Living Proof November 21, 2009

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Living Proof

As you may know, the stereotype of the adult Trust Baby who lives on the street by choice because he or she doesn’t want to obey society’s rules is, if not a downright myth, then at least a rare exception among those experiencing street-dwelling homelessness, particularly on a long-term basis.  At a Homeless Advocacy Meeting I attended this week at The Stewpot, as I looked around the room, I asked myself, as I often do:  “What is the profile of a person who is homeless?”  My answer, after years of pondering the question, is that there is no profile.  As with the ‘housed,’ each person’s story is unique.  However, I have observed that a history of family poverty and an interruption in the process of formal education seem to be a common themes among many individuals experiencing so-called ‘chronic’ homelessness that I’ve come to know over the past six years.

 

So, when I hear someone offering solutions to problems of poverty, disease and a lack of education on a global scale, and offering them in a clear-headed and practical way, I tend to listen.  That happened last week when I caught an interview with Melinda Gates on the Charlie Rose Show on PBS (KERA.)

 

It was later than I like to be awake, but I couldn’t quit watching and was riveted to the interchange within the first couple of minutes, because I saw in Melinda a passion and conviction which I’ve come to recognize in those who are committed to positive action on a deep level.  A statement she made — “That mother in Africa whose child is dying of malaria cares just as much about her child as I care about mine” — shows me:  she’s been ‘on the ground,’ engaged in frequent and genuine contact with people who are suffering.   For her, it’s no longer ‘us and them.’

 

What struck me first of all was her manner.  When asked a question, one could tell she had so much information to give in reply that she had to hold back some of it in order to respond to the question within the timeframe allotted.  That kind of interest and accumulation — not to mention synthesis — of data, comes only from a deep and impassioned curiosity.

 

A few things stood out from the interview.

~~ She said that the money she and Bill have put into the The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (many billions) was a drop in the bucket towards solving the problems they address.  In particular, she mentioned the goal of the complete eradication of certain diseases from the planet — malaria, polio, smallpox, HIV-AIDS — and the improvement of public education.  It was Warren Buffet’s donation of tens of billions more that allowed the Foundation to ‘go much deeper’, in her words, in addressing these problems.

~~ She could answer the hard questions, but never in a contentious and divisive way.  When asked about the diversion of aid funds by corrupt governments in the developing world, she answered, with practicality but without blame, that she and Bill had learned that the work was best and most successfully carried out in certain countries where they could work well with accountable governments  — in other words, tried and true solutions based on experience.

~~ The solutions to large, global problems lie, not in one segment of society alone, but rather only in partnerships between private philanthropy, government funding and cooperation, and faith-based organizations.  That’s why, when I hear opinions put forth with monolithic solutions — and most often government participation as an evil is mentioned –  I realize that these comments are based in ideology rather than in reality.  The massive problems of hunger, homelessness, poverty, and global disease are indeed only amenable to large-scale partnering.

~~ The Gates Foundation sticks with it.  They’ve been working on public education for a decade and are just now coming up with really workable answers to the question of what can make it succeed.  At first they tried organizing smaller communities within the larger ones so that troubled kids could feel a sense of connection, but what they’ve learned over time is that the really important variable is — guess what?  the particular adult individual teacher within the classroom.  (How does that make you feel about the Dallas Independent School District laying off experienced, gifted teacher during its budget problems?)  So now, they are trying to quantify exactly what are the characteristics of successful teachers, so that those can be taught and mentored to others.  They are doing this through transparency in teaching methods and outcomes in pilot programs a couple of states — so that success can be shared, passed along, and hopefully instituted across the country.

~~ Something I observed in her manner was a presence of deep caring coupled with a lack of sentimentality.  It may sound strange, but, as I’ve learned myself — sometimes the hard way — sentimentality about an issue can sometimes cloud its reality, and I believe its takes away from the dignity of those experiencing the problem.  There is a fine line between these two, shall we call them ‘values?’ – compassion and sentimentality.  But it’s probably an important line to learn to identify, in order to keep ourselves from enabling on the one hand and becoming cynical on the other.

 

Regardless of our situations, we are all human beings made of the same flesh and blood as well as emotional and spiritual components, and we are in this together.  Not only is ‘right action’ a moral imperative, it is the correct practical option to try and solve these problems that plague our world.

 

KS

 

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation:  All Lives Have Equal Value

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Pages/home.aspx

The Living Proof Project

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/livingproofproject/Pages/video-gallery.aspx#video=/livingproofproject/Pages/kangaroo-mother-care-malawi.aspx&pager=0

Overwhelming Need November 14, 2009

 

Saturday, November 14, 2009

With winter upon us, it’s a good time to reflect upon the extremes of need that will exist this year for those who are not yet housed and are living on the street.  I found this entry in my journal from the end of last summer, when I still volunteered at the Second Chance Cafe, run by The Stewpot at the Bridge, and thought I would share it.  KS

Journal Archives, Friday, August 16, 2008

Overwhelming Need

Sometimes the amount of need among people who are experiencing homeless in Dallas — even with the welcome advent of the Bridge, our new homeless assistance center — seems overwhelming.  This was one of those nights.  The enormity of the problems of the people involved, the monumental scope of the pain in their lives, the scarcity of readily available solutions, such as adequate housing:  these things were at the forefront of my mind tonight as I left the Second Chance Cafe at the Bridge after helping to serve dinner to somewhere between seven hundred and eight hundred people.

 

Of course, this evening’s bright spot was, as it always is, looking into the eyes of people as they came through the food line.  Always, but even more so tonight, the eyes of the guests meeting mine as they came through the line — almost without exception — were full of light, respect and dignity, longing for acceptance,  willingness to respond with love to the smallest kindness — so much more so than I would ever be able to be in their circumstances.  They almost always say ‘Very Blessed,’ or at the least ‘Can’t complain,’ when asked how they are doing.  The other great blessings are the other volunteers, who show up every week, and the Stewpot staff, which shows up every day.

 

I find that if I just hand somebody a plate in the food line at the Bridge, they may be looking down, preoccupied or frowning, and go on their way with a ‘thank you,’ but without ever looking up.  If I greet them or ask how they are doing, their whole face, their whole being changes — they become radiant.  If I say their name, they become a friend.  And that is no different than you or me.  It’s just that the desperate nature of their circumstances keeps it real:  they know how much it means to have a friend, and what it means not to have any.

 

Why is it that sometimes, like tonight, I look at homeless individuals and the scope of homelessness in Dallas and feel weighed down by the challenges?  Is it seeing people as their ‘diagnosis’ or label rather than seeing them just as the people they are, in the here and now?  Maybe. 

 

I usually see the beauty when I go to the Bridge.  Tonight I could only see how far there is to go.  It was one of those rare times when I say to myself, “How do those who deal with this face to face every single day — for example, the Stewpot staff or the caseworkers and management at the Bridge — how do they do it all the time without losing hope or becoming jaded?”  Granted, I think, write or talk about homelessness in Dallas every day, but I go to the Bridge only a couple of times a month.

 

Perhaps it’s a ‘fix-it’ mentality that one can get into, although trying to ‘fix it’ is a necessary component of approaching the problem as a whole.  Sometimes, though, until we can figure out what we need to ‘do,’ maybe it has to be enough just to go to where the pain is and ‘be with’ it.  It seems that there is tremendous grace in that.  In face, maybe, while action is necessary, being present for someone is the most important part of taking action anyway.

 

Granted, it may not be enough to ‘hang out’ with people who are experiencing homelessness.  But being with them, talking with them, sharing their concerns — one human to another — is one of the most essential parts of what we do, just as it is with our families.

 

KS

Mutuality of Ministry November 3, 2009

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Mutuality of Ministry

 

“I am the good shepherd.  I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for my sheep.”  ~~ John 10: 14-15

“…the same Lord who binds us together in love will also reveal himself to us and others as we walk together on the road.”  ~~ Henri Nouwen

 

I read the following passages recently and felt they challenged, in important ways, certain commonly-held cultural assumptions about ‘helping’ and ‘serving others’.  What do you think?  KS

 

“Ministry is not only a communal experience, it is also a mutual experience…  [Jesus] wants Peter to feed his sheep and care for them, not as ‘professionals’ who know their clients’ problems and take care of them, but as vulnerable brothers and sisters who know and are known, who care and are cared for, who forgive and are being forgiven, who love and are being loved.

 

Somehow we have come to believe that good leadership requires a safe distance from those we are called to lead…  Someone serves, someone else is being served, and be sure not to mix up the roles!  But how can we lay down our life for those with whom we are not even allowed to enter into a deep personal relationship?

 

We are not the healers, we are not the reconcilers, we are not the givers of life.  We are sinful, broken vulnerable people who need as much care as anyone we care for.  The mystery of ministry is that we have been chosen to make our own limited and very conditional love the gateway for the unlimited and unconditional love of God.

 

Therefore, true ministry must be mutual.  When the members of a community of faith cannot truly know and love their shepherd, shepherding quickly becomes a subtle way of exercising power over others and begins to show authoritarian and dictatorial traits.  The world in which we live — a world of efficiency and control — has no models to offer to those who want to be shepherds in the way Jesus was a shepherd.  Even the so-called ‘helping professions’ have been so thoroughly secularized that mutuality can only be seen as a weakness and a dangerous form of role confusion.  The leadership about which Jesus speaks is of a radically different kind from the leadership offered by the world.  It is a servant leadership*… in which the leader is a vulnerable servant who needs the people as much as they need their leader… a leadership that is not modeled on the power games of the world, but on the servant-leader Jesus, who came to give his life for the salvation of many.”

 

                               ~~ Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus, Reflections on Christian Leadership

 

*Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness.

A Night To Remember: Steve Martin and CDM October 28, 2009

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

A Night to Remember:  Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers

An Evening of Bluegrass and Banjo Benefitting Central Dallas Ministries

One of my daughters and I attended the above concert at the Meyerson Symphony Center last evening, and we had a great time.  The hall was sold out, and the concert was not only fun, the music was terrific.  Of course, Steve Martin told his share of funny jokes and played a masterful banjo, and the Steep Canyon Rangers are excellent musicians and vocalists.  A fine concert supporting an extremely worthy organization.

 

After the concert, my daughter and I were talking to the fiddle player, and I was telling him that Bluegrass music is close to my heart, since I’m from Tennessee.  ”Eastern Tennessee?” he asked.  ”Oh, yeh!” I said.  ”Our band lives in Asheville,” he told us.  We high-fived.  ”You know,” he said, “East Tennessee and Western North Carolina are a separate state unto themselves.”  ”Yes,” I said, “no more beautiful place on earth.”  ”Absolutely,” he replied, “a well-kept secret.”  A band after my own heart.

KS

Starlight October 19, 2009

Monday, October 19, 2009

 

Starlight

 

“So do not fear,  for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”  ~~ Isaiah 41:10 

“Pain is inevitable, misery is optional.”  ~~ Mary Shafer

 

The Shafer clan lost a radiant light when Mary Shafer died this past Wednesday in my hometown of Knoxville, after a 14-year battle with recurrent breast cancer.  A book could be written about her accomplishments, but I like thinking back to when I first met her.

 

I was going through Freshman Sorority Rush at the University of Tennessee, and, when I walked into the Phi Mu room at the Panhellenic Building, Mary, then the sorority’s president, met me at the door.  She took a look at my name tag, and her eyes opened widely.  She put her hand on my arm.  “Are you related to Bo Shafer?”  she said, her face alight with what I took to be hope.

 

As I answered Mary politely, “Yes, he’s my cousin,” and she, becoming even more animated, said to me, “We’re dating!” my first thought — which I obviously kept to myself — was, “Uh-oh, I can see that this poor girl is already in over her head.”  My second:  “Please… don’t get your hopes up,” which, fortunately, I also didn’t share, and next, “Ah, well, another one bites the dust.”

 

I don’t mind telling you, her question was one I got often, because, in addition to being tall and handsome, my older male cousin was frequently in the news.  He’d played varsity football for Tennessee and had met Mary when she was cheerleading there, but his philanthropic work and business acumen were what kept him in the public eye.  

 

This cousin of mine was a quintessential illusive bachelor in our town.  How many beautiful women had set their sites, and their hearts, on him?  I’d met a couple of them at family gatherings — rarely did I see them again.  It’s not that Bo was an intentional heartbreaker — it’s that he was looking for the Real Thing.  I realize now that he’d know it when he saw it, and it turned out to be Mary Gwyn, because the next thing I knew, they were married.

 

Bo wasn’t looking for a trophy wife, but rather for a partner in life, and he surely found it in Mary.  He was quoted on KnoxNews.com this week as saying, “I was so old I didn’t think I could fall in love, but I fell head over heels in love with that woman,” he said. “We never had an argument. Her goal in life was to keep a smile on my face, and my goal in life was to keep a smile on her face.”

 

A number of years ago, when Bo was International Kiwanis President, Mary traveled the world with him, even though she was in and out of cancer treatment at the time.  I could never figure out how she had the stamina to keep up the fierce pace of their commitments, and she never, ever complained.  Instead, she called her battle with cancer ‘an adventure.’  A devout Christian and active member of Second Presbyterian Church, her faith never seemed to waiver.

 

It was Bo who told me throughout my life:  “As middle-class Americans, we are in the top 2% of fortunate people living in the world.  For most of humanity, life is entirely different and much, much harder.  We are extremely spoiled.  It is our privilege and our obligation to give back.”  In Mary, he found someone who lived this philosophy at his side, day in and day out.

 

Bo said that, during the year of his Kiwanis presidency, he and Mary lunched with the King and Queen of Thailand and spent time in the most poverty-ridden villages in Africa.  It surprised no one that Mary was equally at home in either place.

 

During one of my family’s trips to Knoxville in recent years, each time we were with Mary, I knew I was in the presence of someone who was truly living the moments of her life to the fullest, cherishing her family and her life’s work.  The phrase ‘Seize the day’ describes her way of being in the world.  She was the kindest, the friendliest, the most caring individual one could ever meet, with an incisive intelligence.  She was also incredibly fun-loving.  As close as she and Bo were, her description of their recent wine-tour of France, with her imbibing a glass with every course, and Bo being a teetotaler, was hilarious.

 

At their house on the lake, where they spent every weekend, they have a tire swing in the living room.  Not too many women would think that went with their decor!

 

Mary and Bo sent out yearly Groundhog’s Day cards, which were always upbeat and inspiring.  In recent years, their greetings contained business cards for an organization called water.org., as Mary had developed a passion for finding solutions to the problem of clean water scarcity in developing nations.  Together, they built wells in Ethiopia and Guatemala.

 

The message of this year’s card was that life is so precious, we should never complain about small things.  She truly and fully took her own advice.  I am in awe of the life she lived and the legacy she leaves us all.  

 

Looking back to that week of Freshman Rush when I first met Mary, I recall that at the end of the week, Phi Mu did a pageant in which she played the lead.  The title of the presentation was “Starlight.”  All these years later, it fits more than ever.

 

KS

 

http://water.org/

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2009/oct/15/local-philanthropist-mary-shafer-dies-at-64/

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2009/mar/29/shafers-honored-for-their-service-to-others/

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/knoxnews/obituary.aspx?n=mary-gwyn-shafer&pid=134419134

 

 

Hard Questions October 8, 2009

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

 

Hard Questions

 

A friend of mine moved ‘off the street’ today and into housing, and it was big news.  His was a high-profile ‘success’ story, because this particular friend has been living a life of street-dwelling homelessness for quite a long time — fifteen years — and he has often been in the news, being a person who doesn’t mind being interviewed and is frequently poetically eloquent.

 

However, as is often the case, there is more to the story than its public version.  Isn’t there always?  The ‘more’ in this instance is that a couple of people — well, actually a person and a dog — got left behind when my friend moved into his new home.

 

I got a phone call from my friend’s ‘street wife’ of twelve years yesterday afternoon, saying that her husband had been informed by his employer, who had arranged for the housing, that he was to move into his new home early the next morning — only sixteen hours notice.  Initially, both husband and wife had expected that his housing would include a place for her, too.  When they recently found out this was not the case, they thought they’d have a week or so to try and make arrangements for her safety and well-being.  Additionally, his dog — his constant companion and best friend for eleven years — turned out to be over the weight limit for the housing and would need to stay behind.  And, in his new home, my friend will not be allowed to have visitors.

 

When the wife called me yesterday, she was distraught.  Media had been at their camp as well as at the new home.  Yet, even though his wife was present during the media visits, no mention was made of the her in any news report, nor of the fact that the dog (who did make it into the story!) and she are to remain behind in the ‘cardboard condo’ under the bridge.

 

The wife is frightened to stay out in the open camp without her husband and protector, with good reason.  So some of her ‘housed’ friends banded together today and came up with the money to pay for a two-weeks’ stay in a motel for her and the dog — a temporary fix, but better than sleeping alone under the bridge.

 

On the phone yesterday, she said she couldn’t understand why she couldn’t go with him — had the rules at the housing unit been made purposefully to exclude her?  I reassured her that no, I didn’t think that was the case.  Rather it was more likely to be an issue of funding-raising on the part of the charity providing the housing.  Generally, at least in this part of the world, any sort of housing subsidy for homeless couples requires that they be legally married, which these two people are not.  They would like to be, but there are intransigent problems with his obtaining a divorce from a wife he’s been apart from for decades.

 

I’ll refrain from discussing how her husband made the decision to go ahead with his move, but I spent the afternoon today with my friend, the wife.  As we ran errands in my car, we cried together, laughed together, and visited two of my close friends who have been consistent and steady friends to people who are homeless — both very kind, wise, forthright and resourceful women.  Each of them gave the wife good counsel and support.

 

I believe that, God willing, she will be all right, and, hopefully, more than all right.  She has skills and resources way beyond what most of us possess after living on the street for over a decade, and there are a number of people who are willing to help make accessible to her tools that will help her move out of her current plight.  But her situation raises a number of hard questions, because there are many long-term, stable couples on the street in the same situation — unable to marry for one reason or another;  unwilling to separate in order to get into housing.  

 

Is there a way to make peace between our religious beliefs and morals, and the urgent need to help people — especially women as the most vulnerable parties — move from street-dwelling homelessness to a more stable life of being housed?  What is our priority?

How do those of us who are advocates and service providers share the story of someone experiencing homelessness or poverty with the public in a way that still presents him or her as a person with dignity?  How do we raise funds and practice public relations in ways that will help people move out of homelessness and poverty, without inadvertently falling into the inglorious category of helpers referred to as ‘poverty pimps’?

How do we hold people up as examples of our hopes, dreams and plans for our own organizations without exploiting them? 

 

Where does the line get drawn between the landscape of our plans for them and that of their plans for themselves, and how do we gracefully and honorably navigate the overlapping territory?  How do we do things that we believe to be truly valuable in helping other human beings without falling into the trap of believing we are their saviors?

Whose highest good is being served in this situation, when the cost of housing a husband is that his street wife and dog are left living under a bridge?

 

KS

 

Link:  See Dallas Morning News Photographer Courtney Perry’s blog entry, “Complexities,”  in response to this post at http://courtneyperry.com/pblog/index.php

Drawing Apart September 23, 2009

Wednesday, September 17, 2009

 

Drawing Apart

 

‘And after the fire a sound of sheer silence.’  I Kings 19: 9-18

 

“This verse is often taken (not inappropriately) to suggest that we draw apart from the noisy bustle of the world to listen for the voice of the Lord…

 

But drawing apart from the world is not enough if we take the noise of the world with us, ‘that inner dialog with self that is a jumble of frivolous thoughts, worrisome cares, and negative feelings,’ as Thomas Merton put it. You don’t put all that behind merely by going off to a quite place — unless you intentionally let go of it, and that is not easily done.  It takes practice.

 

When you hose a concrete floor pools of water collect in the low places.  You sweep the floor, but the water returns to the low places.  You sweep again.  And Again.  Finally, perhaps the fiftieth time you sweep the water away, it has evaporated and does not return.  So it is with the cares of the world.  Let them go.  Let them go again.  And again.  Eventually, they will not return.  Then you can listen for the voice of the Lord.”

 

                                                                                   ~~ Forward Day by Day, August, 2008

St. Teresa: The Bookmark Prayer September 14, 2009

Monday, September 14, 2009

 

St. Teresa of Avila:  The Bookmark Prayer

 

Let nothing disturb you;

Nothing frighten you.

All things are passing.

God never changes.

Patience obtains all things.

Nothing is wanting to him who possesses God.

God alone suffices.

Saving Other People July 30, 2009

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Saving Other People

 

Someone said to me a while back that they’d ’saved’ a person who was homeless by giving them a job.  I was surprised by this assertion and said so.  Do we really save other people?  In a war zone at the point of a gun, perhaps yes.  But when a person is given an opportunity, it is the person herself or himself who shows up every day and turns the opportunity into success.  ”It seems to me that, depending on one’s perspective, either God saves people, they save themselves, or both,” I said at the time.

 

The person with whom I was speaking dismissed my objection, telling me it was just a manner of speaking, and that I had missed the statement’s greater intent.  But I think the distinction is important, because if we claim to ’save’ someone else, either we are fairly arrogant in believing our own line of chat, or we are disingenuous and condescending in thinking others will or should buy into this concept.

 

Those who have tried and succeeded or tried and failed to help people get off the street know only too well: there are many factors that play into the outcome of such attempts, one of the most significant being the person’s readiness to make the gargantuan shift away from street life and into housing and employment. Timing is a critical element.

 

Not long ago I had a conversation with a man who had been living on the street for many years and battling homelessness, mental illness, addiction, and cancer all at once.  He had been placed in housing by a nonprofit agency, but partly because there were not adequate support services attached to the housing, and partly because — by his own report — of his own state of mind, he ended up giving up the apartment and going back into a shelter.  It was too much responsibility and too little structure battling all his challenges at the same time, and, he said, he was lonely, missing the street community of which he had so long been a part.  He then succeeded, within the shelter he had chosen to reenter, in getting his mental illness and addiction under control, got treatment for his cancer and went into remission, and was then ready to once more move into a permanent supportive housing situation.

 

Recently I asked a good friend, Pastor Karen Dudley of the Dallas International Street Church, how her program had gone about facilitating the rehabilitation of those people within her discipleship, many of whom I know to have tried many other approaches before coming to the DISC.  I was expecting a lengthy exposition on philosophy and practice and was quite surprised by the simplicity of Pastor Karen’s response, which is probably why I remember it.  She spoke first of the primary importance of the constant and ongoing spiritual and religious aspects of life at the DISC, and then said:

 

“but the reconstruction of themselves is up to them.”

That simple phrase has continued to ring truer to me than almost anything I’ve heard about helping people get off the street.

 

I know that I am prickly on this subject of ’saving’ people, especially friends who are homeless, because I find this sort of rhetoric to be exploitive and demeaning, as though the person being offered assistance were a project or a specimen rather than a capable human being, full of dignity.  Granted, those experiencing homelessness often have extraordinary challenges to overcome, as would anyone in their place.  But I think we have to be oh-so-very careful where we draw the line in our attempts to communicate with one another about their struggles and the ways that we hope to partcipate in the solutions to their dilemmas.  In reality, how we couch our efforts in our language, as well as in our own minds, says a great deal about us.  The metaphor of reaching out to someone is a lot different from the image of reaching down to them.

 

KS

 

Dallas International Street Church:  http://www.kdministries.org/

Tommy [Not His Real Name] July 20, 2009

 

Monday, July 20, 2009

Tommy

 

There are occasionally people who impact one’s life significantly, even if you rarely see them.  For me, Tommy is one of those.

 

Tommy lives on the street and is always alone.  It is said of him that he won’t talk, but sometimes there are exceptions.  One of the people he’s always trusted is our mutual friend, Trey.  Trey is one of those earth angels to our homeless friends who does a very great deal to help them — and has for years — but does it all quietly and behind the scenes, with no fanfare.  He’s an important part of Tommy’s safety net, often buying him clothes and checking on him, and Trey will be moving out of town soon with his wife and young children.  So Tommy is strongly on my mind these days, knowing that an important link in his support network will soon be missing.

 

I saw Tommy this week at a monthly meeting that we both attend.  I usually sit at the same table with him at the meeting, but this week our tables were adjacent.  During a speech by someone that got a little lengthy, I looked over at him and he was looking my way.  He made the motion of casting a fishing line off into the distance and reeling it in, then cut a look back at me and flashed a rare, enigmatic smile.  I laughed.  ”Somebody needs to reel in this speaker,” he was telling me.

 

I’ve known Tommy for a number of years, back from the time of the Day Resource Center when I used to volunteer there on Friday evenings, tagging along with Our Calling Ministries because they’d let me give away clothing I’d collected for our homeless friends after the ministry had served a hot, home-cooked meal to several hundred street people on the DRC parking lot.  Although his is a sizable physical presence, Tommy is so quiet and still that it is somehow possible to be almost unaware that he’s around.  I remember going away from a freezing cold evening on that urine-soaked parking lot and thinking, “Wait a minute?  Who was that person in a large army-green trench coat standing stock still most of the night, all on his own in the shadows?”  I had the feeling it had been an apparition.  Then I had the strangest thought — that it was Christ Himself among us. I still think that thought was right.

 

Soon Trey introduced me to him, and from that time on I made a point of saying, “Hi, Tommy,” whether or not he responded, but often he did.  Then one night in prayer circle, he was suddenly standing next to me and even held my hand.  From then on, I would often look up to find him standing nearby when I was handing out clothing, and sometimes we would have a brief conversation.

 

I wonder if Tommy mostly refuses to speak with people because sometimes his words don’t come out as he wants them to.  After this week’s meeting, I asked him if he needed some new clothes, as he tends to wear what he has down to the bitter end of its usefulness (and way past its cleanliness), and he replied, in his soft drawl, “Wellll…  I could use some shoes, or whatever you can get.”  I looked at his shoes, which have become well-vented over the summer through coming apart at the seams.  He told me his shoe size, and then, as has often happened when I talk to him, he began to speak further, but his words came out in a jumble.  (The words themselves are sometimes of the so-big-that-average-people-have-to-consult-a-dictionary variety.)  I saw him wince almost imperceptibly, as though he himself was surprised by it, and I tried not to register discomfiture but rather to go on with the conversation as though I understood.  This somehow seems to reassure him.  Although we both knew I didn’t get it all, it was OK, because we had made a connection.

 

One night on the DRC parking lot a few years back, I asked him if he wanted me to help him look for housing through a new program that Central Dallas Ministries was starting called Destination Home.  ”No,” he said, “you see, I’m mentally ill…” and then his words continued in a stream but went off in an obtuse direction and were spoken so softly that I couldn’t understand them.  ”OK,” I said when he was finished.

 

Somehow all of the highly-publicized help we are giving people who are experiencing homelessness in Dallas through our city services — and our arresting, ticketing, jailing and trying to force them into mental health care for which there’s inadequate funding to keep them there — as well as our efforts to transition them into housing that’s woefully insufficient because nobody wants ‘the homeless’ in their ‘hood — somehow all of this costly and much-touted assistance is passing Tommy by.  The only place I’ve seen him safe and cared for is The Stewpot. But he still lives on the street and sleeps in the open.  I continually ask myself how he survives.

 

When we can find a place for Tommy (and the many others like him) in ‘our world’…  a place that is safe, that he can trust, where he can be cared for and be able to care for himself, a place that is clean and out of harm’s way…  on that day, I’ll be willing to concede:  we will have made a good start on solving the problem of homelessness in Dallas.  But not until then.

 

KS

‘The Cost of Poverty’: Janet Morrison June 14, 2009

Sunday, June 14, 2009

 

Janet Morrison on ‘The Cost of Poverty’

 

For those who have not come across Janet Morrison’s Community Dialogue blog, I find it a ‘not- to-be-missed’ voice with an eloquence and comprehension of the realities of the inner city and poverty that is rarely heard.

 

http://janetmorrison.blogspot.com/2009/06/cost-of-poverty.html

 

Today’s post in particular touched me, because it explains so well the cycle of the emotional cost of poverty on children and on families.  There’s much here I had never put together — it’s well worth a read.  Thank you, Janet, for your extraordinary heart and commitment.

 

KS

The Garden Is Growing! May 15, 2009

Friday, 5/15/09

 

The Garden Is Growing!

Update on The Garden: South Dallas, Texas

 

 

The Garden: South Dallas, Texas — a community garden for, by and with people who are homeless or formerly homeless in Dallas — is thriving under the leadership of the Discipleship of the Dallas International Street Church at 2706 Second Avenue near Fair Park.  Team Leaders from the DISC took charge and led a work force of forty people from The Stewpot’s Community Court Project in a successful and fun Garden-Raising Day on Saturday, May 2, 2009.  On April 2 we had a lovely but trash-littered field behind the church; by day’s end of the Garden-Raising, we had seven fully-planted organic raised garden beds!

 

All of us involved that day were tremendously joyful and proud of our accomplishment.  Not only did these energetic and hardworking crews clean up the field and dig the turf out of the seven 4’ X 12’ garden beds, they hauled and laid concrete block borders, carried organic soil by wheelbarrow from the soil pile to fill the beds, trimmed trees, dug a flower bed, built garden benches and tables, and — the best part — at day’s end, everyone celebrated their labor by planting all seven beds with vegetables, herbs and flowers.

 

To view a slideshow by Mandy Mulliez of the the garden site, planning meetings,

and the Garden-Raising Day’s events, look here:

http://www.kodakgallery.com/ShareLanding.action?c=1bf3gjjt.cpdg2dyx&x=0&y=bi27he&localeid=en_US

********

 For a video clip of The Garden Team Leaders speaking on television about their experiences, look here:  http://dallashomelessnetwork.blogspot.com/2009/05/garden-south-dallas-video.html

 

 

For many of us, the best thing about the day was the way that teams of homeless and formerly homeless individuals from the two programs, the Dallas International Street Church and the Stewpot Community Court Project, pitched in and worked together in a spirit which was more than harmonious — it was truly joyous!  So many of us came away from the day elated with not only the significant physical accomplishments of the six crews, but the spirit of love, unity and camaraderie that we discovered working together.

 

More than once during the day, people came up to me and spoke of how hard it can be for people who live or have lived on the street to work together because of the challenges that each faces in his or her life.  They expressed happiness both in their creation of The Garden and in the way they were able to cooperate in order to create it.  Barry, one of the Stewpot supervisors, shared an observation of how people talked about their lives and their challenges with each other as they dug weeds, shoveled soil and planted seeds and plants.

 

Since the Garden-Raising, I’m proud to report that the six Team Leaders and their teams at the Dallas International Street Church have taken full responsibility for the care and nurture of their garden beds, watering them diligently, adding new plants, and reporting excitedly at our Garden meetings about which seedlings are emerging, what plants are producing, a couple of plants that are having problems and possible organic solutions.  We already have a burgeoning crop of green beans!  I quickly learned at our first full-church Garden meeting that we had many very knowledgeable and skilled gardeners in the congregation, and that knowledge grows and is spread around as people work side by side and share their expertise day by day.  A Friend of the Garden has even donated a hammock where the hardworking gardeners can rest from their labors!

 

Here are some of the things we are growing this season:  bush beans, Swiss chard, collards, Japanese eggplant, cucumbers, yellow crookneck squash, lettuce, onions, sugar-pod peas, carrots, okra, tomatoes, several varieties of peppers, strawberries, cantaloupe, watermelon, Italian-leaf parsley, cilantro, citronella, roses, marigolds, dianthus, zinnias, nasturtiums and about five other types of flowers — many of them tucked decoratively into the spaces in the concrete blocks.  One of our gardeners is creating a special butterfly and bee garden bed.  The gardeners have not only worked hard, they’ve been very creative in their garden design.

 

Something exciting and completely unexpected happened a week ago:  just as we had exhausted our initial Seed Money Fund, an Anonymous Angel left an envelope at my house.  On one side was written:  “DON’T ASK WHO…  PLEASE.  IT IS A GIFT.  KEEP UP WITH YOUR WORK.”  On the other side, it said:  “FENCE FUND.  GOOD FENCES MAKE GOOD NEIGHBORS.”  Inside was… $500!  We are very grateful for such kindness, and this Saturday, May 17, the Stewpot DART Community Court Project is sending us another work crew, and we will install our new fencing!

 

If you are currently or formerly homeless, this is your garden, and you may become a gardener now or at any time by joining one of the teams at the DISC.  (The church office telephone is 214-928-9595.)

 

Although we are going to wait until fall growing season to invite groups of volunteers to come in from outside the community and work with us, everyone is ALWAYS welcome to visit us — just knock on the Dallas International Street Church door and ask someone to show you the path.  The Garden: South Dallas is a magical and serene place and one where we already love to sit with friends or alone, to talk or simply and quietly ‘find our peace.’

 

Karen Shafer

 

Special Thanks to:

Bruce Buchanan and the staff of The Stewpot of First Presbyterian Church, Dallas

The Episcopal Church of the Incarnation, especially Martha Lang, Outreach Director

The Garden Advisory Committee

Friends of The Garden for financial support and in-kind donations

Mandy Mulliez for photography

The Dallas Morning News and Michael Ainsworth for a photo spread of The Garden in the Metro Section on Sunday, May 3

Nancy Baker of White Rock Coffee for great coffee

Aaron Hardwick and Mindy of Breadwinners Restaurants and Catering for breakfast pastries for 100

Sandra Davis of SoupMobile for providing lunch for 100

Soil Building Systems for special pricing on Organic Growers Mix

Lowe’s at Northwest Highway & Jupiter for materials at cost

Louis, Cora and Anna for inspiration

and, OF COURSE, Pastor Karen Dudley for her great leadership, compassion and kindness to us all!

 

Wish List:

a bird bath

a bat house

birdfeeders

concrete blocks for additional beds

cash for additional organic soil purchase

any and all healthy plants

any and all seed, especially heirloom varieties

gardening tools and gloves

limb loppers and pruners

a pole tree trimmer

a subscription to Organic Gardening Magazine [http://www.organicgardening.com/]

 

E-Mail: thegardensouthdallas@earthlink.net

 

The Garden-Raising Day, May 2, 2009 May 2, 2009

 

Saturday, May 2, 2009

 

The Garden-Raising Day, May 2, 2009

 

As of today, The Garden: South Dallas, Texas exists on the ground and not just in our minds, hearts, spirits and to-do lists!  And it’s beautiful.

We had a wonderful day.   Thanks very much to every single person who was involved.

Particular appreciation to The Stewpot of First Presbyterian Church, Dallas;  The Episcopal Church of the Incarnation;  and The Garden Committee, all of whom made this possible.

Many Blessings, Karen

For a look at pictures of The Garden-Raising Day in progress, see the inside front cover of the Dallas Morning News Metro Section for Sunday, May 3,  2009.

Dallas International Street Church Gospel Choir April 26, 2009

 

Sunday, April 26, 2009

 

Dallas International Street Church Gospel Choir

 

My friends Sandy and Oliver have given me, over the last 5-1/2 years, literally carloads of clothing, blankets, shoes, and toiletries that I’ve given away to our friends who live on the street and under the bridges in Dallas. They are the most ongoing and prolific donors imaginable for people experiencing homelessness in our city. Oliver, a chef, works many Saturday nights, so Sandy and I go out to dinner then from time to time, and last night was one of those times.

 

When Sandy and I met to go to dinner last evening, she’d brought with her a clothing donation (no surprise) for the Glory Thrift Store at 2704 Second Avenue (75210), the thrift shop of the Dallas International Street Church. “Let’s go down to the Thrift Store right now,” I told her, “and I’ll show you the site for The Garden: South Dallas, Texas, which is nearby!”  She was game.  

[http://theintermittentvolunteer.wordpress.com/2009/04/17/the-garden-south-dallas-texas/]

 

We arrived at the Street Church, and two men I know from Pastor Karen Dudley’s discipleship were standing out front. I’d forgotten about their live televised church service every Saturday at 7:30 P.M., which I’d attended several weeks ago and really enjoyed.  ”We missed the bus to the TV show by two minutes,” the guys told me.  ”We’ll drive you!” I told them, and we headed over to the Access 34 Television studio.

[http://www.gospelondemand.tv/]

 

Inside the tv studio, we said hi to everyone, and, before the broadcast, Pastor Karen got all of us started singing — the choir, the audience — “When the Saints Go Marching In”.  Every time I’m in the presence of the DISC Gospel Choir, I can’t help singing, clapping, practically shouting along with their joy-filled sound, and last night was no exception.  By the time the broadcast started, everyone in the studio was swept up in the Love and the Spirit carried around the room by the choir’s beautiful voices and the sense of celebration in each face.  By the time they’d stopped singing, they had, as usual, brought me to tears.

 

Next time WFAA Channel 8 has its Gospel Choir Competition, we could all write in and support them in being part of it!

 

KS

The Garden: South Dallas, Texas April 17, 2009

Thursday, April 16, 2009

“The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein;…”  ~~ Psalm 24

The Garden:  South Dallas, Texas

 

On the morning of April 2, 2009, I blithely put up a blog post here about gardens (“The Magic of Gardens”.)  I quote myself from that article:  ”The idea [of a community garden] is something that’s beyond my purview to [help] organize … right now,” – and I was convinced of that at the time.  However, by the same afternoon, I had received e-mails from staff members of two of the best nonprofit agencies benefitting people who are homeless in the City of Dallas saying that they were interested in being involved.

 

Janet offered the possible involvement of some volunteers.  Pat informed me that Pastor Karen Dudley, Founder and Senior Pastor of the Dallas International Street Church in South Dallas, had been wanting to start a community garden for years, and, most importantly, that she had access to land where it could be done.                                                                                           [http://www.kdministries.org/]

I realized that perhaps…  a community garden with and for Pastor Karen’s congregation and neighborhood and the street people of Dallas and was an idea whose time may have come.

 

Pastor Karen is a friend and someone I deeply admire (see “Miracle on Second Avenue”), and by the next afternoon, she and I were in the meadow adjacent to her church property, looking at a possible garden site.  A week later, several people met at the Street Church to discuss what was involved in undertaking such a project.  By the end of the meeting, these generous women, including Pastor Karen, had taken out their checkbooks and given us a significant start on a “Seed Money Fund.”  

 

Driving home, I phoned my church, The Episcopal Church of the Incarnation, and asked Outreach Director, Martha Lang, whether they might be willing to contribute to our community garden’s Seed Money Fund.  I sent her a proposal that night and received a reply that she thought they could help.  Miracle of miracles, it is two weeks to the day since “The Magic of Gardens” was written, and… The Garden: South Dallas, Texas (so dubbed by Pastor Karen) seems to be coming to life.

 

Generosity of Friends

 

~~  Our Seed Money Fund is up to $550.00, raised from the Garden Committee and Church of the Incarnation.  $300 of this money will go to purchase organic soil from a Dallas company;  the rest will go for concrete blocks to construct the four raised beds for the first phase of The Garden.  (The soil on the land is not tillable.)

~~  We are incredibly blessed to have a work force of homeless individuals coming for a Garden-Raising Day (remember old-time barn raisings?) the first week in May to clean up the land and construct the beds.  This has been arranged by The Stewpot of First Presbyterian Church in Dallas, and the group will work alongside Pastor Karen’s congregation (most of whom have also come from the streets of Dallas).  Our nonprofit friends are also providing work gloves and some tools!

~~  The Garden is being planned to be wheelchair accessible:  one of our Garden Committee members, also an experienced gardener, uses a wheelchair, and she will advise us.  Many individuals experiencing homelessness, whom we hope will come and work with us, use one as well.

~~  We have received invaluable input, research, information, donation of materials and enthusiastic support both from our Garden Committee members and from friends.  All of this is much appreciated.

 

What Do We Need?

 

~~  To increase our Seed Money Fund in order to buy hoses to reach The Garden and soaker hoses for the beds to save water, to put a second level of concrete blocks on a few of our beds to make them higher for those in wheelchairs, to afford to construct additional raised beds beyond the four that our budget allows for now

NO DONATION IS TOO SMALL (unless you want change for a penny!)

~~  Donation of new or used fencing to enclose The Garden in stages to ward off theft or vandalism

~~  Donations of healthy plants or seeds from other gardeners (we’d love to try some heirloom seeds)

~~  Gardening tools of all kinds, garden carts or wheelbarrows for transporting soil and plant materials, or anything else you can think of!

 

Who Is the ‘Community’ in ‘Community Garden’?

‘Who Is the Community’ in the ‘Community Garden’ called The Garden: South Dallas, Texas?  It is Pastor Karen’s church congregation and the friends and neighbors who live around the church (a neighborhood which would benefit greatly from fresh produce, as there are few supermarkets nearby), but also the true and full sense of community for The Garden: South Dallas, Texas, extends beyond geographical borders to include the entire homeless community of Dallas.  One may not typically think of people spread across the city in different geographical locations as such, but a community it is – 

it is a spiritual network of human beings spread across Dallas, the members of which sometimes stay in shelters, sometimes in alleys or behind dumpsters, sometimes under bridges in cardboard homes.

If you wonder whether this is a community, ask a person who is homeless on the streets of downtown whether they know a person who lives under a particular freeway overpass in a cardboard home several miles away. Percentage-wise, I’m guessing they are more likely to know that individual than many of us would be likely to know someone on our own block in the suburbs.

 

Our mission, our vision, our commitment, then, is a little different from that of the typical community garden, and also includes the desire to bring together people from disparate parts of the city with differing backgrounds to help us all come to know each other and to realize:  we are the same — not ‘us and them.’  So come and work with us!

Possibilities for the Future

 

~~  We would like for The Garden to include benches, picnic tables, and walking paths for the enjoyment of  gardeners, congregants, friends, and neighborhood families.  Our dream is that it can become a beautiful and peaceful refuge for the community, with flowers, berries, fruit trees and herbs as well as vegetables.

 

~~  In time, we would love to have a produce stand out front that the gardeners can operate as a small business.  

~~  We hope that a second phase of The Garden can contain raised beds for neighborhood families to rent for a nominal fee and manage on their own, such as is done in the East Dallas Community Garden and others.  Our first four beds will serve the Street Church, the neighborhood, and the homeless community at large across the city.

~~  Perhaps in the future our gardeners can attend Master Classes in gardening at a community college, or go to work for landscaping companies or garden centers.  Thus The Garden could come to help with job skills training.

 

For Now, a Hope for Healing

 

In a time of ’food insecurity’, growing what can sustain you has real power in and of itself.  Along with this, perhaps someone who is in transition in their lives will come to dig or weed or plant in The Garden and remember…  she or he had a garden as a child with their family, and it was a good thing.  A healing reconnection to the past could be made by someone who has been alienated from his or her loved ones.  Perhaps someone will realize, after feeling for a very long time that he or she can do nothing right in society’s eyes or their own… they have a skill, a gift and can make a contribution.  Few things are more powerful than feeling that we matter and that we have something to give.

 

E-Mail:  thegardensouthdallas@earthlink.net

Karen Shafer

 

P.S.  Within 48 hours of writing “The Magic of Gardens”, I received this e-mail from my grandson, Louis, who is six (Cora is his cousin, also six):

“i herd about the homeless garden wen you get started can we help? and is cora helpeng.  love, louis.”

Good news travels fast!!!

 

“…What I do you cannot do:  but what you do, I cannot do.  The needs are great, and none of us, including me, ever do great things.  But we can all do small things, with great love, and together we can do something wonderful.”   ~~Mother  Teresa

 

Link:  Dallas Homeless Network Blog [http://dallashomelessnetwork.blogspot.com/2009/04/garden-for-homeless-community.html]

With No Conditions March 21, 2009

 

Saturday, March 21, 2009

 

I clipped this out of The Angelus, my church’s newsletter, several years ago.  Knowing it’s Lent now rather than Advent, still it can speak to us poignantly.  KS

 

With No Conditions

 

“The day after Thanksgiving the New York Times told [the story] of a 33-year-old local cab driver…  About five years ago, this cabby ‘prayed to God for guidance on how to help the forgotten people of the streets who exist in life’s shadows.’ As he recalls it, God replied:  ’Make eight pounds of spaghetti, throw it in a pot, give it out on 103rd Street and Broadway with no conditions, and people will come.’  He did, they came, and now he goes from door to door giving people food to eat.  

I am not asking you to stuff the Big Apple with spaghetti, but a New York cabby can bring light into your Advent night.  He prayed to a God who was there;  he listened;  he gave the simple gift God asked of him;  he gave ‘with no conditions’;  and people responded.  Here is your Advent: 

 

Make the Christ who has become a reality, a living light, in your life and in some other life.  Give of yourself… to one dark soul… with no conditions.”

               ~~Written by Walter J. Burghardt (from The Angelus, Newsletter of Church of the Incarnation [Episcopal])

Just Like Us February 26, 2009

Thursday, 2/26/09

 

Just Like Us

 

One of the best and kindest people I know — and definitely the smartest — is my friend, John.  He’s one of those people you look at and think:  “How does he do it?”  He is a doctor of theology and teaches at a Dallas university.  He speaks six languages, including Latin.  And, oh yes, he is a classically-trained pianist and vocalist.  Gosh, John, is that all???  

 

You’d think he’d be ‘full of himself,’ but instead he’s full of humility, humor and love.  The first time my grand kids met him, they talked for an entire year about a story he told them that night — off the top of his head — about a fanciful character called ‘Princerella.’

 

John also puts himself on the line.  When I first mentioned mobile feeders of the homeless to him a few years back, he was volunteering with them within the week.

 

I sometimes find myself spouting a concept that sounds pretty clever and suddenly realize, “Hey, wait, I so didn’t come up with that.  I first heard that from John.”  I think of the hatred one often sees directed towards individuals who are homeless by people who don’t know them and have not had personal relationships with them, except perhaps to pass them on the street.  There are strong examples of this prejudice in comments on public blogs.  

 

When I get frustrated with this irrational hatred and become angered by it, I will sometimes stop and think, “But such hatred is in itself a particular kind of poverty.”  And then… “Wait, I first heard that idea from John.”  I shared this concept with a friend, LeAnne, by e-mail this week when we were both riled up about something unjustly written about our homeless friends, and she got it right away, writing back, “…you’re right.  How awful to have to live that way.” 

 

Here’s part of an e-mail I received from John this week.

 

“Karen,

I guess some people judge the community by different perspectives, and particularly when the economic environment is so troublesome, I think people fear for their own survival. When they do so, helping others becomes a luxury that can be left behind. Prioritizing during crisis makes sense. 

I think the city has to come up with a way to understand the humanity of the homeless in a way that will help the rest of us see how we are better together than apart. Unless you meet the homeless and talk to them, it’s hard to see what we have to gain from knowing them and living with them. Knowing them as the other, they can be caricatured and dispensed with. We do it with so many people…”

 

To me, this e-mail goes to the heart of the matter.  So often, our hearts and minds are changed dramatically when we meet homeless individuals, talk to them, and find out that they are…

 

just

like

us.

 

 

KS

Solutions: Warming Stations & Hypothermia Vans February 16, 2009

 

Monday, February 16, 2009

 

While Dallas city officials have been busy this winter enforcing ‘quality of life’ ordinances by ticketing and arresting homeless citizens during the bitterest cold weather, other cities have found more humane solutions to the question of “Where will homeless people be during cold weather?” 

 

Here are some links from various cities around the United States which have employed the use of ‘warming stations’ and ‘hypothermia vans’ to help those without homes get out of the cold:

 

Charlotte, North Carolina

“Warming shelters open for the homeless”

http://www.wcnc.com/news/topstories/stories/wcnc-011709-sjf-warmingshelters.39facf1.html

“Charlotte leaders activating emergency homeless shelters due to the anticipated cold”

http://www.wbtv.com/global/story.asp?s=9688511

Las Vegas, Nevada

“Warming stations for homeless opened”

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/dec/16/wintry-weather-prompts-warming-stations-homeless-o/

 

Middletown, Connecticut

“As cold hits, city makes sure homeless OK”

http://www.middletownpress.com/articles/2009/01/14/news/doc496eb19b3ceac545935506.txt

“City of Middletown says warming station in church breaks zoning laws” 

http://www.becketfund.org/index.php/article/901.html?PHPSESSID=fc0234a1f346cd20bbadf7c67a04def6

http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081220/NEWS/812200336

 

Omaha, Nebraska

“Warming Stations Open For Homeless”

http://www.wowt.com/home/headlines/36301774.html

Rochester, New York

“Poor People United, Emergency Warming Station kicks off!”

http://rochester.indymedia.org/newswire/display/3305/index.php

 

Portland, Oregon

“Volunteers needed tonight for warming centers”

http://blog.oregonlive.com/breakingnews/2007/12/the_oregon_trail_chapter_of.html

 

San Luis Obispo, California

“Prado Day Center offers SLO’s homeless a second shelter from cold”

http://www.sanluisobispo.com/183/story/564073.html

 

Washington, D.C.

“Riding cold: Hypothermia van rescues homeless from frigid nights”

http://media.www.gwhatchet.com/media/storage/paper332/news/2007/03/22/News/Riding.Cold.Hypothermia.Van.Rescues.Homeless.From.Frigid.Nights-2786606.shtml

“Cold has agencies helping the homeless”

http://www.examiner.com/a-1170675~Cold_has_agencies_helping_the_homeless.html

 

Louisville, Kentucky

“Winter blast leaves 17 dead”

http://www.disasternews.net/news/article.php?articleid=3821

 

 

I am beginning to wonder:  are we going to be able to get it right here in Dallas?

 

Remember, we have less than 2000 shelter beds for around 6000 homeless individuals.  Let’s spend some of the money we have spent on policing this winter on warming stations (other than the jail) and hypothermia vans.  

 

KS

Dallas International Street Church February 12, 2009

Thursday, February 12, 2009

 

Dallas International Street Church

 

Last Saturday, I had the privilege of eating lunch with Pastor Karen Dudley, founder and head pastor of the Dallas International Street Church on Second Avenue in Dallas and some other friends of people who are homeless in Dallas.  The church had just been shut down by the Dallas Fire Department for the second time in two months.

http://www.pegasusnews.com/news/2009/feb/10/dallas-international-street-church-protesting-fire/

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/city/dallas/stories/020509dnmethomeless.201ef9b7.html

 

Previously, in early December, 2008, the Street Church had a number of fire code violations which were corrected.  The church got its ‘green tag’ and reopened at the end of December, which meant by the fire department’s standards, it was up to code at that time.  I visited the church for the first time during that closure, and wrote about the experience on this blog:  

http://theintermittentvolunteer.wordpress.com/2008/12/12/miracle-on-second-avenue/

 

Rumors abound as to the reasons for this closing, so I’ll not add further fuel to that fire here, but rather will stick to what I know, which is this:  no one in town is doing what Pastor Karen is doing.  She is taking in and giving refuge and care to people who literally have no other options.  The population she serves and the neighborhood where she serves them are both extremely vulnerable.  And… she does what she does with unconditional love the equal of which it would be hard to find anywhere in this city.

 

Last Saturday night I also had the pleasure of attending the taping of Pastor Karen’s worship service at Access 34 Television.  It was the second time I’d heard the Dallas International Street Church gospel choir — they are terrific!  I hope they produce a CD soon — I’ll be the first in line to buy it.  I suggested this to the choir director, and he said, “First, we have to get the church reopened.  Then we need a keyboard that doesn’t short out when we’re playing it!”  

 

Anyone have an extra keyboard lying around in the garage you’d like to donate???  If so, I promise you’ll be proud of the choir it backs up!

 

Here’s a message from Pastor Karen’s website:  http://www.kdministries.org/

 

“The time is now. If you can help in any way, please contact me, Pastor Karen Dudley, Dallas International Street Church, 2706 2nd Ave., Dallas, Texas 75210  Phone: 214-928-9595″

 

KS

Patience February 2, 2009

Monday, February 2, 2009

 

Man!  Leave it to Henri Nouwen to try to make me better than I want to be or seemingly have the capacity to be.  Just when I’m feeling impatient in the extreme with the City of Dallas and their treatment of the homeless and the pace of progress regarding change, he hands me this:

“Entering Actively into the Thick of Life”

“What, then is the compassionate way?  The compassionate way is the patient way.  Patience is the discipline of compassion…  The words ‘passion’ and ‘patience’ both find their roots in the Latin word ‘pati’, which means “suffering.”  The compassionate life could be described as a life patiently lived with others…  If we ourselves are unable to suffer, we cannot suffer with others.  If we lack the strength to carry the burden of our own lives, we cannot accept the burden of our neighbors.  Patience is the hard but fruitful discipline of the disciple of the compassionate God.

At first this may sound disappointing.  It really sounds like a cop-out.  Each time we hear the word ‘patience’, we tend to cringe…

But true patience is the opposite of a passive waiting in which we let things happen and allow others to make the decisions.  Patience means to enter actively into the thick of life and to fully bear the suffering within and around us.  Patience is the capacity to see, hear, touch, taste, and smell as fully as possible the inner and outer events of our lives.  It is to enter our lives with open eyes, ears, and hands so that we really know what is happening.  Patience is an extremely difficult discipline precisely because it counteracts our unreflective impulse to flee or fight.  When we see an accident on the road, something in us pushes the accelerator.  When someone approaches a sensitive issue, something in us tries to change the subject.  When a shameful memory presents itself, something in us wants to forget it.  And if we cannot flee, we fight.  We fight the one who challenges our opinions, the people who question our power, and the circumstances that force us to change.

Patience requires us to go beyond the choice between fleeing or fighting…  It calls for discipline because it goes against the grain of our impulses.  Patience involves staying with it, living it through, listening carefully to what presents itself to us here and now…  [it] means stopping on the road when someone in pain needs immediate attention…  overcoming the fear of a controversial subject…  paying attention to shameful memories and searching for forgiveness without having to forget.  It means welcoming sincere criticism and evaluating changing conditions.  In short, patience is a willingness to be influenced even when this requires giving up control and entering into unknown territory.”

                              ~~Compassion, Henri J.M. Nouwen, Donald P. NcNeill, Douglas A. Morrison

… ‘And Now We’re In the Woods’ January 15, 2009

Thursday, January 15, 2009

 

I’ve known Scott for years, and, sometimes when I see him, he doesn’t feel like talking.  Sometimes when he talks, his words are so big and he is so erudite that I have to seek out a dictionary in order to understand him. Today, though, his words were simple and to the point.

 

“Where did they all go?” Scott asked me.  Although he himself is homeless, he was referring to the scores of people who used to sleep on the Bridge courtyard at night and have been unable to find shelter elsewhere.  

 

“I think they’re hiding in the woods,” I told him.

 

“This city has a horrible gut in it, and it digests people,” he said.  ”And now we’re in the woods.”

 

KS

Powerlessness December 30, 2008

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

God ‘Unmasks the Illusion of Power’

‘Learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart.’

~~Matthew 11:29

“God chose powerlessness.   God chose to enter into human history in complete weakness.  That divine choice forms the center of the Christian faith.  In Jesus of Nazareth, the powerless God appeared among us to unmask the illusion of power, to disarm the prince of darkness who rules the world, and to bring the divided human race to a new unity.

Through total and unmitigated powerlessness, God shows us divine mercy.  The radical, divine choice is the choice to reveal glory, beauty, truth, peace, joy, and, most of all, love in and through the complete divestment of power.  It is very hard — if not impossible — for us to grasp this divine mystery.”

                                        ~~Henri Nouwen,  ’Advent Meditations from the Writings of Henri Nouwen’

We Built It, They Came, Now What? December 15, 2008

Monday, December 15, 2008

 

We Built It, They Came, Now What?

 

Here I sit in the same cafe where I sat exactly 5 years ago, thinking the exact thoughts I had the first time I went out with HungerBusters Mobile Soup Kitchen to feed the homeless on the streets of Dallas in 2003.  How are the people around me going about their daily lives (and how am I?) while homeless individuals in the hundreds are starving and freezing on the streets of our city?

 

This time, though, the public will has been mobilized, the $21 million has been spent building the Bridge Homeless Assistance Center in downtown Dallas, the ‘promise’ has been fulfilled, hopes have been raised for homeless and housed alike, and much good has been accomplished, only to have it come crashing down now that bitterly cold weather is upon us. It Has Been Built, and They Have Come.  And now They are locked out by the hundreds.

 

What a grim, and, for me, unexpected lesson in failed bureaucracy.  People who know much more than I do may have seen it coming.  I didn’t.

 

There is much rumor and hyperbole around the disastrous new policy implemented at the Bridge since December 1, so I am going to focus first on what I know for sure.

 

What I Know For Sure

 

~~People who do not have a Bridge ID cannot get into the campus for meals.  The numbers of meals served at the Second Chance Cafe by the Stewpot of First Presbyterian Church has dropped to around 1300 per day from around 2150.  That means that, currently, 850 times a day someone is being denied a meal that has been provided since May, 2008, and that Second Chance Cafe is committed to serving.  This meal service was promised in national and local media by Bridge management when the center opened.

 

A friend who was licensed to feed on the streets, but is now prohibited from feeding the homeless downtown by a city ordinance which does not allow feeding outside the Bridge, told me a story of a man coming up to his car on the street outside the Bridge asking for food and crying because he was so hungry several days ago.  Such stories are just the tip of the iceberg.

 

~~The Bridge ID application procedures have been unwieldy and frustrating, if not non-navigable, for the homeless, to say the least.  As of  the end of last week, the process for getting an ID required standing in 3 different lines for up to 3-4 hours, and sometimes still coming away with no ID.  Add to that that to get a Bridge ID, preexisting identification is required, and many chronically homeless people don’t have that, or have had their ID’s stolen, and you see the potential frustration inherent in the process.  Throw in the percentage of this group that are mentally ill and have poor coping skills to begin with.  Add to that the number of homeless people who have to be at work 6 AM, when the Bridge ID lines opened at 9 AM, and you start to see the complications of a solution that on its face sounds simple and reasonable.  There have been promises of streamlined procedures from Bridge management, and hopefully they will/ have come through.

 

People who were issued temporary ID’s as early as Thanksgiving still don’t have their permanent ID’s.  Sometimes they are admitted to the Bridge with a letter from their Bridge caseworker, and sometimes not, depending upon who is on duty at the gate.

 

~~ As to the Bridge sending its overflow guests to other shelters, I was out among the homeless during the subfreezing weather a week ago and learned that the shelters were requiring payment and identification, two things they are often without.  But, more importantly, I learned that on those cold nights the shelters were full.  Even if you discount the ‘shelter-resistant’ population — and you cannot in good conscience do that — I personally saw and spoke with many people sleeping outside shelters on those nights who told me they had tried to get in and were turned away for lack of space.  And, if you can’t get into a shelter, you obviously can’t eat your meals there.

 

Additionally, the working homeless are still at work at the time most shelters require occupants to be inside, around 4 PM, so they are essentially penalized for having jobs.

 

Just this afternoon I spoke on the phone with a friend who is currently sleeping under a freeway overpass  and offered to let him sleep on my couch.  He said overflow procedures are in practice at the shelters due to subfreezing temperatures tonight, but, at Dallas Life Foundation, for example, you have five free nights until you have to pay, and he’s saving his money until he really needs it (! the current temperature is around 30 degrees!) because all the homeless are having to buy their food now since the Second Chance Cafe is unable to serve them meals due to lack of access to the Bridge campus.

 

When you add to that reports of theft and other problems within some of the shelters and you understand why there are, once again, hundreds of people hiding wherever they can and sleeping outdoors.

 

~~  The primary population this policy change has impacted negatively is the “chronically homeless,” the exact population the Bridge was to target when it opened.

~~  A homeless man was seriously burned last week trying to stay warm in a parking garage stairwell in downtown Dallas.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/121308dnmetgarage.561b9995.html

 

~~  When I was at the Bridge campus on November 30, the last night that sleeping was allowed on the courtyard, and I spoke with a number of women sleeping there about where they’d sleep the next night.  ”We have no idea,” they told me.  All of these women were on their own, without the protection of male partners.  I don’t know whether you know what women alone face living on the street, but it is not a pretty picture.    

 

~~  I personally know one pregnant woman who is on the street in this weather, and I would surmise from past experience that there are more.

 

What I Believe to be the Case

~~While the stated reason the Bridge has closed its gates to those without Bridge Identification because of issues with the Fire Marshall, it has been shown to be the case in the past that temporary compromises on these sorts of issues can be reached within the city for the greater good of the affected population, where there is a constructive plan and the public and political will to do so.  

 

~~ While rumors persist among and from my homeless friends that two people have died sleeping outdoors in this weather, there has been no confirmation of this.  However, what is being predicted by homeless people and service providers alike is that, before winter is out, there will be casualties of this current situation.  We have to do all in our power to prevent this happening.

 

What Can Be Done

 

I am certain this problem can be solved quickly, and it must be.   Here are some suggestions for what can be done.  I welcome others in the comments section.  It is not an exaggeration to say that people’s lives are at stake.

 

For this winter, I respectfully request that we:

~~Effective immediately, reopen the Bridge campus during meal hours to anyone who needs a meal.  This has been the practice since the opening in May.

~~ Reopen the Bridge campus for sleeping for anyone who is nonviolent, and especially for women, and use the police manpower that is currently being used for sweeps of the homeless to keep order there if necessary.  This way, people can at least be safe. Those who have previously been banned for violent or predatory behavior should remain so.

~~  For warmth, large outdoor heaters could be set up and a large tent with side flaps for temporary protection could be provided — infinitely better than sleeping in the open on the concrete.

~~  The Fire Marshall could be asked to make special provision for the winter for an expanded number of people to be allowed at the Bridge until Spring 2009.  The city or the Bridge should provide funding for a Fire Marshall to be on duty at all times to insure public safety for the numbers of individuals that need to be sheltered for the winter.

~~  These policies should be in place every day until a date to be determined in the Spring, 2009, not just for subfreezing weather.

~~  Even with the cost of extra policing and fire prevention, the costs to the city are likely to be considerably less that the current cost of police sweeps of the homeless downtown and of providing for them through emergency services, (ambulances, hospitals, jails, emergency mental health services, crisis intervention, policing), as we are now back to doing, statistically proven to be by far THE MOST EXPENSIVE way to deal with homelessness, humanitarian concerns aside.

~~  Alternatively, or in addition, we could consider using one of the abandoned buildings downtown as temporary shelter, complete with Porta-Potties, and use Downtown Safety Patrol or Dallas Police to keep order there.  Guests there could eat and use other services (bathrooms, laundry, storage) at the Bridge, as they were doing before December 1.

~~  Being a ‘Can-Do’ city, I know that we can come up with the Code and Zoning permits we need to make these solutions possible if we feel they would be successful and effective.

 

In Conclusion

 

With the publicity around the Dallas International Street Church regarding its becoming a refuge for the homeless when they were turned away from the Bridge and other shelters  (See “Miracle on Second Avenue”)  I don’t have to tell you that there is unhappy irony in a tiny, poor, South-Dallas church trumping a $21 million state-of the art homeless assistance center in its care of the homeless population.

http://www.wfaa.com/video/?z=y&nvid=312288

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/121308dnmetchurchfix.38b6e7d.html

 

The homeless population is the responsibility of the Bridge now, and the staff there are being paid well, in a state-of-the-art facility, to handle these issues.  It is failing to live up to that responsibility at this time.  With our tax dollars supporting the Bridge, we as taxpayers are entitled to transparency and accountability, not just an effective public relations campaign.

 

It would be tragic if the promising start made by the Bridge towards a compassionate and successful resolution to the homeless problem in Dallas up until now were at this point seriously derailed by a policy that is harming in a critical way the population it is supposed to be helping.

 

KS

Link:  http://www.pegasusnews.com/news/2008/dec/16/bridge-we-built-it-they-came-now-what/

Miracle on Second Avenue December 12, 2008

Thursday, December 11, 2008

 

Miracle on Second Avenue

 

Sometimes, through a benevolent combination of circumstances, you get the privilege of walking straight into the heart of Love, and tonight, at the invitation of my friend David Timothy, AKA SoupMan, I got to do that.

 

For months David had been inviting me to visit the Dallas International Street Church with him, but I hadn’t gotten around to it.  Then the story broke today about this tiny, poor, South-Dallas church sheltering homeless people in the hundreds who had been unable to get into the Bridge and other shelters in downtown Dallas.  When I had dropped by the SoupMobile this afternoon to pick up some brochures and chat with David and had learned he was going to the Street Church tonight to deliver some crates of canned food, I jumped at the chance to go with him.

 

All day rumors had been flying about the status of people being allowed to sleep inside the Street Church for tonight (Thursday).  The previous night the Fire Marshall had shut them down for code violations — the church is housed in a very old building south of Fair Park — and for having too many people inside sleeping on the pews, on the floor, anywhere there was a square inch, so that they would not have to sleep outdoors in the subfreezing weather.  The Dallas International Street Church had become the last refuge of many of the Dallas homeless population now that the Bridge had found it necessary to revise its open-door policy to coincide, unfortunately, with cold weather.  The timing of the implementation of this policy change with the advent of subfreezing weather was abysmal, and was resulting in extremely difficult circumstances whose lives are already quite challenging.

 

http://www.wfaa.com/video/?z=y&nvid=312288

First we’d heard the Fire Department would have a representative stay in the church tonight to keep an eye on things and allow the homeless to shelter there.  Then we’d heard that was a no-go, and that a large open-sided tent the congregation owns — complete with a with an outdoor heater — was to be set up to shelter the homeless behind the church  — not exactly snugly warm, but better than sleeping in the open or on the concrete.

 

We pulled up into the church’s parking lot in the SoupMobile van to unload the food, and I noticed an official City of Dallas vehicle parked outside.  “I think the Fire Marshall is here,” I told David.  In the next moment, a woman came running up to us waving her arms and either laughing or crying — I couldn’t tell which.  It was ‘Queen,’ the de facto shelter director, and she was calling out, “Oh, thank God you’re here.  Did you bring any food?  You’re not going to believe what’s happened!”  The city had relented, it turned out, and was going to allow the homeless to sleep inside after all, with a Fire Marshall present all night to oversee things.  “Look, look, there they come!”  She pointed to a group of people walking along the sidewalk toward the door of the church.  “They’ve walked all the way from downtown!  We were not allowed to go downtown and pick them up in busses [which had been happening earlier in the week], but, if they can walk to here, they can come inside.  We made the rounds of the shelters earlier.  People have to have money and ID’s to get in, but, anyway, the shelters were all full.”

 

Several men came out of the church to unload the van, and we all went inside.  A church service was in progress, loud, spirited, with a gospel band.  Queen took me by the hand and led me through the pews of people, introducing me as we went along.  We sat down in the second row, and, suddenly, both of us began to cry.  She put her arm around me, this sister that I’d never met before tonight, and I leaned my head against her shoulder.  The frustration, the anger, the bewilderment, the stress that this week had brought to everyone who loves and works with Dallas’ homeless people — it poured out of us both to the sound of the searing gospel music as we searched our pockets for Kleenex and looked at each other without the necessity of explaining anything.

 

The sermon, given by a young, dynamic preacher, was pure, was strong, was speaking truth to power without condemning anyone.  “Seven months ago,” he said, “I was an addict, was homeless, hadn’t had a bath, was walking up and down Second Avenue, right out here.”  He pointed toward the front of the church.  Speaking eloquently about letting yourself be willing to shine, he said, “The changes that have happened to me in the past few months should by all rights have taken years.”

 

As the service continued, David took me for a tour of the building.  To say that Pastor Karen Dudley operates the International Street Church on a shoestring is a mild understatement [http://www.kdministries.org/staff.php].  When dinner was served in the kitchen, the plates of the first shift of ten or so people had to be washed before the next round could be fed!   Looking on, David said to me, “Seems just a little bit like the stretching required in the feeding of the loaves and fishes, doesn’t it?”  We laughed.  “Hey,” he commented, “this is a pretty good-looking meal they’re serving tonight, mashed potatoes and meat.  Often they don’t have hot food here at night.  Louis,” he asked the cook, “where did this food come from?”  “From you, SoupMan!” Louis said, “You brought it yesterday, and it’s been in the freezer since then.”  David had forgotten he’d ‘paid it forward’ with some food sent to the SoupMobile by Bakers Ribs!  It was pretty funny.

 

Near us in the kitchen, I noticed a quiet, unobtrusive young man sitting by the wall, observing, and saw that he wore a badge.  I walked over and introduced myself, asking, “Are you with the City?”  “Yes,” he said cordially, “My name is Anthony _____.  I’m the Fire Marshall.”  We expressed our gratitude to him for being there and our happiness that a compromise had been worked out with the city.  He was polite and kind, with a low-key demeanor and good people skills in evidence.

 

Twenty-six code violations were found the previous night when the city had shut the shelter down, and we looked at some of them.  It’s a very old building, and some fix up is in order, to be sure.  The contractor who had graciously volunteered his services to make the repairs and get the building up to code after the story of the shutdown aired on WFAA, Channel 8, is due to arrive at 9 A.M. tomorrow morning (Friday) to get started.

 

We went outside to talk to some people, and Queen came out.  “Guess what?  You’ll never believe it.  That was the Dallas Morning News on the phone just now.  Two people have called in and are going to pay for hotel rooms for a few dozen people tonight!  We’re signing them up right now!”  There were ‘woohoos’ and high-fives all around.  When a [shelter] door closes, sometimes more than one window miraculously opens.

 

By this time, the church service had ended.  We went back in the building for one last look around and noticed a clean-cut, white-shirted man standing across the room with Anthony.  When we approached him, we could read “K. Sipes, Fire Chief” embroidered on his shirt.  It was now 9:40 P.M., and, long day notwithstanding, Deputy Fire Chief Kevin Sipes himself was on the premises to check out how things were going.  We met him, talked to him for a while.  “This compromise seems like a win-win for the homeless and the city,” David said.  “We don’t want people to be out in the cold in this weather,” the Chief told us.

 

After a dispiriting week, it was a very uplifting couple of hours, amid the people who are the poorest of the poor, the most outcast of the outcast.  The gratitude, the love, the truth, the peace that is in that place and among those people does indeed pass all understanding.

 

KS

 

P.S.  Much appreciation to the good people at Channel 8 News, WFAA, for their coverage of this issue.

Bitter December 5, 2008

Thursday, December 4, 2008

 

Bitter

 

Last night, armed with a carload of heavy coats and blankets given to us by an Anonymous Angel, I went out on a mission into the heart of downtown Dallas with a good friend.  We went  in search of the city’s homeless people who have been banned from sleeping in the Bridge courtyard as of December 1 and are now back to ‘sleeping rough.’

 

After an hour of driving around, we couldn’t find anyone out on the street, but we knew they were there — just in hiding.  It we could have found them, though, so could have the Dallas Police, who had been issuing written warnings and citations to them for the past two days.  We talked to the very few homeless individuals who were walking on the downtown streets.  “Where is everyone sleeping tonight?” we asked them.  “They’ve scattered,” a woman told us.  “The police have really been after us and came this morning at 6 A.M. to the freeway fence where people were sleeping and started ticketing them.  Media crews showed up about that, and it saved some.”

 

My friend and I knew the obvious places where homeless people used to sleep before the Bridge opened, and we drove there.  Not a soul could be seen at any of these locations.  After that, we checked out the places we knew of that are farther out from the central district downtown.  No one in sight, no heaps of blankets on the concrete containing sleeping human beings.

 

We guessed where to look even farther afield, and we guessed correctly.  When we found them, we stopped our car and got out.  They knew us, trusted us, and began to come out of hiding, one or two at a time, in the dark, in the cold, to talk to us.  Near where we parked, one person had found a single piece of wood about 2 inches wide and 3 feet long, had been able to light it and was huddled over it, trying to stay warm.  Some people were sleeping under cardboard, some just blankets, most well out of sight.  One man said, “I’d been sleeping at the Bridge until they shut us out on Monday.”

 

It had been a Godsend that our ‘angel’ had showed up that afternoon and given us enough coats and blankets to give away.  I stood at the rear of the vehicle and handed people blankets one by one.  “Can I have one for my wife?” someone asked.  “She’s sleeping right over there around the corner.”  At our vehicle’s side door, my friend fitted people with warm jackets.  We also had some socks, hats and gloves.  We stood around and talked.  Word spread that we were there, and more people showed up.  Everyone hugged us, thanked us, hugged us again.  At the end, they wanted to pray with us, so we put our arms around each other’s shoulders in a circle, and one of the men spoke a prayer of thanks and offered requests for our well-being.  The Miracle of the Coats and Blankets was that, when we were finished at the end of the night, we had exactly one blanket left.

 

Of course, even though people are now hungry — because some are no longer allowed on the Bridge campus at all due to the new identification procedure and some only have day passes which keep them off the Bridge campus after 5 P.M., so they either miss all meals or the evening meal — it is illegal for us to feed them.  All feeding of the homeless outside the Bridge (except on private property) is now officially banned by the city.  So there are currently many people who can at this point neither eat at the Bridge, nor can they be offered food outside it.  I had heard already since December 1 the dinner numbers at the Stewpot’s Second Chance Cafe (the Bridge dining hall) are down to the mid-200’s from the steady number of 750-900 per meal since the homeless assistance center opened in May of this year.

 

Last night, we left our homeless friends and drove around some more downtown.  A number of people were sleeping on the sidewalk next to one of the shelters, which was full.  These people were clearly not shelter-resistant:  we spoke with some of them, and they had tried to get in.

 

Once again, the poorest of the poor are being criminalized and driven underground.  The ‘fringe’ people are being forced back to the fringes and beyond.  It is a tragic turn of events.

 

Designed to serve in particular the ‘chronically homeless,’ the Bridge is not effectively doing that for large numbers of them at this time.  For a few days this week, these people were back out on the street.  For a couple of days after that, they were persistently ticketed by police at the orders of undetermined entities at City Hall.  Now, they are in hiding:  in the open, on the ground, cold, hungry.  Tonight, I heard a weather report that a ‘bitter’ freeze is on its way to the Dallas area.  Imagine how that will feel sleeping outdoors without even the shelter of a building to lie close to.

 

We can do better.  We have done better for the past few short months.  And we must do so again immediately, before people begin to die from the cold.

 

We must deliver on the emergency shelter that has been promised.  At the very least, we must allow the shelter-resistant homeless or those the shelters can’t accommodate — especially women — to sleep back on the Bridge campus away from predators and violent offenders.  As the Bridge management sorts through who is ‘qualified and unqualified’ to receive shelter there, we must follow through on the the commitment that the Bridge has clearly and emphatically put forward to the public through the media since it opened in May and even before:  to provide safe refuge and access to the meals that the Stewpot is offering to all those who need it.  

 

For heaven’s sake and for our own as well, it is time to stop playing politics with people’s lives.

 

KS

Conversation With the DPD: A Good Man Just Doing His Job December 3, 2008

 

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

 

Conversation With a Dallas Police Officer:  A Good Man ‘Just Doing His Job’

 

Last night at 10:35 P.M. I drove downtown to see for myself what was going on with the homeless people who’d been banned from sleeping in the courtyard of the Bridge and were once again sleeping on the street.  I had heard a rumor that authorities were going to start ticketing homeless people tonight.  I drove down Corsicana Street and turned right onto Park Lane.  Just ahead of me were a small group of homeless individuals sitting or lying on the steps of a ramshackle building across the street from the Bridge and few Dallas Police officers standing in front of them on the sidewalk and street.  There were a couple of police bicycles pulled up there, a scooter of some sort, and, as I sat there, a police cruiser arrived.

 

I stopped my car beside one of the officers and rolled down my window, asking him respectfully, “What’s going on?  Are you ticketing people tonight?”  His face was familiar, and he was polite and forthcoming.  “Right now we’re issuing warnings.  Tomorrow, a list will be drawn up and we’ll go from there.”  I asked for more details:  were there to be warrants and arrests?  “I don’t know.  I just get my orders piece by piece.”  I questioned him further about where the orders were coming from.  City Hall was all he knew, but no specifics.  “I know this must be hard on you guys, too,” I told him.  “No, I’m just doing my job,” he said emphatically.  “Thank you for the information,” I told him.  I made eye contact with a homeless man who was sitting on the sidewalk waiting for his citation from another policeman.  “I wish it could be different,” I said to all concerned.  

 

I used to see the police department differently in these situations.  Around this same time last year, I would have thought of the ticketing officers as enemies of my homeless friends.  Then I sat in a church service at First Presbyterian Church downtown and listened to a sermon by Dr. Joe Clifford around the time 150 to 200 homeless people were taking refuge at night from police arrest by sleeping on that church’s parking lot.  At the end of his moving sermon, Dr. Clifford said a prayer that surprised me:  he prayed with sympathy and with unity for the homeless, for the church, for the city, for the Dallas Police — ALL of whom, he said, were doing the best they could in a difficult situation.  In that moment, my thinking changed from ‘us’ — the homeless and those who advocate for them — and ‘them’ — city officials and police who make and enforce laws that I believe unfairly target the homeless — to ‘all of us, doing the best we know how at this point in time.’

 

Nonetheless, as I drove away and pulled up to a stop light near the Farmer’s Market last evening, I felt devastated by this turn of events.  For the second night in a row, I sat by the Farmer’s Market in my car and wept.  This is what we were putting behind us when the Bridge opened, wasn’t it?  Weren’t the days of huddled and miserable human beings sleeping on the cold concrete of our city streets being roused from their brief rest by uniformed men, ‘just doing their jobs’, issuing them citations for ‘sleeping in public,’ ‘obstructing the sidewalk,’ and any number of other ordinances designed to specifically get the homeless out of public view… weren’t those days now going to be behind us for good?

 

I pulled over into a driveway and ‘phoned a friend’ who knows the situation.  He, too, was stunned by this turn of events.  Neither of us could believe that, a year later, after all that has come to pass, we are back to this.  God help us all, then and now.

 

KS

Displacement and Community November 28, 2008

 

Friday, November 28, 2008

Reflecting upon the sense of community I often feel at the Bridge homeless assistance center in the Second Chance Cafe, I came across the following.  There can scarcely be a more displaced group than the homeless community, and yet so often it feels like family to me, even when, like this evening, there are so many new, unfamiliar faces which come through the food line.  KS

 

Displacement

“The word community generally expresses a certain supportive and nurturing way of living and working together….  If we want to reflect on community in the context of compassion, we must go far beyond these spontaneous associations [of sentimentalism, romanticism, and even melancholy].  Community can never be the place where God’s obedient servanthood reveals itself if community is understood principally as something warm, soft, homey, comfortable, or protective.  When we form community primarily to heal personal wounds, it cannot become the place where we effectively realize solidarity with other people’s pains….

The call to community as we hear it from our Lord is the call to move away from the ordinary and proper places….  The Gospels confront us with this persistent voice inviting us to move away from where it is comfortable, from where we want to stay, from where we feel at home….

Why is this so central?  It is central because in voluntary displacement, we cast off the illusion of ‘having it together’ and thus begin to experience our true condition, which is that we, like everyone else, are pilgrims on the way, sinners in need of grace.  [Thus] we counteract the tendency to become settled in false comfort and to forget the fundamentally unsettled position that we share with all people….  [which] leads us to the existential recognition of our inner brokenness and thus brings us to a deeper solidarity with the brokenness of our fellow human beings….  The Greek word for church, ekklesia — from ek = out, and kaleo = call — indicates that as a Christian community we are people who together are called out of our familiar places to unknown territories, out of our ordinary and proper places to the places where people hurt and where we can experience with them our common human brokenness and our common need for healing.”

            ~~Compassion, A Reflection on the Christian Life, by Henri J.M. Nouwen, Donald P. McNeill, and Douglas A. Morrison

Economic Reality at Wilkinson Center Food Pantry’s Doorstep November 20, 2008

 

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Brian Burton, Executive Director of the Wilkinson Center in East Dallas, writes a mean fund-raising letter. Even after totaling up my credit card debt this week and nearly falling off the chair, I read this and found myself writing out a [pitifully small] check.  Brian’s also one of the nicest people around, which makes one glad to help, and the Wilkinson Center does a super job at all that it does.  I reprint his letter with permission.  KS

The Wilkinson Center

               “Do all you can for everyone who needs your help.  Don’t tell your neighbor to come back tomorrow, if you can help today.”  ~~ Proverbs 3: 27-28

November 14, 2008

Dear Friend of the Wilkinson Center:

 

Yesterday, I got a heavy dose of the new economic reality.  As I made my way through the Center, I observed in the Food Pantry service area every seat taken — and, there were families standing along the walls waiting.  The reality of our economy is at the Wilkinson Center’s doorstep.

As you plan for your charitable giving this Thanksgiving season, I respectfully ask that you, once again, consider the Wilkinson Center deserving of your support.  Because of a generous matching gift from local foundations, every dollar you give will be matched up to $250,000! [by the Harold Simmons Foundation and the Ginger Murchison Foundation]  …We will always strive to be good stewards of your investment in our shared mission to help those less fortunate.

 

If you’d like to see your gift at work please contact me for a tour.  Thank you for being a member of our Wilkinson Center family.

 

Faithfully yours, in service,

Brian Burton, Executive Director

 

http://www.wilkinsoncenter.org, P.O. Box 720248, Dallas, TX 75372, 5200 Bryan St., Dallas, TX 75206, 214-821-6380

Guest Commentary: Robert Blass November 10, 2008

 

Freedom Of Or From Religion?  What Does It Mean?

 

Freedom of or from religion?  What does it mean?  It means we are a nation of choices. It means we are a democratic nation with the freedom to choose or not choose what God, Bible or written word we follow. We are a multi-culture and multi-religious country.

 

Freedom of choice, freedom of marriage and legislation to combat discrimination against people is a constitutional right meant to be protected by the government, not taken away by extremist religious groups. If we fail to protect those Civil Rights then we are no better than many of the countries we criticize.

 

We practice bigotry imposed on others who do not practice the religion or beliefs of some; made even worse, when that bigotry produces its own brand of terrorism right here within our own borders. That terrorism includes the lack of caring for our fellow man and their freedoms which allows many to suffer shamelessly. Historically our country has a pattern of doing this and even though we have learned and corrected ourselves through the years, we continue to get caught in new practices of bigotry that replace the old. It serves no purpose to take away rights based on religious beliefs that have no effect on the right to practice our personal beliefs and it contradicts the freedoms our country is based on. It should never be a matter of my way or no way.

 

I am a Christian who believes I answer to my God daily. I am a Christian who accepts others as they are and even thought they may not believe as I do, I love them anyway.  I am a Christian who believes that my love and example will show the way for them to find the same path to Christ I have found. I am a Christian who knows I can pray anytime, anywhere I choose. I am a Christian who makes personal life choices based on my beliefs. I am a Christian who believes I can lead by example and pray that others will follow but I do not expect the government to force my way on others.  Will we ever learn?

 

My way is NOT the fundamentalist extremist way. What kind of Christian are you?

 

May God Bless America!

 

Robert Blass

 

Thanks to Pat Spradley of the Stewpot’s Street Zine for sending this my way.  KS  [http://thestewpot.org/streetzine.asp]

Reggie’s Story October 6, 2008

Monday, October 6, 2008

       Reggie Crawford, with whom I’m privileged to work when I volunteer at The Bridge homeless assistance center,  is one of the most inspiring and compassionate individuals I’ve met in a while.  I appreciate that Reggie and Street Zine have given me permission to reprint his story here.  KS

 

STEP Transformed Plan A & B Into G For Me

By Reggie Crawford

 

Like most people, I just wanted to live a normal life expecting nothing flashy, extravagant or extraordinary. 

 

My life started out very simple; I guess you could call me a military brat. My father was in the military for over thirty years, and my mother taught high school and did most of the kid raising of myself and six siblings. My mom was a very determined and strong woman who I think was my greatest influence because she always believed in me.

 

I went to college majoring in music education and business marketing. Upon graduation I quickly found a job as a music teacher which I hated. I was not mentally prepared for this work and I had no patience which is something you really need when you teach middle school kids. The bad notes were killing me! 

 

I quickly found that I needed another plan so I resorted to plan B, which was to join the military. There have been times in my life when I made some brilliant decisions and this was one of them.  While in college, I was in ROTC and already had a four year commitment. At that time, the Army had a one year delay entry program and I looked forward to and could not wait to enter the military.

 

I loved the Army, as a brand new second lieutenant; I was on my way up. Both of my parents were very proud; I had a new car, new house, lots of new friends, and a new attitude that spelled super arrogant. Some called it cocky, conceited, or even egotistic; but I will call it for what it really was, bone head.  In my mind, I really thought I was an icon, my family thought I was crazy, which was not far from the truth. 

 

My drive helped me get promotions and medals but after several years in the service I decided to give civilian life another try.  You have to remember that up to this point all I had known was military life. I was scared to death, but I still had plan B so if things did not work out in civilian life I could always return back to military life.

 

I went to work as a sales representative with a major company and continued to move up to a management position. After several years in sales I changed careers again and went to work as a loan manager at a major bank. I loved my civilian jobs and I loved my life. I guess you could say that I had the American dream; married with two great kids, a nice house and a dog named Human who I suspected hated me. 

 

I remember an unknown author who said “the only sure thing we know about life is that change will happen, be it good or bad.” Needless to say my change was really, really bad. My eighteen year marriage fell apart, I had several bad investments, and finally a job lay off.

 

The good life as I had known it was gone and I had helped the process by abusing drugs and alcohol which pretty much guarantees a meltdown in life. Here I was, without a wife, kids and job which presented me with the abnormal life of homelessness.  The self-centered, smug, and stuck up self was replaced by shame, embarrassment and guilt. Here I was sleeping on the streets, standing in line for meals, and hoping I could get myself out of this situation before I got myself killed.  Oh yeah, remember plan B? Now, I am too old to return to the military.

 

After one year and five months of living a homeless life, I realized that I really needed help. I’ll call it a ‘lifeline’ because I was drowning mentally and spiritually.  I decided to enter a program at The Stewpot called STEP (Stewpot Transitional Employment Program). This program was God sent for me; the people actually cared about my well being. Some of the people I met while in the STEP program have become true friends.  It is also while participating in this program that I learned about another plan.  I will call it plan G, God’s plan. 

 

Plan G is the reason I decided to write my story. I truly believe that God orchestrated this path for me, not because I am a bad person, but because I needed to be humbled.  I now understand that life is full of ups and downs, twist and turns and things that don’t always go as planned, but through God’s grace and faith nothing is too big to overcome. This journey has been the best thing that has ever happened to me.

 

Today, I am working as the dining room coordinator at the Second Chance Café, located at The Bridge. This gives me the opportunity to work with some of the best volunteers in the City of Dallas. My job is to make sure that the dining room runs smoothly while the meals are being served to the homeless population accessing services at The Bridge.

 

I thank everyone who has helped me along the way, but first and foremost, I thank God for his/her grace and understanding.

 

Reprinted from the October 2008 issue of Street Zine [http://thestewpot.org/streetzine.asp].

If You Have Been Given Gifts, Use Them September 29, 2008

 

Monday, September 29, 2008

 

If You Have Been Given Gifts, Use Them!

 

Yesterday evening we at Church of the Incarnation (Episcopal) instituted and inducted our new rector (senior pastor), The Right Reverend Anthony J. Burton, formerly Bishop of the Diocese of Saskatchewan, Canada.  The service was beautiful and quite moving and was presided over by the The Right Reverend James M. Stanton, Bishop of Dallas.  We are greatly blessed to have Bishop Burton and his family as part of our parish.

 

During his sermon, Bishop Stanton made a statement that stood out in particular to me, because this is something of which I constantly have to remind myself.  The statement was emphatic and simple:  “If you have been given gifts, use them!”  

 

The sermon text was based on the following passage from The Letter of Paul to the Romans.  I am far from a biblical scholar, so it is not surprising that the impact of this text had never come home to me before:

 

     “I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.  Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.  For by the grace given to me I bed every one among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith which God has assigned him.  For as in one body we have many members, and all the members do not have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.  Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them:  if prophecy, in proportion to our faith;  if service, in our serving;  he who teaches, in his teaching;  he who exhorts, in his exhortation;  he who contributes, in liberality;  he who gives aid, with zeal;  he who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.  Let love be genuine;  hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good;  love one another with brotherly affection;  outdo one another in showing honor.  Never flag in zeal, be aglow with the Spirit, serve the Lord.  Rejoice in your hope be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer.  Contribute to the needs of the saints, practice hospitality.  Bless those who persecute you;  bless and do not curse them.  Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.  Live in harmony with one another;  do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly;  never be conceited.  Repay no one evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all.  If possible, so far as it depends upon you, live peaceably with all.”

                                                                                                      ~~Romans 12:  1-18

This passage reminded me of my favorite quote from Mother Teresa, which I have used on this site previously:

 

     “Love until it hurts….What I do you cannot do:  but what you do, I cannot do.  The needs are great, and none of us, including me, ever do great things.  But we can all do small things, with great love, and together we can do something wonderful.”

KS

Website of Church of the Incarnation:  http://www.incarnation.org/

The Poorest of the Poor and Forgiveness September 24, 2008

Journal Archives

Friday, 2/24/06                                                                                                                                        

Blogger’s Note:  This incident took place in 2006.  The situation for homeless people in Dallas has improved considerably since then, particularly with the advent of our new homeless assistance center, the Bridge, in May, 2008. Also, I believe that the current city administration is sensitive to and proactive in finding solutions to the issues surrounding homelessness.  KS

 

The Poorest of the Poor and Forgiveness

“…to love Him in the distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor.” 

                                                                                                             ~~Mother Teresa

 

On Wednesday, I went out with David Timothy of SoupMobile and another volunteer to feed several hundred people at the Day Resource Center, currently the City of Dallas’s only designated site for groups feeding the homeless.  (The other volunteer was a columnist from the Dallas Observer researching an article on the homeless encampments.)

 

The feeding went smoothly, and people were able to come through the line several times times before we ran out of hot dogs — a hugely popular item:  they’re meat, and they’re hot food.  Most of the people appeared to be ‘chronically homeless’, in pretty rough condition, and are no doubt the ones who were spending the night inside the Day Resource Center prior to the new ruling forbidding sleeping there.

 

Next we went to the I-45 bridge homeless encampment, where about one hundred people have formed a stable community under the freeway bridge, so the reporter could interview an individual who lives in the camp and is its de facto leader, helping to maintain order there.  We pulled up to the chainlink fence surrounding the camp on a dirt road next to a motel.  The interviewee works at the motel, and the three of us waited in the van for him to get off work.

 

People kept stopping by the van to say hi to David and to see if we had food to give out.  The street people seem to love and even revere him.  He told them we weren’t allowed to feed there anymore — if we did we could incur a $2000-per-incident fine.  Soon a nice-looking man named Slim stopped to talk to us;  he doesn’t live at the camp but comes around daily and is friends with many of the residents.

 

While the reporter went into the heart of the camp to conduct his interview, David and I talked to Slim.  The subjects came up of the new strict enforcement of regulations on groups feeding the homeless and the closing of the Day Resource Center as a night shelter.  A prominent public official was mentioned, and I said I was having a hard time not being quite angry with her for her part in the way homeless citizens in Dallas are being treated.  I said that a couple who live in a homeless camp in the woods near my home said that before this woman was elected, she used to routinely give money to panhandlers, courting the homeless vote, then turned the tables on them once she was in office.

 

Right away, Slim began to talk in Biblical terms about love, forgiveness, and turning the other cheek.  What he said was profound and learned, but even more important, he hit upon truths that I had been missing.  I have a tendency to ‘hate the haters,’ often expressing my outrage at injustice in terms of anger, and he said in a loving and understanding way:  “Satan has thrown a veil over [this politician’s] eyes, so that she doesn’t see the harm she’s doing, but is deluded by her power and that of those she’s trying to please.”  This good man, who stays among the homeless and is their friend, was preaching love and forgiveness towards those who persecute them!

 

I hear this sort of faithfulness all the time when I’m with the homeless population.  The men and women I’ve met on the street are the most spiritual people I’ve ever known, and here was another example of that faithfulness, embodied in Slim, now teaching me, the middle-class advocate, the true meaning of Christian love, which should be so evident to me, but which I find so easy to forget:  LOVE YOUR ENEMIES.  How hard is this to do????  But here was a man who, along with his friends, is constantly persecuted by city and state officials, and he is reminding me about the heart of Christian love.

 

“Slim, this is unbelievable,” I said to him.  “This is just what I needed to hear!  I am so focused on the problems in Dallas right now  [ie, what you resist persists!], and your message of love and compassion for those in power, even in their misguided actions, is something I’d totally missed.  Thank you.”

 

It was a powerful message.  I feel Slim was ‘sent’ to gently remind me that, even if I can’t love a particular politician at the moment, to focus all my attention on my frustration with what’s going on with the city and the homeless may be missing the point.  While I don’t have to ignore injustice, perhaps this represents a call for me to go deeper within myself with this work, and to be as good as the street people I want to stand alongside.  I can focus more on the solutions and less on the problems, if for no other reason than that focusing on the problems dissipates my energy, taking it away from loving, helping and serving and into the ‘combat zone.’  I have to continue to fight injustice, yes, but maybe in a different way than letting it anger and frustrate me so much.  The battle is within myself, and it is there that I need to look:  for guidance, for love towards all sides.  Perhaps that’s how healing will come.  I don’t have to agree, and I can still speak out about the actions of people who I feel are persecuting the homeless, but I am called at the same time to embrace them with love.  Not an easy thing.  The more deeply I go into this work, the more it challenges me to grow — in unexpected ways.

 

KS

In the Midst of Them August 27, 2008

Regarding people who are homeless in Dallas…

 

“We are called to serve them. They are the least of these in our community, and Jesus has taken up residence with them, according to the gospel, and he is to be found in their midst. We exist to serve Christ, and according to Matthew 25, that’s where Christ is, so we serve them.”

 

                                                    ~~Dr. Joe Clifford, Senior Pastor                                                                                                                             First Presbyterian Church, Dallas, Texas                                                                                                             Dallas Observer, December 13, 2007

 

                                                                                                                      

Pregnant and On the Street August 19, 2008

Current Journal

Tuesday, 8/19/08

 

I had this experience two years ago.  I befriended a young street couple;  the woman was pregnant.  I tried in vain to help them find temporary housing.  The short version of the story was that I spent many hours calling every nonprofit I’d ever heard of on their behalf (they didn’t have access to a telephone), and the couple didn’t fit the criteria for any of the programs I contacted because they weren’t married and wouldn’t separate.  They wanted to marry but couldn’t because the man’s identification documents had been stolen, and there were complications from his background in getting them reissued.   

 

I didn’t know a lot about the different organizations who were helping the homeless at that time, and I could write a book on what I learned from that experience.  Things are much better in Dallas since then, especially with the Bridge providing a central location for services.  One thing that was evident then and still is: there were many groups helping the homeless in their own small and valuable way, few of them knew what the other was doing, and none of them could help my friends.

 

The couple ended up moving from the street into an abandoned building in Deep Ellum, then to underneath a bridge, where she miscarried.  It was maddening, trying to put together a puzzle that actually did involve life and death — with many of the pertinent pieces missing.  I simply couldn’t believe that in a city this size, with wealth this predominant, there wasn’t a housing program that would accommodate them together temporarily until the baby was born.  Guess what?  To my knowledge, there still isn’t.

 

Christian organizations do most of the ‘heavy lifting’ with the homeless and depend on church congregations for financial support.  Since the church does not condone living together without marriage, service providers that are connected to the Christian faith community do not generally allow unmarried couples to be housed together in their programs.

 

I might as well go ahead and appall my fellow feminists here and say that I hold a pro-life stance, so I am going to proceed to call the living being within a woman’s belly a child.  If we are going to address this problem of homeless women staying on the street while they’re pregnant and put the unborn child first — first above our ideas of the morality or immorality of conceiving a child out of wedlock — then we have to revisit housing pregnant street mothers who are unwilling to give up living with their street husbands and consider housing them together.  These couples are often married in their own eyes but not married legally or in the eyes of society.

 

Here’s why:  most of those women that I’ve known won’t separate from the man they are with while they are homeless.  They will stay on the street rather than go into housing alone because, along with the emotional and physical attachment they have to ‘their man’, he has been and is their protection — in fact, often their very survival.  The woman I spoke about in the first paragraph told me that, even when she was with her ‘man’ — and he was big, tough, and strong — other men on the street reached out and grabbed at her body frequently, pregnancy notwithstanding.

 

Another thing:  I’m not a person who generally feels I need to be taken care of, but when I was pregnant, this changed.  I felt particularly vulnerable during this phase of married life.  Many other comfortable, middle-class women I know have said the same thing, and one can imagine the magnification of this if one were homeless.

 

People will say these women should think twice before they get pregnant while homeless.  How about this statistic?  I have been told that at least 25% of socially and legally recognized marriages are ‘shotgun’ weddings, and that’s a conservative number of those that are willing to admit to their situation.  But in ‘polite society’, we can rush up the wedding or hedge the conception date.  Unplanned pregnancies happen in all segments of society, but homeless women can’t hide theirs behind closed doors.  Do I think it’s the world’s greatest plan to conceive a child while one’s living on the street?  Of course not, but it’s happening, and that’s the reality.

 

It is all well and good to carefully screen the individuals we let into our nonprofit programs and then report marvelous numbers and statistics of success about how well we’ve served them.  What about the people who don’t meet our narrow criteria?  What if those people are carrying around a new life within them?  What’s our priority?

 

Many years ago, my cousin, Lyn, whom I deeply admire, founded a pilot program for pregnant teens at an inner-city high school in a poverty-and-crime-ridden area in my hometown.  She and her organization, the Junior League, built a day-care center on the school grounds for the children to be cared for while the parents finished high school, and required both the mothers and fathers to take parenting classes, which the center provided.  The program was tremendously successful.  Many young women graduated from high school who would have dropped out, attended college, raised their children and had successful lives because of Lyn’s program.  It became a national model.  The most important part to me was that much better mothers and fathers were created because of the parenting training, and all kinds of problems were circumvented because of those new skills.  I was utterly amazed to learn later that some people in town complained that Lyn and her program were causing teen pregnancies!

 

I call myself a Christian, and I am a churchgoer at that.  Still, call my viewpoint pragmatism or moral relativism if you will.  But we cannot claim to honor unborn life and then fail to do every single thing in our power to facilitate its well-being because we do not approve of the lifestyle choices of the parents involved.  Housing those parents together, regardless of paperwork, in order to give them some stability, guidance, protection and structure would be a start.

 

KS

 

This article is linked to the following:

http://larryjamesurbandaily.blogspot.com/2008/09/pregnant-and-on-street-reality.html#comments

http://www.everydaycitizen.com/2008/09/pregnant_on_the_street_and_don.html

Harmony May 29, 2008

 

      “Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit;  and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord;  and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone.”

                                                                                                                   ~~1 Corinthians 12: 4-6

 

[taken from Daily Word, published by Unity, May, 2008]

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

Broken May 15, 2008

Journal Archives

Thursday, 12/22/05

I was out with the mobile soup kitchen on a feeding run tonight, and unlike most nights, the vibe was strained on the truck.  For starters, I’d arisen from my sick bed to show up for the commitment I’d previously made, realizing that in the past few weeks I’ve been writing about the homeless, thinking about them, talking about them a great deal… but that I needed to see them, touch them, talk to them — that being with them is what I love, not doing politics about them.

I felt ill on the run, alternately sweating and freezing, thinking I might pass out.  There’s nowhere to sit on the truck, and the floor was slimy with spilled soup, so we volunteers slipped and slid around as it bumped along through the downtown streets.  One of the regular volunteers was tired, which made her very sharp-edged.  When she was rude to the rest of us one too many times,  I came within an ace of walking away and hitching a ride back to my car.  It was an unusually wretched start and middle to the run, and I was determined to just endure.

Then I began talking with Joe, a homeless man we picked up at the first stop to ride with us and help us feed. Wanting to get the real lowdown, I was asking him how things were out there.  It was a grim, unflattering and unsympathetic portrait of who was out on the street and what was going on.

As the van clattered and lurched along, between bouts of bending over to slop scalding soup into paper cups, as I sweated and froze and felt I’d faint, as the grouchy volunteer barked irritable orders at everyone, as an uncharacteristically-rowdy, block-long line of ragged people milled and pushed and shoved and shouted outside the truck in front of the Day Resource Center, I thought to myself, “Now, exactly why am I doing this?”

Joe offered to do the ladling, and I stepped away to rest my back.  He was so kind to notice I was tired.  Then the director asked me to come outside the truck and ‘work on the ground,’ which I love, so it was a relief to get outside and hand people food and talk to them a little.  “How are you?  How’s it going?”  “God bless you all for being out here!” they’d say, or  “I’m OK, but I could sure use some work.”  “Joseph, I’ll pray for you.”  “Oh, thank you.”  A man getting mock angry when I let a woman be served ahead of him.  The woman giving me a hug, and then another.  “Why do the women get to go first?” a man asks.  “Does it make you men feel like chopped liver?” I joke with him.  “You call them ladies, but you call us men.”  “OK, we’ll call you gentlemen from now on!”

I was starting to loosen up, to remember, to feel what this was about.

And then I began to look into their faces, one by one, as they stepped up in line to receive their soup, sandwich, cookie and banana.  A young woman with cerebral palsy, looking brave and dignified, not wanting to meet my eyes.  A man who could barely stand, trying to signal something as he swayed away, almost as if he were crossing himself.  A woman deathly pale with a yellowish pallor to her skin and a cap pulled down that barely covered the absence of hair.  People with skin leathered and hands swollen from the cold.  Someone blind.  Someone on crutches.  So many of them thanking us, blessing us, wishing us Merry Christmas.  Loving us for loving them.  Dark faces, pale faces, every kind of face in the world.

Broken faces.  Broken, as we all are.

Beauty.  Real beauty. 

We left, and as we rumbled back toward our starting point, I thought, “This is why I do it.  To be near them.”

But, still, why?  What is the Grace that’s near them, that spills over onto me, that makes me want to be out in the cold, ladling soup, giving away sandwiches?  When I try to pin down a reason, it slides away, like mine and Joe’s tennis shoes on the soupy metal floor of the catering truck.

And then, sitting here in Barnes and Noble, drinking my hot cocoa, feeling less at odds and less resentful of the middle-class Dallas culture than I did in my first entries into this journal a year ago — accepting it, even, and my place in it, and the fact that I drive a nice car while many people have no homes…  Remembering that driving here, I drove all the way down Beverly Drive looking at the stupendous displays of Christmas lights and didn’t need to turn away in frustration, accepting that that kind of wealth is part of life, too — just observing, not judging…  

Anyway, I got it, sitting here, remembering the beauty, the desperation, the softness, the fear, the humanity, the love, the blankness, the greed, the need — in those broken faces in the crush of people outside the Day Resource Center — giving to them out of my own brokenness, as they gave to me.  I got it…

The beauty, the grace is in the brokenness.

But it makes no sense!  And when I once read that Henri Nouwen said it, I thought, well, my great hero is just wrong on this one.  Beauty in healing?  in unconditional love?  in service?  Sure.  But in brokenness?  

The only connection I can make is with Christ’s broken body on the cross.  But wasn’t the beauty in the resurrection?  The brokenness of Christ’s body I find devastating!  Do we have to be broken first in order to be healed?  Is it because only through brokenness comes the possibility of Grace?

The Spirit of Love is out there on the street, for sure — in the people themselves — surrounding them, hovering near them.  I feel the intensity of Christ’s Love there, have always felt it.

It a mystery, a magnificent mystery.

And our street people show it to me.  Every time.

KS

Liturgy and Action May 12, 2008

 

       “Do you wish to honor the Body of Christ?  Then do not allow it to be scorned in its members, in the poor, who have nothing to clothe themselves with.  Do not honor him in church with silk and then neglect him outside when he is cold and naked….  

       What does Christ gain from a sacrificial table full of golden vessels when he then dies of hunger in the persons of the poor?”

                                                                                       ~~St. John Chrysostom, Fourth Century

 

Thanks for the quote to Father Bob Johnston, Church of the Incarnation (Episcopal) newsletter, The Angelus.

Services Provided by The Bridge May 3, 2008

Dear Readers,

Here’s a link to the website of a group of people who have generously allowed me to work with them on Friday nights at the Day Resource Center for the last couple of years while they serve dinner and give away clothing.  They provided me with a way to give away the clothing I like collecting, which opportunity I lost when the homeless camps were razed by the city in 2005.

The post gives a list of the services to be provided by the new homeless assistance center, The Bridge, when it opens in May.

http://www.ourcalling.org/2008/04/25/the-new-center-will-provide-what/#comments

KS

 

Suffering and Compassion May 1, 2008

Suffering and Compassion

       “Compassion is a mind that removes the suffering that is present in the other…We can nurture the unconditional love that does not expect anything in return and therefore does not lead to anxiety and sorrow…. The essence of love and compassion is understanding, the ability to recognize the…suffering of others, to put ourselves ‘inside the skin’ of the other.  We ‘go inside’… and witness for ourselves their suffering….  Shallow observation as an outsider is not enough to see their suffering.  We must become one with the object of our observation.  When we are in contact with another’s suffering, a feeling of compassion is born in us.  Compassion means, literally, ‘to suffer with.’”

       “We have to find ways to nourish and express our compassion.  When we come into contact with the other person, our thoughts and actions should express our mind of compassion, even if that person says and does things that are not easy to accept.  We practice in this way until we see clearly that our love is not contingent upon the other person being lovable.”

                                                                                     ~~Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step  (81-83)

Worthy or Unworthy…Is That the Question? April 28, 2008

“It’s not about whether people are deserving. It’s about our compassion.”

Journal Archives

Monday, 5/9/05

When the subject of  the homeless comes up in general conversation, people frequently want to discuss ‘Unworthy Homeless Persons I Have Encountered.’  Often that single, and sometimes unpleasant, experience with a street person becomes a certain knowledge of the ‘ubiquitous homeless.’  The ’shiftless’ mother who, babe in arms, asks for money for formula and takes it straight into a liquor store somehow becomes every woman out on the street who has a child and asks for help.  The stories may well be true, but they miss a couple of points.

Helping the homeless is not about their worthiness.  It is about our giving.  If receiving blessings were dependent upon worthiness, would you and I have all that we have?

If you see someone misusing a resource they’ve been given, that’s not a reason to refrain from helping the person in need that comes along.  What if she’s in earnest?  If you give aid to five women in a row who buy liquor with the money and meet a sixth who’s on the level, would you deprive that sixth hungry child of the help she’d receive from you?  Or, if you want to be sure of how what you give is used, you could go and buy formula for the child yourself.

This is one of the reasons I have liked working with mobile soup kitchens, who go to feed the homeless where they live.  There are no questions asked, as Jesus asked no questions when he helped the poor and the sick.  The worthiness of the recipients is not at stake.  The work is about compassion.  There are no qualifications required except that a person be hungry, thirsty, cold, in need of solace.  “Ask, and ye shall receive.”

There is no single profile for a homeless person.  There are hustlers, manipulators and thieves on the street, yes.  Ditto drug addicts and alcoholics.  There are also veterans:  about 40% — people broken by war in body, mind and spirit, the same people who were heroes when they went off to war.  There are families who lost their jobs and missed a few house payments, finding themselves on the street.  There are mothers with children who ran from an abusive husband in the middle of the night and didn’t know how to seek out a shelter or couldn’t get in.  Do I want to feed and clothe these people if I have the opportunity?  Yes.  Do I want the woman who lives under a bridge because her ex-husband tied her up in their basement for a long period of time and she can’t bear confinement to get treatment for her trauma?  Yes.  If she doesn’t or is unable get it, do I want to offer her a sandwich?  Yes again.

Do I want to interview each of these people when I encounter them to determine whether they fit someone’s profile of worthiness?  Definitely, no.

KS

Christmas Angel April 12, 2008

“Compassion is something other than pity. Pity suggests distance, even a certain condescendence… Compassion means to become close to one who suffers. But we can come close to another person only when we are willing to become vulnerable ourselves.”
                                                                                                            ~~Henri Nouwen, Here and Now

Journal Archives
Christmas Day, 2004

Christmas Angel

I went to noon Christmas Mass by myself today, the first time in years we haven’t gone to Christmas Eve Midnight Mass as a family, as my grandchildren, at age two, are too young to be out that late. Church was lovely, and, as I drove away, I took with me the special joy of receiving the Christmas Eucharist amidst the radiance of the beautiful sanctuary, awash with green pine garlands and banked with red poinsettias and white candles.

At the intersection of I-75 and Mockingbird Lane, I pulled up near a stop light beside a woman who was begging. I happened to have some extra blankets and sweatshirts in the car, so I rolled down the window as I approached the light and offered her a stack of these things.

The most beatific smile crossed her face as she took them, and, as she tried to thank me, I realized she could make sounds but was unable to speak. It seemed as if perhaps she was missing part or all of her tongue, I couldn’t be sure. But she opened her mouth and attempted to thank me, taking my hand warmly in her weathered palms. I was able to understand, “God bless you! God bless you!”

I pulled forward to the red light and turned to watch her as she walked away. She went over to a low concrete wall and laid the stack of clothes and blankets on it. Bending over the pile and beginning to sort through it, and evidently pleased with what she found there, she suddenly raised her arms and face toward the sky and began a joyous, wordless dance! I will never forget the look of bliss on her face, the brilliance of her smile, the ecstacy in her body over the stack of clothing.

I began to cry as I headed to meet my daughters and their families for Christmas lunch, and I couldn’t stop. There was something about this woman that stuck with me, the image of her wordless praise, her arms reaching toward heaven. She broke my heart and touched me so deeply that, opened by church and the Eucharist, I was suddenly emptied of whatever concerns I’d had before I’d met her, to be refilled with a scalding mixture of pain and joy that would sting me for weeks whenever I thought of her, which I often did — this miraculous Christmas angel.

KS

Rightness April 7, 2008

       “My Father, open the eyes of my soul. Cause me to see that any issue that causes distrust or anger between me and another…even my own iron ‘rightness’ on matters of faith…can cause me to make a desert ‘in the name of the Lord.’”

                                                                                                            ~~St. Augustine

Guest Writers From the Street? March 29, 2008

I have long wanted to have guest writers on this blog — especially people who live on the street — but never got down to figuring out how to implement it. Perhaps this will be the way!

Today I received this comment on ‘Blogger Profile’ from my friend, Reagan, with whom I work on Friday nights at the Day Resource Center. She is one of a very dedicated group of people from Northwest Bible Church, who bring dinner to over 200 homeless individuals every Friday and have done so for many years.

These people do much more than serve dinner, however. They befriend street people in a very personal way, pray with and for them, and many of their number support homeless individuals quietly and without fanfare, helping them in countless ways with transportation, doctor visits, clothing needs, paperwork issues, and, above all, love, support and genuine friendship. The word ‘volunteer’ doesn’t even begin to cover it. They enter into real relationship and commitment with people from the street. [Website: www.ourcalling.org]

“Hi, Karen-

I’ve been thinking about you lately and have missed you the last couple of weeks at the DRC Friday nights! 

I met a woman tonight, Sherry, who lives on the street and writes about her experiences. Prose and poetry, and I really enjoyed hearing some excerpts. Do you know a way or a connection so that her stuff might be read? either on a blog or in a publication? Just a thought.

Reagan”

“Hi, Reagan,

It’s great to hear from you. I’ve missed being there on Friday nights the past few weeks, but will be coming next week.

I would love to invite Sherry and other people who live on the street to write guest posts on this blog! What do you think?  Leave it to wonderful you to help create another level to this blog which I had in the back of my mind when I began it but hadn’t thought how to implement! Synergy and Spirit, eh?

Blessings! — which you and the amazing Friday night crew from Northwest Bible Church bring in spades to our friends at the Day Resource Center!

Karen

Are You Willing To Be Transformed? March 5, 2008

       “…Are you willing to be transformed? Or do you keep clutching your old ways of life with one hand while with the other you beg people to help you change?

…It is not a question of willpower. You have to trust the inner voice that shows the way. You know that inner voice. You turn to it often. But after you have heard with clarity what you are asked to do, you start raising questions, fabricating objections, and seeking everyone else’s opinion. Thus you become entangled in countless often contradictory thoughts, feelings, and ideas and lose touch with the God in you. And you end up dependent on all the people you have gathered around you.

Only by attending constantly to the inner voice can you be converted to a new life of freedom and joy.”

                                                                                                        ~~Henri Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love

Journal Archives
Saturday, 4/23/05

Church and Candace

When I last saw Candace a couple of weeks ago, she asked me to take her to church with me sometime, and I said, “Sure!” There is something unique about Candace. She feels like my daughter. And Patrick is someone I think I might be proud to have as a son-in-law. But I can’t help but wonder, is it wise to take a virtual stranger in my car, even one who feels like family?

I asked my friend, David, for his opinion, as he is familiar with street culture, and he responded:
“You asked if I thought it would be a problem with you taking Candace to church. No, I don’t see a problem there. I think this would be a very kind thing to do for her. However each case is different. There are definitely some individuals on the street that I would not want you to take anywhere in your car. My sense for Candace is that it would be fine for you to take her to church.”

So I’m going to try to arrange to take her to church with me on Wednesday.

Wednesday, 4/27/05

Losing Track

This early evening, during which I’ve done a fair share of crying, proves the point of the above Henri Nouwen quote on transformation, it seems to me, with unusual clarity. I’ve lost track of Candace and Patrick, and the impact of the loss feels overwhelming. Now they’re gone, and I have no way to find them.

I had asked David to tell Candace when he went by their camp yesterday that I would pick her up for church today at 5:30 P.M. But he didn’t see her, so I drove to their little house at that time to see if she could go. I pulled up beside their lot and they weren’t there, so I stopped to ask two people who were sitting on the Stairs Going Nowhere, waiting for the bus.

“Candace isn’t here,” they said. “Are she and Patrick still staying here?” “No, she and Patrick have sort of split up for a while.” “Do you know where she is?” “No.” “Is Patrick still here?” “He’s around.” I knew they didn’t trust me enough to say more. The street’s a closed society until people know you. “Please tell them Karen said hello,” I said, as there seemed nothing else to say.

I pulled away and began to cry — ‘the ugly cry,’ as Oprah calls it, face all distorted, nose running, the works. On my mobile, I tried to call both of my daughters for comfort — no answer.

I drove around, feeling I’d lost track of something of irreplaceable value, feeling so lost myself, drowning in the conviction that I’d missed something vital with which I was supposed to connect. So odd and inexplicable, how one can love certain strangers after knowing them such a short time. I had met hundreds of people while going out on the street to give away clothing and food, but Candace and Patrick had drawn me to them and their little home like a magnet. Our meeting on that Holy Saturday seemed providential.

It had taken me two weeks to get around to taking my new friend and surrogate daughter to church with me. I had kept thinking about it but not getting it done. And my friends who felt like family had slipped through that small crack in time.

[to be continued]

KS

Waxing Philosophical February 14, 2008

Giving Freely

“…a nun once said to me, ‘Mother Teresa, you are spoiling the poor people by giving them things free.  They are losing their human dignity.’

When everyone was quiet, I said calmly, ‘No one spoils as much as God himself.  See the wonderful gifts he has given us freely.  All of you here have no glasses, yet you all can see.  If God were to take money for your sight, what would happen?  Continually we are breathing and living on oxygen that we do not pay for.  What would happen if God were to say, ‘If you work four hours, you will get sunshine for two hours?’  How many of us would survive then?’

Then I also told them, ‘There are many congregations that spoil the rich;  it is good to have one congregation in the name of the poor, to spoil the poor.’

There was profound silence;  nobody said a word after that.”

                                                                                ~~Mother Teresa, In the Heart of the World

Journal Archives

Tuesday, 12/23/03

 

To my surprise, feeding the homeless is controversial. I did not know this, although, being oppositionally-defined as I can sometimes be, it would only have encouraged me. Nonetheless, I’m surprised that not everyone thinks hungry people should be given food.

 

‘People should get their needs met through the institutions and organizations we’ve already created to deal with the problems of hunger and homelessness,’ an acquaintance recently told me. But what if they’re not going to? What if the organizations, excellent though they may be, are woefully inadequate to the scale of the task, which is clearly the case in Dallas? What if significant numbers of people fall through the cracks? Some are not going to get their needs met with current resources; some are unable to; some — many — do fall. And for those, another approach is required.

 

To me, feeding the hungry seems self-evident, especially as a person who calls myself a Christian. “Feed my sheep,” says Jesus in John 21. He doesn’t say, “If my sheep are employed, or at least job hunting,” or “If they can conform enough to live in a shelter,” or “If they promise to take their antidepressants and visit their psychotherapists on a regular basis.” Jesus states simply, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” “Lord…you know that I love you,” Simon Peter replies. Jesus: “Feed my sheep.”

 

And even more direct is the bit in Matthew 25: “…I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me…as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” Then follows the horrific fate awaiting those ‘goats at the left [hand]’ who decline to offer these kindnesses to their brothers and sisters — read that passage if you want to tremble!

 

The argument that feeding street people enables and perpetuates homelessness confuses me. Can you look for a job when you’re starving? Dirty? Freezing? Without an address? Did Mother Teresa perpetuate starvation by going on the streets of Calcutta and feeding the ‘poorest or the poor?’ Did she encourage the sick to get sicker because she tended to their medical needs?

 

Or does our plenty somehow shame us, that we are willing to let children live cold and hungry on the streets of Dallas while we buy designer tennis shoes and IPods for our own kids? Is this moral? Is it correct human behavior, religion aside? Is it even reasonable?

 

If rational self-interest is our guiding principle, does the terrible reality of homelessness and poverty in our own city and around the world serve that principle? Sometimes I wonder if our collective anger towards street people has something to do with their reminding us of the ludicrous, wasteful splendor in which most of us live, and perhaps also of the ubiquity of vulnerability all humans share.

 

True, feeding the homeless is only one part of the puzzle. A comprehensive plan is required to get people off the streets and into housing. Enlightened self-interest tells us that to do everything we can to solve the problems of homelessness and hunger in our city benefits us all. It tells us that that there are many paths to this desirable conclusion, that all kinds of help is needed: shelters, job training, treatment centers, rehabilitation programs, housing — yes, but also, surely, the simple service of alleviating people’s suffering directly, wherever they are, by giving them food when they’re hungry, a smile, a hug and a kind word when they’re lonely, a blanket and clothing when they’re cold.

KS

Resisting the Call February 13, 2008

       “Today I stand before you to make a just, useful, and suitable intercession, I come from no one else; only the beggars who live in our city elected me for this purpose, not with words, votes, and the resolve of a common council, but rather with their pitiful and most bitter spectacles.”
                                                                                                            ~~St. John Chrysostom

Journal Archives
Wednesday, 8/27/03

I walked out of church last night and came face to face with a stained glass window I’d been passing for years but hadn’t noticed. “Feed my sheep!” it fairly shouted. Felt it was an Executive Order — that I was meant to begin volunteering again — this time with people who live on the street, the homeless people in Dallas.

Talk of ‘callings’ often sounds pompous, but I’d been feeling this prompting for some time, (though maybe not in such a clear way as a church window jumping out at me.) Then, tonight, I passed a shelf in the bookstore where I often go to write, and I was arrested by a book entitled The Heart of Henri Nouwen. When I took it from the shelf, it fell open to this passage:

       “Jesus did not say: ‘Blessed are those who care for the poor,’ but ‘Blessed are the poor.’… Here lies the great mystery of Christian service. Those who serve Jesus in the poor will be fed by him whom they serve… We so much need a blessing. The poor are waiting to bless us.”
                                                                                                             ~~Henri Nouwen, Here and Now

Serendipity. Time to act.

KS