the day putting advertising flyers on houses for $7 an hour.  Joe grew up in a carnival family and said he has worked at the State Fair of Texas since he was a child.  He had seen the football stadium at SMU for the first time that day and couldn’t get over how big and impressive it was.

We sat there talking, with the heat of the day dissipating and a nice breeze cooling things off.  Behind us, the large garage doors of the pavilion were open and the mega ceiling fans whirling.  Though it was still daylight at 8 PM, people were already settling into their cots inside the building for the night, because many of them start off for work at 6 AM or so.  

We were trying to identify a bird that flew onto the roof of the Bridge, and Joe began to talk about how much he liked Blue Jays and how they are sign of good luck.  He said he knows he’s in a quiet, peaceful neighborhood when he sees a Blue Jay, and he’d seen one that day while he was passing out flyers.  

I found out Joe is a celebrity buff.  He once asked a Channel 11 reporter for her autograph, and, of all movie stars, would most like to meet Bruce Willis.  Cullen and I talked about how we couldn’t believe that, at his age, Sly Stallone still did his own stunts in the last Rambo.  “Arthritis, and still running through the woods!” he said.

But Joe was most excited when he was telling us how, years ago, he had met several members of a prominent, high-profile wrestling family and what a thrill this was for him.  He was recounting the various things that had happened to that family in the interim.  Joe’s enthusiasm for everything, from Blue Jays to football stadiums to wrestlers, is contagious, and I found myself mesmerized listening to him, because of the joy which illuminates him when he talks.

Suddenly a woman appeared, standing before us.  “Remember a certain child who was always at those wrestling matches on TV and was wearing a shirt with a flower on it?  That child was me!  I am the cousin [of that wrestling family]!”  “What???  NO WAY!!!” Joe said, and jumped to his feet to hug her.

The woman’s sister came to stand beside her, adding, “And I was usually up in the stands, ‘cause I was too young for a long time to be in the ring.”  One thing led to another and pretty soon they were waxing nostalgic about the glory days of the Sportatorium on Industrial Boulevard, where these women had spent much of their youth — how it had been a significant historical landmark until it burned down, and whether that was arson — and the importance of being able to ‘whup people’s asses.’

On a personal note, as a child, I only ever got ‘whupped’ for cussing.  A foul mouth was pretty much second nature to me, and, since my parents weren’t fond of cursing, they sometimes got fed up with mine and expressed their disapproval through generally mild forms of corporal punishment (and allow me to inform you, it did no good.)  Other than feeling a natural affinity for ‘bad words’, however, I was a sickening sort of Buddhist-leaning, Sunday-school-attending, Presbyterian goody-goody who pontificated to my friends with statements like, “Don’t smush that ant!  Ants are our friends!”

But these women had grown up doing a considerable amount of ass-whupping themselves — from about the age of eleven, in the wrestling ring with their cousins, the pro wrestlers.  They demonstrated to us how they’d stand in the ring gesturing and shouting, “Bring it on!!!”

When Joe found out who they were, it was as though the actresses from the new Sex and the City movie (yes, we’d discussed them, too) had walked onto the Bridge campus.  There was a lot of ‘You’re kidding!’, more congratulatory hugging and a celebration right there on the sidewalk that was somewhere between a family reunion and a red-carpet event.

I ventured that I had been to the Sportatorium only once, for a wrestling match in the ‘70’s with a boyfriend from overseas who idolized American wrestlers.  When I expressed the opinion that night to my boyfriend that some of the ring action looked like it might be fake, he got so upset that he threw a full cup of Coke straight up in the air and showered us and everyone around us with ice and soda, which got stickier and sticker as it dried and as the night wore on.  

So it was with hesitation that, after ten minutes or so of listening to my new friends at the Bridge reminisce about this or that particular wrestling match from the glory days and not wanting to offend anybody’s sensibilities, I gingerly asked them if they thought any of the drama in the ring was planned, after someone gave me the opening, “Boy, wrestling has sure changed a lot since then.”  But the question didn’t offend anyone, and they said, sure, a lot of it was rehearsed, but still unexpected things often happened.  So there you have it, folks…the truth from the source.

KS

Dinner at The Bridge May 24, 2008

Saturday, 5/24/08

Last night I helped with the evening food service at the Bridge, the new homeless assistance center in downtown Dallas.  Along with Our Calling Ministries, with whom I’ve worked at the Day Resource Center for the past couple of years, and  teaming up with David Timothy, AKA SoupMan of SoupMobile Mobile Soup Kitchen, we assisted the Stewpot staff in serving dinner to several hundred homeless people.

David served as a sort of ‘maitre d’’ to the homeless guests, helping them find seating, and my job was that of ‘gatekeeper’ at the door, teamed with one of the Downtown Dallas Safety Patrol officers who serve as security at the center, letting people into the dining hall in small groups.  I liked this job, because, each time I opened the door to the long line of people in the courtyard, SoupMan and I were able greet the people coming in face to face. 

There was a steady stream of people through the door from 6 PM until about 7:15, and a trickle of people from 7:15 to 7:30, when the meal ended.  From my perspective, the meal service went like clockwork, very smooth.

I had a few random observations of the evening:

~~  The first five people in the door were in wheel chairs and were missing some part of a lower extremity.  Three more wheel-chair-bound guests came as the evening progressed.

~~  Four women who came to eat were pregnant.

~~  The Safety Patrol officer I was teamed with asked me to request extra food for the pregnant women who came through.  This kind of sensitivity will build good relationships between the keepers of the peace / guardians of the rules at the center and those they are there to protect.

~~  There were three or four women of my age (middle age) that I had not seen before who were dressed as if they were middle class.

~~  A couple of men coming through the line were carrying a portable magnetic chess game and continuing their game as they waited.  “I’ve tried to learn how to play chess,” I told them, “but I just can’t remember how all the different pieces move.”  “Repetition,” one of them told me. “That’s all it takes.”  “I’m pretty sure my brain just doesn’t work that way,” I said to him, “My five-year-old granddaughter can beat me.”  Good laugh, but sadly true.

~~  There’s a library at the Bridge.  Many people who came through the line were so involved in reading a book that they looked up only to say hello as they entered the dining hall and waited in line.

~~  One of my young friends who is pregnant — I’ll call her Deanna — has already enrolled in the job training program at the center and is very excited about learning to do housekeeping.  I have been seeing her on the street for a couple of years.

~~  My ‘street son,’ Tim, who has no family and has been on the street for ten years, has been employed for two months at a local downtown ministry near the Stewpot and is within a month of earning his way into an apartment.  Please send him your thoughts and prayers.  He’s making an heroic effort to get his life together and to help others to do the same.  In the past, he has sometimes protected Deanna when she was on her own on the street.

~~  Inside the Welcome Center, two friendly volunteers were answering questions for homeless guests and signing up volunteers.  In offices beside the lounge, workers were still conducting interviews with homeless individuals at the time I was leaving, about 8 PM.

~~  There were two medical transports from the main building during time I was there, people being taken from the Welcome Center on stretchers.

~~  The atmosphere appears to be non-threatening and welcoming throughout the campus, but the rules of civil behavior are strictly followed.  That’s exactly the balance that is needed.

~~  A comment I heard:  “It’s obvious that they care about us.  They built these buildings [The Bridge.]”

~~  Another:  “Inside these walls you can learn to solve your problems and get your life together.”

It’s a promising start, and it was a joy to see my homeless friends in a safe, clean, beautiful environment.

KS

 

 

A Middle-Class Homeless Crisis in Dallas? May 21, 2008

This blog received a comment on the post entitled “Broken” from a friend in my church, Church of the Incarnation (Episcopal) that I hope you’ll go back and check out (May 15, 2008.  Click on ‘Comments’ at the bottom of the post.)  

May I just say…I love my church, not only because it is a beautiful, old building with lovely, reverential services, but because of people like English, who care enough to ask the hard questions and to show up on Christmas Eve at the Hyatt Regency Dallas for the SoupMobile’s Christmas Angel Project — and to go to Honduras to build schools, and to New Orleans to rebuild houses, and to fight poverty in Belize, and to mentor in areas of poverty around our very blessed church property, and on and on (it requires an entire book to list all of the outreach that is done out of Church of the Incarnation, thanks to Outreach Director Martha Lang and many others).  My fellow parishioners and our priests put their love on the line constantly all over the place.

Anyway, I hope you’ll read the comments of the “Broken” post where English asked an important question:

“Do we have a middle-class homeless crisis in Dallas?”

and read the response from David Timothy, AKA SoupMan, of SoupMobile Mobile Soup Kitchen.

I would love to know what readers think.  What is your experience and what are your observations?

KS

Little Ones April 2, 2008

BLOGGER’S NOTE: Regarding the children in this story, I am glad to report that I have rarely seen children on the street in about the last three years. This is purely subjective, but our city seems to be doing a better job of getting them into shelters. I am printing this story to show what children sometimes go through.  KS

Journal Archives
Thursday, 2/19/04

Employed!

I went to help crew the mobile soup kitchen truck at the last minute today, as some volunteers had cancelled. I didn’t need to buy the prenatal vitamins for Robin after all, as she and her husband, Sean, had left for the Gulf Coast last night. I didn’t meet Sean last week, but the director told me he is movie-star handsome and is in fact an actor. He was in a soap opera in Los Angeles, then came out to Dallas for an acting job that fell through, which is how he and Robin ended up on the street. He just procured a job on an oil rig at the coast, so they’re headed south.

I worked ‘on the ground’ for the first time tonight, which means standing outside the truck receiving the food from the passthrough at the rear of the truck and handing it to people — sort of crowd control, although there’s nothing to control — our customers are usually very polite. There are most often male volunteers out front, but it was a ‘girl group’ of workers this time. I like the closer contact with people that being on the ground provides, getting to reach out and touch them and talk to them for a minute.

We gave away all the socks I’d bought at the dollar store at the first stop. There was one young man at the City Hall Plaza, dressed in a single light shirt, who asked for a blanket, but we didn’t have any. Blankets will be my focus this week at thrift stores.

One of the people that touched my heart especially tonight was a young man who couldn’t speak — though he could make sounds, I couldn’t understand him, and I hated that I couldn’t. He was asking for something and pointing, perhaps another sandwich, but we had run out.

Little Ones

It was a pretty upbeat run because it wasn’t too cold, and at most stops we had enough food for people to go through the line several times. Then at the third stop came a stomach punch. A mother and two daughters, ages about eight and ten, came through the line and got their food. The director made a special effort to get off the truck and visit with the little girls, giving them some extra cookies.

When we’d finished handing out food, I noticed the family of three sitting together under a tree across the park. I walked over to talk to them and saw that they’d made a bed on the ground out of one thin sleeping bag, so I asked if they had a place to stay for the night. The mother said they’d been kicked out of two shelters. I asked her why, but couldn’t understand her answer; then she told me the shelter said she didn’t do her chores. Privately, I questioned her story, but didn’t confront her about it. I have not known the shelters to kick out children.

For the first time since I’ve been doing this, I thought I was going to start sobbing: those beautiful, trusting little girls with their brilliant smiles were looking up at me from the ground. I asked the mother what she needed. ‘Blankets,’ she said, but we didn’t have any, so I went back to the truck and got a heavy plastic bag for them to put under their sleeping bag and also gave them two thick sweaters I had brought along. ‘Will you be safe here?’ I asked her. She said she hoped so.

The director and I wondered aloud if in fact the shelter did kick out this mother with kids, but just before we left the stop, the mother told me she might be able to get into Austin Street Centre tonight after all.

I continue to be really shaken up by this experience, finding it devastating, and I’m haunted by the thought that I should have done something more to help them. But what? Call 911? Would that have made their situation better or worse? Bring them home to stay at my house? Although the latter may be the answer in my heart, it’s almost certainly not realistic and brings up all sorts of questions. But don’t radical problems require radical solutions?

In retrospect, I believe I made a mistake in not calling 911. I had never encountered such a situation before, and we left the scene before I could think it through. One thing I know: little girls sleeping under a tree in the cold in a park in downtown Dallas is not acceptable.

KS

The Roots of War March 31, 2008

Our youngest granddaughter, now three years old, was born in Vietnam. Knowing and loving her has given us all a special interest in this beautiful country and its history, as did coming of age during the Vietnam War.  KS

 

The Roots of War

“In 1966, when I was in the U.S. calling for a ceasefire to the war in Vietnam, a young American peace activist stood up during a talk I was giving and shouted, “The best thing you can do is go back to your country and defeat the American aggressors! You shouldn’t be here. There is absolutely no use to your being here!”

He and many Americans wanted peace, but the kind of peace they wanted was the defeat of one side in order to satisfy their anger. Because they had called for a ceasefire and had not succeeded, they became angry, and finally they were unable to accept any solution short of the defeat of their own country.

But we Vietnamese who were suffering under the bombs had to be more realistic. We wanted peace. We did not care about anyone’s victory or defeat. We just wanted the bombs to stop falling on us. But many people in the peace movement opposed our proposal for an immediate ceasefire. No one seemed to understand.

So when I heard that young man shouting, “Go home and defeat the American aggressors,” I took several deep breaths to regain myself, and I said, “Sir, it seems to me that many of the roots of the war are here in your country. That is why I have come. One of the roots is your way of seeing the world. Both sides are victims of a wrong policy, a policy that believes in the force of violence to settle problems. I do not want Vietnamese to die, and I do not want American soldiers to die either.”

The roots of war are in the way we live our daily lives — the way we develop our industries, build up our society, and consume goods. We have to look deeply into the situation, and we will see the roots of war. We cannot just blame one side or the other. We have to transcend the tendency to take sides.

During any conflict, we need people who can understand the suffering on all sides… We need links. We need communication.

Practicing nonviolence is first of all to become nonviolence. Then when a difficult situation presents itself, we will react in a way that will help the situation. This applies to the problems of the family as well as to problems of society.”

                                                                        ~~Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step, “The Roots of War”

[see previous entry from this author, “Meditation on Love,” 3/11/08]

Fellow Countrychildren March 24, 2008

This link is from the Co-Grandmother of our three grandchildren, Nancy (married to Steve.)

http://www.photovoice.org/html/galleryandshop/photogalleries/

I hope you’ll look at all the screens, but then go to Screen 3 and click on ‘Street Vision’. These are our youngest grandchild’s fellow ‘countrychildren’ in Vietnam.

When my daughter and son-in-law went to Vietnam a year and a half ago to bring our granddaughter back to her new home in the United States, they fell in love with her first home and country of birth and its beautiful, gracious, loving, peaceful people.

These pictures touch me to the core. Our granddaughter, now three years old, is an angel beyond what we could have ever hoped for or dreamed of, and so are the children in the pictures.

KS

The Capitalist March 19, 2008

My five-year-old grandson has an entrepreneurial streak. This past weekend, his mother (my daughter) called me and said, “He is sitting on the front porch with his old beat-up red fireman’s helmet and a sign reading $5.88, trying to sell the helmet to people walking by! Should I make him come inside?” Then, the next day, he had added his well-used child’s yellow construction hard hat to the venue, and the price for the two had gone up to $22.67! “I don’t need these any more,” he told his parents.

This fondness for cash makes all the more remarkable what he had done the previous week. He phoned me to say he had something for me, asking if I would come by their house on my way home to pick it up. When I arrived, he presented me with an envelope which had “Karen” written on the outside. I knew this was important business, because he always calls me “Gaz”, a name he began to call me as a toddler which has become my official grandma name.

In the envelope was a five dollar bill and two quarters, enclosed with the following letter, written out in his careful cursive-and-print-combo handwriting, with wonderful phonetic spelling:

“THEIS IS MUNE FOR THE HOMLISE”

I was unbelievably touched by his generosity and thoughtfulness, which was completely his own idea. It’s all the more remarkable because his total savings at that point was $18, much of which he’d worked hard for by raking leaves and doing other chores for his family.

I asked him, “Do you want me to take this money and buys some socks with it and give them to people?” “No,” he said, “I want you to give them the money directly.”

When you think of it, $5.50 is an embarrassment of riches. It will buy Donna a cup of coffee at McDonald’s, which she loves to have to warm herself up at bedtime. It will purchase a copy of StreetZine from Gordon. And there will be still be some left over for whatever special person comes along with a need or a wish.

Wisdom of a Child, Wisdom of the Street February 21, 2008

 

“The rewards of compassion are not things to wait for. They are hidden in compassion itself. I know this for sure.”

                                                                                                                        ~~Henri Nouwen, Here and Now

Alternating between past and present journal entries, this happened recently…

Current Journal
Sunday, 1/27/08

My granddaughter, Cora, who is five, had been saving money in her pink piggy bank, and one cold Sunday afternoon recently she decided it was time to part with some of it. She, her mom (my daughter, Rose) and I were going to brunch at Lucky’s, and she was promised that, if she was able to keep herself under control and in her chair during the meal, she could buy a gum ball at the restaurant (nothing like a bribe to elicit cooperation.)

Cora was unnaturally angelic during the meal, concentrating with greater-than-usual focus on her drawing in anticipation of spending her money on something resembling candy. After the meal, she bought her treasured gum ball. In fact, she was allowed to get three, one for each of us.

“Now,” Cora said matter-of-factly and with authority, looking levelly at her mother and me, “I want to take the rest of my money and give it to the people who don’t have houses.” “People who don’t have houses” is a phrase I have sometimes used to describe to my grandchildren my friends who live on the street. Rose and I exchanged surprised glances at an idea that seemed to come from out of the blue, but we knew it was an offer we didn’t want to refuse. “I think I know where we can find some of those people,” I told her.

We left Lucky’s and drove downtown to the spot I had in mind and stopped the car. A handful of people who are homeless were on the sidewalk, and I knew a few of them. When we rolled down the windows, they crowded around the car.

Let me say, by the way: I don’t advocate going downtown, opening your windows and handing out money, for many reasons. When I go downtown to help give away clothing or food, I never take or distribute cash. But neither Rose nor I were about to tell Cora she couldn’t ‘live her dream.’

I told her, “You can just give each person a coin as you wish,” and she did. Chaos briefly ensued as Cora handed out her coins through the back car window, but she was undaunted. When the money was gone, everyone outside the car offered their blessings and their gratitude.

Several people wanted to pray with us, so we held hands through the window and listened while they offered their prayers for bounteous blessings on us, guidance for themselves, and strength to overcome their particular problems.

Then a woman I know, Donna, looked at Cora in her rear car seat and said to her, “Now, I want you to always stay in school! It’s very important. Do you promise?” Cora stared at her with wide eyes, very solemn, and silently nodded assent. Donna continued, “And always, always depend on yourself. Be able to take care of yourself when you’re grown up. Don’t expect anyone else to take care of you.” Again, the solemn and awed assent from the back seat.

“Now I can go to McDonald’s tonight and get a cup of coffee!” Donna told us excitedly. “I’m a hot-drinks person myself,” I told her. “Nothing better in this weather.”

We drove home, blessed by this exchange with these people from the street. I am always awed by their faithfulness and the bounty with which they are able to offer blessings to those who come to see them.

The next day, and many times since that time, Cora has said to her mother or me when the subject of ‘people who don’t have houses’ comes up: “Remember that woman??? Remember what she said to me about ‘stay in school’?” “Yes,” her mom or I will say, “and she also said…” “I know! I know! About taking care of myself!” she says, impatient with us, making it clear that she doesn’t need to be reminded.

KS

Children, Stuffed Animals, Hot Cocoa and Grace February 15, 2008

Journal Archives
Monday, 12/29/03

When the rear door of the mobile soup kitchen slides up and I see the faces of the people lined up outside waiting for food, it’s as if a powerful energy and grace flow from them into me.

Tonight, my daughter, Mandy, sent along two new plush stuffed animals in case there were children in the food lines of the mobile soup kitchen, and at City Hall Plaza, the first two people in line were children. The soup kitchen director asked if she could be the one to give them the toys. A girl, about seven, chose the lion, and her brother, who looked to be around four, embraced the gray monkey and held it tight. Someone in the crowd around him said, “Look, he doesn’t even care about food! He just wants the monkey!” And the homeless people surrounding him laughed in a carefree way and shared for a moment in his joy.

We had enough food so that at the last stop, some people were able to come through the line three or four times. Some of the cookies had gotten wet, and, when the crisp cookies were gone, I scooped up the soggy bits in my plastic-gloved hands to throw them away, but people stopped me, asking for what was now ‘goo,’ so I opened my hands and they scooped it out, eating it eagerly.

Then, as we were closing up the back of the truck — all the sandwiches, soup, bananas, and nearly every cookie crumb having been given away — a man hurried up to the truck, looking as if he’d come from a distance. “Am I too late?” he said. “We’re so sorry, everything’s gone,” we told him. He was very lean and weathered and obviously hungry. He struggled to hide his disappointment, and succeeded. “Well, I just got here too late, it’s OK,” he said, as we apologized again. It was heartbreaking.

It occurred to me while driving to the bookstore for my ritual hot cocoa, a metaphorical foot still in the ‘street’ world but edging back into the reality of north Dallas, that it is dangerous to look out at the faces of the people lined up outside our mobile feeding truck and think that their being homeless is an acceptable and inevitable reality. One must, I think, keep sharp in one’s mind that solutions must always be sought to homelessness and hunger, even if they’re never found. One cannot acquiesce.

Am tired, drained, going home. I am so grateful that I have one.

KS