Racism, Our Familiar Companion

Last Sunday, I was sitting on the patio of a Dallas cafe having lunch with my nine-year-old granddaughter and one of her friends.  The friend had gone to climb on some nearby play equipment, and my granddaughter leaned over and whispered to me, “Grandma, do you know the ‘n-word’?”  ”Yes, I know it,” I replied, wondering where this was going — this granddaughter is mixed race, partially of African-American descent.

“A boy at school came up behind me this week and said, ‘Hey, N – - – - -, get out of the way.’”  I didn’t try to hide my astonishment.  ”What?????  I am really shocked to hear that,” I told her.  I asked for more details:  whether she’d told the teacher and how things proceeded from there.  ”Yes, I told the teacher, and she made him come all the way across the room and apologize.”  ”How did you feel about all of this?”  ”Well, it really hurt my feelings.”  ”I can well imagine.”

We began to discuss the ‘n-word’ itself.  She was obviously well aware of the ‘not-OK-ness’ of people calling someone of a different race the word, but  I said, “You know, in the rap community, people sometimes use that word towards each other, and they feel that’s OK.”  ”Yes, I know.”  It seemed clear that the distinctions between the differing usages were evident to her from our discussion that followed.

I didn’t want, at that point, to know the race of the name-calling child — let’s call him Howie, and I specifically refrained from asking, not wanting to add to the ‘divide’, nor to begin stereotyping the child in my own mind.  I just wanted to process the transaction, which over the next many hours and days I inevitably have done.

When I picked up my granddaughter at school on Monday, she said, “I was partners with Howie in class today.”  ”Really,” I asked, “And how did that go?”  ”Fine, he has trouble reading and can only read little words, like ‘it’.  He’s in a special group.”  ”Well,” I said, “that must be hard for him.”  ”Yes, but he’s the one who called me the N-word!”  ”Oh, yes, I remember.  So how did your work together turn out?”  ”Well, at the end, we were supposed to shake hands, but he would only shake with his elbow.”  I guessed at what that action represented in his mind, but to her I said, “Hmm, why do you think he did that?”  “I have no idea,” she replied.

I have stewed about this day after day.  The incident presents itself to me in the odd hours — quiet times, the middle of the night.   I admit it took me very much by surprise.  I raised a biracial daughter who is now thirty years old, and, to my knowledge, this racial epithet throwing didn’t happen to her.  It is not that I’m naive enough to believe that people don’t think in these terms.  Perhaps any of my daughter’s school fellows who had these thoughts were just too well-mannered to express them.

The anguish of knowing that someone you love as much as I love this grandchild has to put up with this kind of garbage gets me right in the solar plexus.  I have processed it layer by layer as the days have passed, and I still am — and I’m sure will continue to do so.  It’s so troubling that it took me days to discuss it with friends or family.  But after a lot of reflection, I’ve at least been able to find some positives.

1)  My granddaughter seems to be handling it well.  I’m not sure about the teacher’s motive in having her and the boy work together, and I want to find out.  But my granddaughter seems to understand that it’s mostly the boy’s issue and not about her value.

2)  The reality that thirty, forty, fifty years ago or more (and probably in some places today), a white person (and this boy is white, it turns out) could put violence behind their words towards a person of color with impunity, and that today the justice system and the public consciousness has begun to come to terms with these issues successfully — that they produce outrage and legal repercussions — shows that, although racism is alive and in many ways has only changed it’s form, a lot of progress has been made.

3)  What kind of words is this child hearing about race at home?  I can’t be sure, of course, but guessing at the possibilities, I feel frightened.

4)  Such an experience could prepare one for the world as it is, if handled properly.

5)  This is my predominant thought:  what kind of courage did it take for those African American parents in the deep south during desegregation to send their precious children off to a white school?  How must it have felt for them, not to mention their children, to meet not only the jeering and vitriolic hatred of white parents and fellow students, but to face angry, self-righteous politicians, armed local lawmen and attack dogs with the same kind of hatred in their hearts and on their faces — and wearing as well the absolute certainty that their bigotry put them in the right?

It seems that racial hatred isn’t going anywhere.  All one has to do is listen to national and international news to realize that.  But at least, if the light is made to shine on it, if it isn’t allowed to fester in hidden places and is called out and held to account, that is not just something — it is a very great deal.

KS

Coercion or Cooperation?

Pine Street Inn in Boston, Massachusetts, New England’s largest resource for homeless men and women, sends Outreach vans onto the city’s streets 365 nights per year — in the cold, snow and rain — offering homeless men and women help in the form of warm blankets, hot meals, clean clothes and transportation to shelter.  The journal below allows us to follow a van on one night’s journey and details some of the experiences of the shelter’s outreach volunteers.

Imagine just for a moment that you are one of the homeless women or men described in the article.  As you read, ask yourself whether you would respond better to the approach used by Pine Street — one of respect and trust building — or to the methods used by many other cities, which often includes this choice:  “Do you want to go to a shelter or go to jail?”  KS

One Night’s Journey

December 2011

Have you ever wondered what happens to Boston’s homeless men and women on cold winter nights?

Every night, Pine Street Inn’s Outreach vans head out, loaded with warm blankets, hot meals and clean clothes, offering rides to shelter. Through the cold and snow, the Outreach teams crisscross the city from 9:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m., serving people in need.

Here are just a few of the situations that Outreach counselors Nelson, Vincent and Maggie encounter during one night on the vans.

Should We House Homeless Alcoholics or Make Them Get Sober First?

People will doubtless have strong — and differing — opinions about this, but I’ll offer this observation:  the traditional approach of making homeless alcoholics and drug addicts get clean and sober before they qualify for housing has left a large percentage of them still on the street.  The Housing First approach described in this article has some very favorable statistics in its favor.

Is it better, if someone is going to die of their addiction, for them to die cold and alone outdoors?  Maybe if they don’t have the ‘moral courage’ to get clean, this is what they deserve.    This Associated Press article considers some differing perspectives.  What do you think?  KS

http://enews.earthlink.net/article/top?guid=20120103/243cdd6f-7af9-4a07-aef4-bfe5d271fa78

Small Things With Great Love

My son-in-law sent me this story today.  What these two people are doing is not small, but the love they express — each in her or his own way — is great indeed.  It reminds me, despite the difficulties in the world, that there are people out there quietly doing wonderful things every day.  KS

Austrian chef, Catholic nun are spirit behind Trinity Cafe

Monday, December 19, 2011 01:16:00 AM

Dec. 19–TAMPA — Alfred Astl frets a lot.

And with good reason: He’s the chef at Trinity Cafe, a restaurant that serves the homeless and working poor in downtown Tampa. He operates on a razor-thin budget, stretching pennies instead of dollars, in order to feed the growing throng of hungry people who come for a free noontime meal Monday through Friday.

“He always thinks he’s going to run out, which he never does,” confides Sister Maureen Dorr, the 81-year-old Franciscan nun who stopped in to volunteer 10 years ago and never left.

“I tell him not to worry. I happen to know another man who multiplied. He really had a way with loaves and fishes, and so does Alfred.”

That’s how it is with the Austrian chef with the serious demeanor and the fun-spirited Catholic sister who’s a bit of a flirt. They are the yin and yang of Trinity Cafe. He does the nourishing — creating innovative and well-balanced meals from soup to dessert at about $2 a serving. She does the nurturing — walking among the homeless guests to dispense hugs, give counsel and offer prayers.

“Sister Maureen is an angel on earth. And Chef Alfred is a grizzly with the heart of a teddy bear,” says Cindy Davis, program director. “They are the heart and soul of the cafe. To have them working here together is a real blessing for us and every guest who works through the door.”

Neither seeks out attention. But they got it anyway last month.

Sister Maureen was named a local hero by Bank of America, which came with a $5,000 check. Astl, 61, was chosen as a community hero by the Tampa Bay Lightning — an honor that came with a $50,000 award. Both directed their winnings to the cafe’s food account.

Davis says the windfall came at a time when the nonprofit needs it the most.

The cafe’s $455,000 annual budget — which depends on donations and grants — is being challenged by an increase in the number of people it serves. The limit was supposed to be 200 meals a day; that’s jumped to about 230. And looming in the future is a $650,000 project that will allow the cafe to relocate from its current cramped quarters at the Salvation Army to its own permanent building in the V.M. Ybor neighborhood.

When the cafe eventually moves, it will be open seven days a week. And it will keep that same “dining with dignity” tradition, using volunteers from churches and community organizations to serve patrons at tables covered in white cloths and set with silverware.

That’s a touch Astl insists upon.

Before coming to Trinity Cafe, he spent 35 years in the hotel and food industry, honing his skills as a chef in exclusive settings from Aspen to New York. He worked at a Four Seasons, country clubs, high-end inns and corporations. He owned his own continental restaurant in Tampa with wife, Sandy. He worked for the late George Steinbrenner’s Yankee Trader at Bay Harbor Inn. For four years, he served as division chef for five Rusty Pelican restaurants.

But for all the prestige and money that came with his career, Astl got burned out. He missed out on seeing his two sons grow up. Working six or seven days a week, sometimes 18 hours a day, took a toll on his health.

Then he saw the help wanted ad for a chef to work “five days a week, lunch only.” He thought it would be a nice break for a little while. That was 10 years ago.

Obviously, there are differences. He doesn’t deal in ahi tuna or Kobe beef anymore. He haggles with food proprietors on the cost of odd-shaped chicken breasts. $1.34 a pound? I’ll give you 60 cents.

Good quality food is a must, he says, “but I have to get it cheap.” And nothing is wasted. Today’s leftover braised corn is tomorrow’s corn chowder. Every meal starts with salad or soup, a healthy portion of protein, a starch, a vegetable, a dessert and a piece of fruit. That same gourmet style he developed when working in exclusive restaurants is reflected here.

“I approach this the same way I did everything else — I come in and do the best with what I have,” Astl says. “Only I know this is the only meal of the day for these guests.”

While the chef is working his magic in the kitchen, Sister Maureen is making the rounds in the waiting lines and at the tables. Some of the faces are familiar; once a week, she’s at the jail, counseling and ministering to those who ran afoul of the law. She has a special fondness for the men, and often offers herself as a dance partner in the middle of the dining room.

“Stay with God,” she whispers to a bearded man, sitting forlornly against the fence while waiting for the cafe to open. “He won’t abandon you. Don’t give up. He’s here.”

For 40 years, Sister Maureen worked in education as a teacher and administrator. She says this is just another extension of what she has done since entering religious life at age 17.

“St. Francis taught us about living out the gospel and serving the poor,” she says. “But truth is, I don’t minister to them. I minister with them. I firmly believe there are such good people who have had bad opportunities. They show me the way to God as much as I try to show them.”

She acknowledges her advanced age, but quickly dismisses any notion of retirement. “Nuns don’t retire,” she says with a laugh. “We just get recycled. As long as God gives you the health, you keep on moving.”

Yes, Astl and Sister Maureen admit, their personalities are different. He’s all business, quite serious about the balance between pinching pennies and providing a substantive meal. She’s quick to crack jokes and wrap her arms around a lost soul who needs a human’s touch. Both agree that those differences don’t matter. The bond they share — their compassion for the poor — trumps everything.

“She is marvelous,” Astl says with admiration. “Just marvelous how she connects with everyone.”

“And he is a God-centered man,” Sister Maureen says. “Though he doesn’t think he is, I know it’s true.”

Write

“I don’t stop and think about whether a piece will be acceptable.  I just write.  In fact if I can’t write, for whatever reason, I am very unhappy and feel covered by a divine darkness.”

~~ John Tavener, Composer, from In Britain Magazine, September, 1998

Friday, December 2, 2011

The Beach in Autumn

‘Off season’ is my favorite time to go to the beach.  The ocean is beautiful in cooler weather, and the crowds of summer have long departed.  Here are a few pictures taken last week at the Cape Cod National Seashore, a landscape that is truly unusual and spectacular.  KS

Dunes to cross before the beach!

Climbing the 'Himalayas' of sand

Hiking past a sand crater with the Atlantic Ocean beyond

Path to the sea

Sea meets sand

Strolling

Change

Change — even change for the better — is often approached with apprehension.  ”In giving up something,” people think, “will I be left with nothing?”  It takes courage to renounce the known for the unknown.  It is not easy even to renounce a famliar pain for an unknown, and therefore uncertain, happiness.  The mind is like a horse that for years has pulled its delivery wagon.  The horse grows accustomed to its daily route, and cannot be convinced easily to walk a new one.  The mind, too, will not lightly abandon its old habits, even when it knows they cause only misery.

Beneficial changes should be embraced with courage.  As long as one’s hope for better things are opposed by fear of their attainment, the mind can never be at peace.  Accept change, therefore, as life’s only constant.  Our lives are an endless procession of gains and losses, of joys and sorrows, of hopes and disappointments.  At one moment we find ourselves threatened by the storms of trials;  moments later, a silver lining brightens the gray clouds;  then, suddenly, the skies are blue again.

                                  ~~ Paramahansa Yogananda, The Wisdom of Yogananda, Volume 5

Street Doctor

Piggybacking, with permission from Larry James, on his blog, here is a fascinating look at what one doctor in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania — Dr. Jim Withers — and his team are doing to heal a city by ministering on the streets to the city’s homeless population.  Dr. Withers has been practicing ‘street medicine’ since 1992.  There are always people living on the street who are unable to access medical care because of their inability to move through even the most streamlined red tape.  That is why, for me, this type of medicine is particularly compelling and seems so very important.  The post on Larry’s blog is on Monday, October 31, 2011.  KS

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-20124033/doctors-street-medicine-helps-cure-homelessness/

Here’s the link to Operations Safety Net, founded by Dr. Withers to house his homeless patients in Pittsburgh.

http://www.pmhs.org/operation-safety-net/

http://larryjamesurbandaily.blogspot.com/

Medicine That Matters

by Karen Shafer

“The Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program’s mission is to provide or assure access to the highest quality health care for all homeless men, women and children in the greater Boston area.”

The lobby of Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program at Jean Yawkey Place, with Deshawn Parris, Security Officer, and Shirley Berard, Administrative Assistant

Jean Yawkey Place 

In the summer of 2011, while touring the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, I stepped off the third-floor elevator into Barbara McInnis House, looked around, and began to cry, (and I’m pretty sure it was what Oprah refers to as “the ugly cry”.)  Those accompanying me — my daughter, two of my grandchildren, and our tour guide, Manager of Volunteer Services Carrie Eldridge-Dickson — at first looked at me in surprise.  After all, we were viewing a beautiful, pristine environment decorated in pastels — a state-of-the-art facility which provides “medical respite care”, short-term medical and recuperative services, for homeless men and women in Boston, Massachusetts.  I felt as if I’d stepped into an ideal world.

My companions’ surprise turned quickly to understanding.  They shared the comprehension that my tears were in part joyful at what has been accomplished there, but that they also conveyed frustration at how few of our homeless brothers and sisters will ever experience the level of loving and dignified care expressed in the atmosphere surrounding us at that moment.

The 104-bed Barbara McInnis House is a medical respite care facility spread throughout three floors of Jean Yawkey Place, Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program’s central facility which opened in May of 2008.  The building also houses a primary care walk-in clinic with ten exam rooms and four meeting rooms for mental health care, a dental clinic with five operatories, a pharmacy, office space for “street” and “family” outreach teams, and the organization’s administrative offices.

Barbara McInnis House provides 24-hour care for homeless men and women who are too sick for life on the streets or in shelters but not sick enough to occupy acute care rooms in area hospitals.  It has a dining room that serves patients three nutritious meals a day, and a large common area and outdoor patio — all under one roof.

The cellar-to-roof renovation of this former city morgue and forensic research facility now addresses the unique medical needs of the city’s homeless men and women.  It was made possible through the combined generosity of private, foundation and corporate donors.  BHCHP raised $42,000,000 in the organization’s only capital campaign in its 26-year history.

Model of Care

Jean Yawkey Place sets the stage for the model of ‘integrated care’ practiced at BHCHP.  The organization’s web site, www.BHCHP.org, describes the complex challenge of tackling health care among the vulnerable homeless population.

“Many homeless patients struggle with at least one substance abuse problem, at least one chronic physical condition and a psychiatric illness. Each condition is often preventable and manageable… on its own. But, in combination and left untreated, such health problems become compounded and all too often fatal. Medicine, in general, and homeless medicine, in particular, have long grappled with addressing these interconnected aspects of a patient’s healthcare in a coordinated way. In the traditional care model, behavioral health care and medical care operate independently.

The integrated care model at BHCHP unites physicians, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, nurses, case managers and behavioral health professionals in a close collaboration. They follow patients together and separately in a variety of settings: on the street, at Barbara McInnis House, in outpatient clinics and, as needed, in shelter or housing.

A patient can move from street to clinic to hospital to respite care to shelter to housing, having easy and regular contact with at least one member of the medical team so that serious medical and behavioral diagnoses receive integrated attention.”

No homeless person is refused treatment at BHCHP.  The professional staff provides medical treatment to homeless men, women and children at eighty locations across the city — in adult and family shelters; in two hospital-based clinics; in emergency, transitional and permanent-supportive housing; and through home visits to formerly long-term homeless patients who are now housed through the Housing First initiatives in Boston.  They also provide care on the street, in alleyways and under bridges to those “rough sleepers” who avoid shelters.

BHCHP’s Beginnings

How does such an impressive result come to be?  An article from the American Journal of Public Health entitled “The Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program: A Public Health Framework” talks about its beginnings.  (O’Connell, Oppenheimer, Judge, Taube, Blanchfield, Swain, Koh: August, 2010)

In 1984, a community coalition consisting of eighty people representing shelters, homeless service providers, community health centers, nursing and medical schools, state and city governments, homeless persons, and advocacy groups was convened by Boston mayor Raymond Flynn and Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis.  An extensive community needs assessment to identify gaps in existing health care services was then conducted.

Initial funding for the program came through a pilot grant of $300,000 annually for four years from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Pew Charitable Trusts, subsequently matched by an additional $250,000 annually from the state of Massachusetts.

City wide cooperation and ‘buy in’ strikes me right away as a predictor of the program’s probable success, and, in particular, the inclusion of homeless people and their advocates in the planning.  All too often, critical issues of how service is to be conceived and delivered to the homeless community is decided by committees comprised of those who have never experienced homelessness, without ‘grass roots’ input.  Such a comprehensive network early on hopefully precludes the ‘fiefdom’ approach of non profit organizations that can occur in cities, resulting in duplication of services and competition for funding.

The Mission of BHCHP

“To provide or assure access to the highest quality health care for all homeless men, women and children in the greater Boston area.”

When the program began offering clinical services in 1985 with a staff of seven, these things stand out in terms of its mission:

“The coalition insisted that health care be embraced as a matter of social justice rather than charity, and they defined the program’s mission to ensure that the highest-quality health care would be available to all homeless men, women, and children in Boston.” (O’Connell, et al)

It also viewed  itself as a viable professional career for health professionals rather than as a volunteer opportunity and hoped to ensure thereby continuity of top-tier, accessible health care for homeless men, women and children.  This seems a radically positive, innovative notion, and would seem to insure that, by having physicians and other health care providers as salaried employees of BHCHP, not only would availability of health care be assured, but vital relationships of trust could be built between provider and patient, leading to ‘continuity of care.’

What is meant by ‘continuity of care’?

1.  Continuity of care from street and shelter to hospital requires an enduring and trusting relationship between the doctor or clinician and patient.

2.  Multidisciplinary teams should deliver care.

3.  BHCHP should act as a catalyst within the mainstream health care system to ensure that the special needs of homeless persons are addressed.

4.  BHCHP should serve as the “glue” linking hospitals and health centers with the community of shelters and homeless service providers.

5.  BHCHP should strive to bridge medicine and public health.

6.  BHCHP should create and implement ‘respite care.’  [now existing as Barbara McInnis House]  (O’Connell, et al)

It is also significant that BHCHP is located near two teaching hospitals, Massachusetts General and Boston Medical Center.  BHCHP has walk-in clinics on the campuses of both facilities.  Colleges and universities are now educating healthcare providers in increased sensitivity to the particular needs of various ethnic and social groups.  This is especially important as the homeless population is one which requires special care in building trust and relationships, both because of possible health issues such as mental illness or addiction, and because attitudes toward homeless people in society as a whole tend at times to be negative, and opportunities for rejection abound.

Who Deserves Compassionate Care?

One only has to read the comments section of newspaper articles on homelessness — where homeless people are frequently referred to as ‘bums’ or in other derogatory language — to understand the negativity which can be directed at people living on the street.  This attitude in the public at large may be a more powerful determinant of the quality and scope of the health care offered to the homeless population than one thinks.  For example, some nonprofit organizations seeking to provide health care to those living in poverty may be hesitant to include homeless individuals within their scope — even when they believe they are deserving and needful of help — because they may feel that the ‘homeless’ label will impede funding efforts.

So, at the heart of the mission of any program offering health care to those living in poverty must be the consideration of this question:  Are people experiencing homelessness deserving of compassionate care?  Whether or not to include homeless healthcare in programs may in part be a matter of conscience, where non profit leaders either bend to public pressure and opinion, or stand firm in the moral commitment to treat all human beings as equally deserving of inclusion in a community of care.

The decision at the outset by the founders of Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program to emphatically declare that individuals who are homeless are entitled to and would be provided with top tier, continuous and compassionate health care, provided in an integrated model by on-staff medical and clinical professionals, and with the assumption of the inherent worthiness of each patient to receive such care, regardless of circumstance, represents a rare commitment, but one that seems to have been met there in an extraordinarily successful manner.

Toward the end of our tour of the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, my family and I were fortunate to have a chance meeting with Dr. James O’Connell, a founding physician of the program and currently its president.  When we told him how moved we were by the beauty of the facility and the range and depth of its proffered services, he said, “Remember, it hasn’t always been like this!  It took us a while to get here.”

The success of the program says a great deal about an inspired vision; about the wisdom of its founders and their careful planning; about a limitless amount of dedicated work and commitment; and also, not to be underestimated, about the political and moral will of a public which supports and undergirds the idea that those who at this moment live in society’s shadows are nonetheless deserving of its best.

BHCHP Overview

~~ BHCHP has operated in the black for all of its 26 years and has brought medicine that matters to tens of thousands of homeless men, women and children.

~~ BHCHP employs close to 300 doctors, dentists, physician assistants, registered nurses, nurse practitioners, psychologists, psychiatrists, mental health case workers, chefs, building and maintenance staff, substance abuse counselors, case managers and dental assistants.

~~ BHCHP delivers health care to over 11,000 patients each year.

~~ BHCHP manages the medical care throughout greater Boston’s adult and family shelter system, in two hospital based clinics and at over 80 sites throughout greater Boston.

~~ Over its 26 year history BHCHP has developed a care model that makes it a leader in urban medicine throughout the world…compassionate, professional care from a full-time staff…immeasurable savings in both dignity and dollars.

Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program: www.BHCHP.org

This article appears in the October, 2011 issue of Street Zine, which is available from licensed street vendors across Dallas.

Meditation and Anger

To sit [in meditation] is not enough.  We have to be at the same time.  To be what?  To be is to be a something, you cannot be a nothing.  To eat, you have to eat something, you cannot just eat nothing.  To be aware is to be aware of something.  To be angry is to be angry at something.  So to be is to be something, and that something is what is going on:  in your body, in your mind, in your feelings, and in the world.

While sitting, you sit and you are.  You are what?  You are breathing.  Not only the one who breathes — you are the breathing and the smiling.  It is like a television set of one million channels.  When you turn the breathing on, you are the breathing.  When you turn the irritation on, you are the irritation.  You are one with it.  Irritation and breathing are not things outside of you.  You contemplate them in them, because you are one with them.

If I have a feeling of anger, how would I meditate on that?  How would I deal with it, as a Buddhist, or as an intelligent person?  I would not look upon anger as something foreign to me that I have to fight, to have surgery in order to remove it.  I know the anger is me, and I am anger.  Non-duality, not two.  I have to deal with my anger with care, with love, with tenderness, with nonviolence.  Because anger is me, I have to tend my anger as I would tend a younger brother or sister, with love, with care, because I myself am anger, I am in it, I am it.  In Buddhism we do not consider anger, hatred, greed as enemies we have to fight, to destroy, to annihilate.  If we annihilate anger, we annihilate ourselves.  Dealing with anger in that way would be like transforming yourself into a battlefield, tearing yourself into parts, one part taking the side of Buddha, and one part taking the side of Mara.  If you struggle in that way, you do violence to yourself.  If you cannot be compassionate to yourself, you will not be able to be compassionate to others.  When we get angry, we have to produce awareness:  “I am angry.  Anger is in me.  I am anger.”  That is the first thing to do.

In the case of a minor irritation, the recognition of the presence of the irritation, along with a smile and a few breaths will usually be enough to transform the irritation into something more positive, like forgiveness, understanding, and love.  Irritation is a destructive energy.  We cannot destroy the energy;  we can only convert it into a more constructive energy.  Forgiveness is a constructive energy.  Understanding is a constructive energy.  Suppose you are in the desert, and you only have one glass of muddy water.  You have to transform the muddy water into clear water to drink, you cannot just throw it away.  So you let it settle for a while, and clear water will appear.  In the same way, we have to convert anger into some kind of energy that is more constructive, because anger is you.  Without anger you have nothing left.  That is the work of meditation.

                                                                                             ~~ Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace

“Abandon yourself entirely to God’s guidance.  Do not hesitate or be frightened.”

~~  Mother Teresa

Friends who read this blog have told me that the posts they like best are those that tell about the lives of people living on the street.  In that spirit, here’s an entry from my journal from 2009.  Prior to this encounter, Max was in recovery from an addiction, had a sponsor and was attending Twelve-Step meetings.

Journal Archives  

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Off the Wagon:  Max Revisited

Sitting on my patio this afternoon drinking a cup of tea in this beautiful weather, I thought about my friend, Max, and tears stung my eyes.  Everywhere I looked around the garden I saw his smiling face and bright blue eyes: in the fresh, green Vinca springing up by the gravel path, in the last of the rusty leaves still clinging to the Red Oak tree by the fence.

It’s funny:  you may not think about a person every day, but there’s a notch somewhere in your gut that fits neatly into place when you know they’re doing well, and that comes unhinged when they’re not.

There are joys without number in knowing and loving people who live on the street, but this is one of the costs.  Once you know, you can’t ‘not know’, and their troubles visit you even in the most peaceful moments.  On the other hand, the depth of their suffering, and sharing it with them, carves out a place in yourself where their loving spirits reside, and that is a gift beyond measure that also stays with you.

One day this week, I was crossing a downtown street with a friend and heard a voice calling out, “Hey, Mama!” in my direction.  It was Max, who grabbed me in a bear hug as I stepped up onto the curb and planted his characteristic kiss on my cheek, complete with the “Mmmm,MMM!” sound that people make when we kiss someone we haven’t seen in a while.  I hadn’t seen Max in about a month, and I almost didn’t recognize him from our most recent encounter.  This day, he was unshaven and disheveled, a different Max than I’d last seen, ‘spit-shined and polished’, as they say, with a new buzzed haircut of which he was proud.

“How’re you doing?” I asked him.  “Well, not so good,” he confessed, “I’ve slipped a little bit.  I’m having some trouble.”  I knew what he meant.  He’d been struggling with and — when last I saw him — succeeding in kicking his addition to crack cocaine.  At that time, he’d been more than three months ‘clean’ — not an easy thing when you’re on the street, because those who are willing to facilitate your return to your old life greet you out there at every turn, when you don’t have a door you can close to get away from them, clear your head and make a ‘right’ choice for yourself.

What I said to him was, “I’m so, so sorry about this.”  There is absolutely no point in a ‘tsk, tsk.’  For starters, like every other human being, I make bad decisions on a daily basis.  However, gratefully, I have the peace and quiet of a home within which to consider my options.

Also, I know well that the person who will be hardest on Max in this case is certain to be himself.  I have rarely met a person living on the street who falls back into an addiction and does anything other than take responsibility for it and heap blame and guilt on their own shoulders.  “I’m working to get back on track,” he told me.  “Max, I know you can do it, and I’ll be praying that you do.”  “Love you, Mama.”  “Love you, Max.”  We parted.

Max had been sleeping in The Bridge Homeless Assistance Center courtyard before it closed for sleeping December 1, 2008, and was one of the lucky ones who got into a shelter.  As long as he’s been sober, he’s been talking about securing a place in a drug rehabilitation program in Houston.

The sheer guts that it takes for a former addict to stay clean and sober for four months while spending his or her days on the streets of a big city is a lot more guts than most of us have.  Shelters put people outside around 6 A.M. and reopen for business around four in the afternoon, and this man works past the afternoon cut off.

Yet Max did it.  And I pray he can do it again.

KS

Dallas Area Cooling Centers

From The Stewpot blog:

http://www.thestewpot.org/blog.asp

Urgent Need in the Horn of Africa, Where Children are Dying of Hunger

I often focus on local homelessness and hunger on this blog, but the tragedy unfolding in Southern Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia is so gut-wrenching that I’m moved to pass along this information.  Night after night I listen to the BBC World Service, and, along with many of you I’m sure, weep at pictures on the nightly news of children dying in refugee camps — having arrived just a little too late to be saved from the ravages of malnutrition.

Mothers are walking for weeks to the camps, carrying their children, in order to try to survive. Many people are dying along the way.  It’s a truly desperate situation.

While it’s a fact that Somali rebels have stolen aid from agencies in the past, making some people hesitant to give, journalists are telling us that the rebels are yielding to local pressure and are letting aid through at this time.

Even a small amount helps:  for example, texting $10 to UNICEF (864233) will feed a child for 10 days.  Here is a link to organizations that are already on the ground there and need more help:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43841708/ns/nightly_news/

KS

Situations like this may be the thing that gives Dallas its sterling reputation nationwide.

Ignorance & Bigotry: 10 / Tolerance & Compassion: 0

Homeless man upset at being called a ‘bum’ by council member Hunt on Twitter

By KIM HORNER

Staff Writer

khorner@dallasnews.com

Published 08 July 2011 11:24 PM, Dallas Morning News

A homeless man who was photographed downtown and called a ‘bum’ in a recent tweet by Dallas City Council member Angela Hunt spoke out on Friday, saying that he has been demoralized by the incident.

‘I’m not a bum,’ said Julian Arredondo, 72, whose photograph appeared on the Internet, in the newspaper and on television news this week after Hunt expressed her frustration with the presence of homeless people at the Main Street Garden.

‘I don’t steal from nobody. I don’t bother nobody,’ Arredondo said.

The council member, who posted the photo link on Twitter last Saturday, raised concerns about camping, loitering and a ‘threatening environment’ at the downtown park. One of her tweets read: ‘I’m tired of bums in Main St. Garden. Counted 12-many sleeping. Where is DPD’ Where is Bridge”

Hunt said in interviews this week that she wanted the city to address how to encourage homeless people to use shelters and services. She could not be reached for comment Friday.

City Manager Mary Suhm said this week that police have received other complaints about the homeless at the park and that the city is working to address those issues.

Arredondo said he only visits the public park to sit on a bench or buy a sandwich at the cafe. At night, he sleeps on a mat in the unair-conditioned pavilion at The Bridge, Dallas’ homeless assistance center. The former construction worker said he cannot afford an apartment on his roughly $10,000 annual retirement income.

The great-grandfather also has a felony conviction, which makes it especially difficult to find housing. He became homeless for the first time in his life a year ago after serving two years in prison for assault with a deadly weapon. A Dallas police report from the March 2008 incident states that the victim was stabbed with a pocket knife. Arredondo said he was defending himself during a robbery.

The self-described ‘loner’ regularly meets with caseworkers at The Bridge and The Stewpot, hoping to find a place to live one day.

Arredondo said he was at the Main Street Garden last weekend when a man asked if he could take his photo but would not explain why. Arredondo said he was surprised later when others at The Bridge told him they saw him on the news.

‘They said, ‘Hey, you’re a movie star. You’re on TV,” he said.

Arredondo, who never learned to read after leaving elementary school to support his family by picking cotton and other crops, asked someone to read the news article to him. He says he feels ‘slandered.’

‘I can’t go nowhere. They say, ‘There he is,” he said, adding that he has not returned to the park.

Trina Taylor, a caseworker at The Stewpot, said she has been helping Arredondo rebuild his life for a year. She said that Arredondo does not panhandle, get into trouble, do drugs or drink.

‘Anything we’ve asked for, he’s done,’ Taylor said. ‘He’s a good guy.’

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/downtown-dallas/headlines/20110708-homeless-man-upset-at-being-called-a-bum-by-council-member-hunt-on-twitter.ece’ssimg=219614#

You Know You’re Vacationing With Family When…

… You walk into the kitchen and eat cold scrambled eggs off a plate without knowing or caring who they belonged to.

… You’re the loudest people in a public place and other people are looking at you while trying/pretending not to.  It may be exuberant joy, or it may be bickering, but your group is the loudest.

… You say one word or phrase, and everybody gets the joke.

… You say one word or phrase, and everybody gets offended.

… People feel free to offer you fashion advice unsolicited.  And definitely unsolicited.  Sometimes it sounds like, “Oh, God, Mom, NO!”

… One daughter says to the other meaningfully:  ”She bought a t-shirt.  In a bright color.”  The other daughter knows that means turquoise.

… You feel free to ignore people’s fashion advice, knowing they have to go in public with you anyway.

… You know just what to do to soothe a tired, hungry, grumpy grandchild.

… Nothing that anybody can do can soothe a tired, hungry, grumpy grandchild, and every attempt to do so irritates her/him even more… in the extreme.

… Every odd thing that anybody does you tend to see as evidence of family pathology, and almost certainly your fault.

… You think how you wished you’d forced the whole group into family counseling at an early age.

… Every adorable thing that anybody does you tend to see as evidence of your terrific parenting and your brilliant application of the child development books you read when they were young.

… You’re so glad your Healthy Family doesn’t need counseling.

… You congratulate yourself on telling your kids:  ”Follow your dreams!  Be yourself!  Speak your mind!”

… You wish your kids were a little more reluctant to speak their minds to you, and you wish they’d use “I feel” statements whenever they’re inclined to do so.

… You long to turn to someone and share the ‘beautiful-sunset moment.’  Everyone you can think of that you’d like to share it with is right there.

KS

I slept and dreamt that life was joy.  I awoke and saw that life was service.  I acted and behold, service was joy.

                                                                                                        ~~Rabindranath Tagore

Our Calling Needs Your Help!

Check out the new building and message from Founder and Director Wayne Walker on YouTube!!!

What a worthy organization!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uu8tAbcqODQ&feature=youtu.be&utm_source=OurCalling+Newsletter&utm_campaign=c1e48cd7ed-5-6-11&utm_medium=email

“A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.”

                                                                     ~~Martin Luther King

Mayoral Forum Held at The Stewpot This Week

The Stewpot of First Presbyterian Church, Dallas, held a mayoral forum Thursday, April 14, 2011 to give Dallas Mayoral candidates an opportunity to address questions regarding the concerns and well-being of Dallas homeless citizens.  Present at the event were vendors of the homeless newspaper Street Zine (published by The Stewpot), Stewpot and Crossroads Community Services staff, Bridge Homeless Assistance Center staff and homeless advocates.  The forum was organized by Street Zine Editor, Pat Spradley and other Stewpot staffers, and the candidates were invited to the event by homeless advocate Clare Nilson.

Panelists were former Dallas Police Chief, David Kunkle, and former Homeless Czar, Mike Rawlings. Candidates Ron Natinsky and Edward Okpa were invited but unable to attend.

The questions ranged from their support of sales of the homeless newspaper published by The Stewpot, Street Zine and the needs of homeless citizens generally, to questions about the Bridge Homeless Assistance Center, and specifics regarding the candidates’ opinions of so-called Quality of Life ordinances, passed by Dallas and other cities to limit the presence and movements of homeless citizens in public places.  Those attending learned about the opinions of the men regarding homelessness and a little of their personalities as well.

Everyone involved in the event is appreciative that the two candidates took time to attend and offer their perspectives on the important issues facing those experiencing homelessness in our city.  Much gratitude as well goes to Ms. Spradley, Ms. Nilson and the Rev. Dr. Bruce Buchanan, Executive Director of The Stewpot, as well as Stewpot staff, for hosting this event.

KS

Check the Street Zine Facebook page next week for an update on this important and informational event and see some pictures as well at :

www.facebook.com/pages/Street-Zine/157413954313713?sk=wall

“It’s not the load that breaks you down,

it’s the way  you carry it.”

~~ Lena Horne

Thinking of the people of Japan, who are carrying an almost incomprehensible burden with unimaginable courage and grace.  KS

‘Generic Ministry’ cares for Boston homeless in all weather

by Karen Shafer, February 10, 2011

“The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who who are in the shadows of life; the sick, the needy, and the handicapped.” -Hubert Humphrey, 1977

The Boston area has been slammed by an unusually large amount of snow this winter, even by New England standards — six snowstorms in a month — but that does not stop John Mark, Judi, Mick, Robert, Scott and the dedicated volunteers of Generic Ministry in the small town Needham, Massachusetts from hitting the streets of downtown Boston every Tuesday and Wednesday night to care for those who are homeless.  During a visit to my family in January, 2011, it was my privilege to ride along with this dedicated group for two nights in the midst of the some of Boston’s most extreme weather in years, and to learn a little bit about the situation for our homeless brothers and sisters in the Boston area.  Although Boston provides an adequate number of shelter beds for its homeless population, there are always people in any city who are ‘shelter resistant’ — unable or unwilling to cope with going into shelters, often due to mental illness and its ramifications.

The Generic Ministry van is equipped with shelves of warm clothing organized by size and type, with hanging racks of winter-worthy coats, with bins of socks, underwear and hygiene products, and with military surplus blankets, all of which are stocked and sorted twice weekly by a ‘behind-the-scenes crew’ made up of Robert (who also coordinates all contacts), Rick, and Scott, and by Martha, who finds online deals for the toiletries.  Sandwiches made by school children in Needham and adjacent towns are available, as are bottled water, juice, chips and desserts.

John Mark loads the van on a cold January night

Street feeding is not prohibited in Boston as it currently is in Dallas, and requires no registration or permit, but I was still surprised the first night when we pulled up right on the busy street next to the sidewalk across from Boston Common and opened up the van for the distribution of food and clothing.  The food giveaway is run by volunteers who themselves are formerly homeless, and they were waiting for us in front of a popular hamburger restaurant when we arrived.  Immediately about thirty people came out of nowhere and formed a line behind the truck to request warm clothing, while traffic on the busy street patiently drove around us.  Generic Ministry volunteer Mick filled orders for specific clothing items and sizes from inside the van.  Short a worker for manning the food line, Anthony and James, who head up the formerly-homeless volunteers, put me to work distributing food from a table on the sidewalk, although we had to search for a path through the snow bank, which was about waist high.  (By the time I left the area a week later, the snow banks were higher than your head!)

After everyone had been served, the remaining sandwiches, chips, desserts and bottled water were given to the formerly-homeless volunteers to distribute among people who sleep in train stations, doorways, alleyways, and on church steps throughout the city.  At this point there was ample time for visiting and street counseling.  The Generic Ministry volunteers have warm and mutually-respectful relationships with their street friends and seem to know them well.  They hand out cards printed with information about shelters, emergency services,  medical care and rehabilitation, but their service goes way beyond this.  If someone is in need of transportation to a shelter or the emergency room (there are three major hospitals in the area), they will transport them in their van — or call 911 if appropriate, and they keep track of the situations and challenges of individuals from week to week.

One of the people I’ll always remember from that first night is Harry.  He had brought with him a beautiful spiral bound notebook tied with ribbons, and I saw him ask John Mark for his signature.  It turns out he was collecting autographs in celebration of the life of Sargent Shriver and his advocacy for those living in poverty and with disabilities.  Then he pulled a twenty dollar bill from his pocket and gave it to John Mark as a donation for the ministry.

The next night, as we made the ministry’s usual stops around downtown Boston, Harry met us again at one of the locations to help out.  I was sitting in the front seat of the van with the door open, and he came up to say ‘hi’.  He was so cold that his teeth were chattering and he was shivering, as the temperature edged in the direction of zero for the second night in a row, but his dedication is such that he had gotten a ride from the halfway house where he lives in a small town outside of Boston to come and aid the ministry.  I offered him a blanket to wrap around himself, but he laughed as he declined it — “Oh, I’m not homeless!” he said.  John Mark later told me that Harry had collected clothing for his homeless brothers and sisters in the past and gotten a ride for the half-hour trip to the ministry headquarters to deliver it in person.

A highlight of the Wednesday night outing was a visit to the Pilgrim Church Homeless Shelter in Dorchester, Massachusetts, a neighborhood of Boston, where Generic Ministry delivers desserts weekly.  The shelter operates without guards, metal detectors or policing of any kind, except for the self-policing done by those who stay there, despite the fact that Pilgrim Center takes in men who have been banned from other area shelters.  Out of respect for those who were already bedded down for the night and those who were waiting in line to get in, I walked through quickly, but the order and calm of the shelter space — a church sanctuary with the pews removed — made a deep impression on me.

Later, outside on the snow-covered parking lot, I was introduced to the church’s pastor, The Rev. Mr. John Odams, and I asked him how the shelter works so well without guards.  “We used to have a policeman on duty, but he didn’t have anything to do,” he told me.  “I’m not sure why it works.  Maybe it’s because it’s more an atmosphere of a home than a shelter.”  A large number of those who stay at Pilgrim Shelter have aged out of foster care, not having been adopted by the age of eighteen, so the shelter is run under the direction of the United Homes Adult Services division of Children’s Services of Roxbury.

Keeping an eye on the weather, we left Dorchester and drove into downtown Boston.  An emergency weather declaration had been issued for Boston that night — with the expectation of a winter gale predicted for 9 P.M. and slated to bring at least an additional eight inches of snow on top of the approximately four feet that had already fallen this winter — which means any car blocking roads or impeding snowplows can be towed by the city at the owner’s expense.  As we drove around downtown, emergency vehicles were busy removing cars that had been left parked in order to make way for snow plows and sanding trucks.  Despite the amount of snow that had fallen in the last several weeks, the streets of downtown were clear of snow, having been plowed and sanded aggressively in preparation for the next round that night.

The ministry know the whereabouts of a number of individuals and groups who ‘sleep rough’ in the downtown area and makes about a dozen stops on its Wednesday night rounds.  In front of a downtown Seven-Eleven, we saw one of their ‘regulars’ — Sammy — sitting hunched over on a low windowsill.  Judi got out to check on him, while we pulled over by a snow bank and parked the van next to the sidewalk in the valet area of an elegant-looking restaurant.  I was surprised that no one asked us to move, though there were a number police cars cruising the area, as the streets were still actively being cleared of parked cars.  Judi came back to the van with the message that Sammy had a leg injury and wanted to go inside somewhere for the night, so together she and John Mark helped him into the van.  It had seemed at first that Sammy was willing to go into Pine Street Inn, a major Boston shelter, or to the hospital, but en route to the shelter he made the decision to go back to his camp in the back of a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority train station, so we took him there, and Judi and John Mark helped him limp inside.

Sammy had left Barbara McInnis House (which provides respite medical care for homeless men and women) against medical advice that same week, and, on our way to his camp, he and Judi discussed his plan for re-admittance.  I was struck again by the nonjudgmental and respectful-yet-realistic approach that Judi took with him, acknowledging his rights as an individual to make choices — good or bad — yet encouraging in a calm and supportive way the healthy choice of rehabilitation and medical care.  It is because of this non-patronizing approach that Generic Ministry — called ‘earth people’ by their homeless friends — has the trust and confidence of this extremely wary, at-risk population.

At one point we parked in a cab stand, and the cabbies waited patiently in line behind us as a small group of people lined up for clothing, blankets and sandwiches and we visited with them.  A prosperous-looking man walked by and stopped to watch what we were doing.  He looked at the ‘Generic Ministry’ name on the side of the van and nodded:  “I like it,” he said.

Mick & John Mark making the rounds after a snowstorm

As we continued our rounds, including a visit to another MBTA station encampment, I expressed my surprise that people are allowed to seek out and create their own shelter in the downtown Boston area, considering the restrictions on homeless people in Dallas and other cities and the amount of resources that many cities spend on policing to keep them off the street.  Here is a conversation from a Boston Herald article which seems to sum up the city’s approach towards it homeless citizens.  The article covers a high-profile homeless woman who refused to go indoors for this cold snap, saying she could handle this level of cold.

Homeless woman shuns shelter as temps turn deadly

By Christine McConville / The Pulse / Tuesday, January 25, 2011

http://bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1311794

“I’m not that cold,” she said, as she showcased her seven layers of clothing. “I can handle it.”Not possible, Boston police Superintendent in Chief Daniel Linskey told the Pulse. While police can’t force people off the streets, he said, he doubts the wisdom of testing the elements.  “This cold is a different type of cold. It’s lethal. You can have negative effects just being exposed to the elements for a few minutes,” Linskey said.

This weekend, the city ordered evening shelters to remain open during the day and relaxed requirements for other, sober-only facilities. There’s the obvious threat of frostbite and hypothermia, said Dr. James O’Connell, who provides medical care for Boston’s many homeless.  And in extreme weather conditions, chronic medical conditions can really tax the body, he said.  “There’s nothing good about staying outside in this,” he said.

Each year in Boston, one or two people die from the extreme cold, he said, numbers kept down by active campaigns to get people into shelters….

No one can force [the woman] indoors.  “It’s a tricky situation,” O’Connell said. “People have the right to live their life the way they want.”

Linskey agreed.  “If someone can show us their sleeping bag and a heat source, and they are lucid and have the method and manner to survive the cold weather, we would allow them that option, if what they are doing is legal,” Linskey said. “If they’re drunk or in harm, we can put them in protective custody, but mainly, we’re just looking for them to go to the shelter.”

Yesterday, the city’s push appeared to be largely working. The Pine Street Inn was setting up extra cots to accommodate the overflow crowd, shelter spokesman Barbara Trevisan said.

O’Connell said he’s seeing some patients indoors for the first time.  “There’s an elderly man in his mid 70s, and this weekend was the first time in 26 years I’ve seen him sleep in a bed, rather than a sidewalk,” he said. “With the bitter cold and all the snow, even though he struggles to be around other people, he realized it’s better to be inside.”

This article seems to represent a fundamentally different view of homeless issues and civil rights than what we are accustomed to seeing in many cities, and certainly in Dallas.  Perhaps it can be classified as ‘non-criminalization’.  One often hears about the ‘rights of individuals’, but this so often means that the rights of those who have financial means supersedes the rights of those who do not:  property owners, business owners and organizations of those who are housed are more likely to be heard than those who are disenfranchised and have nothing.

At our last stop, a small tent camp on Boston Harbor that had been in the news because of the city’s efforts to persuade people living there to come inside during the extreme cold, Judi and John Mark delivered some supplies to the campers on foot.  Then, as we began the drive home, we looked up at the Boston skyline, which was just beginning to be shrouded in a mist of snow.  “It’s here,” said John Mark, of the impending snowstorm.  It was making its appearance just over an hour past its predicted start time and had thankfully given us a grace period to complete our rounds.  By the time we reached my family’s house about twenty minutes away, the footprints that we’d left on the driveway just a few hours earlier were completely obscured by the steadily falling snow.

Generic Ministry, Needham, Massachusetts

www.genericministry.org

Pilgrim Church Homeless Shelter, Dorchester, Massachusetts

http://www.pilgrimchurch1862.org/ministrytothehomeless/pilgrimhomelessshelter.html

Pine Street Inn, Boston, Massachusetts

http://www.pinestreetinn.org/

Barbara McInnis House, Boston, Massachusetts

http://www.bhchp.org/specializedservices.htmhttp://www.bhchp.org/pdf/BMHBrochure-JYP.pdf

This article appeared in the March, 2011 issue of Street Zine. http://www.thestewpot.org/sz.asp

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

The Beach in Winter

I’ve always wanted to have a vacation right on the beach.  Although I have to be somewhere close to the world’s worst ‘googler’, I’ve hopefully searched beaches in various locations online for years looking for an affordable cottage where I could step out my door in the morning and onto the sand, cup of coffee in hand.  But until this past week, the dream had alluded me.

Half of my family recently moved to the Boston area, and when I visited them last week, the amount of snow there — around 70 inches and rising since Christmas — was a novelty for me, and I quite enjoyed it (I didn’t have to shovel it!).  Those who live there, however — and natives among them — are pretty adamant at this point that they’re ready for a break.  So we (my daughter, son-in-law and two grand kids) escaped the head-high snowbanks of the city and went to Cape Cod for the weekend.

The Cape had received snow as well, but much less than Boston.  I am not a fan of crowds, so a midwinter view of the Atlantic seemed to fit the bill, and this is the only time of year I can afford the rentals!  My daughter, Mandy, an expert online searcher, found the beach house of my dreams.  And since I’m now of an age to have a Bucket List and this sort of trip was on it, I was able to cross an item off my list.

The beauty of the beach half covered in snow and of the ocean in winter were breathtaking.  But the most important thing was time spent watching the kids and their parents in their winter coats, gloves and hats out on the beach, just past the dunes and the snow line, searching for shells and building sand castles, climbing on the rock jetty, and watching my daughter, a nature photographer, walking the beach taking pictures.  When I went down to the beach, bundled up against the wind, I sat for a long time on the sand and the rocks, soaking up the beauty.  To my surprise, it was much warmer by the water than anywhere else.

A highlight was when we discovered that if you stand on the porch and throw bits of bread into the air, the space around you will suddenly fill with sea gulls, and they will hover right in front of you and catch their treats in midair!  My grandson did this by the hour.  And I got my dream of sitting on the porch in winter gear with my oldest daughter, drinking our morning coffee, the temperature just above freezing.  It was fantastic.

I should let the pictures of the beach and ocean speak for themselves.  But I will say that the people I met on Cape Cod were some of the kindest and friendliest I’ve met anywhere.  We had one of what the grownups agreed was in the ‘Top Five” dinners of our lives at the Blue Moon Bistro in Dennis Village, and the Irish breakfasts and French toast mounded with fruit at Keltic Kitchen and at the Hearth and Kettle in West Yarmouth defied description.  (Leave it to me to go straight to food as looming large in the ‘happy memories’ category.)

Although I crossed something off my Bucket List after this trip, it didn’t get any shorter.  After I put a check next to, ‘Stay right on the beach and drink hot tea, coffee or cocoa on the porch,’ I went straight to the bottom of the list and added:  ‘Do it again.’

KS

The beach at dusk

Beach lighthouse

Feeding the gulls from the porch

A seagull hovering in midair to catch a treat

A fishing boat at Chatham, the 'elbow' of the Cape

Sunset

“You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people.  In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”

~~ Thomas Merton

Psalm 140

Deliver Me, O Lord, from Evil Men

To the choirmaster. A Psalm of David.

1 Deliver me, O Lord, from evil men;

preserve me from violent men,

2 who plan evil things in their heart

and stir up wars continually.

3 They make their tongue sharp as a serpent’s,

and under their lips is the venom of asps. Selah

4 Guard me, O Lord, from the hands of the wicked;

preserve me from violent men,

who have planned to trip up my feet.

5 The arrogant have hidden a trap for me,

and with cords they have spread a net;

beside the way they have set snares for me. Selah

6 I say to the Lord, You are my God;

give ear to the voice of my pleas for mercy, O Lord!

7 O Lord, my Lord, the strength of my salvation,

you have covered my head in the day of battle.

8 Grant not, O Lord, the desires of the wicked;

do not further their evil plot, or they will be exalted! Selah

9 As for the heads of those who surround me,

let the mischief of their lips overwhelm them!

10 Let burning coals fall upon them!

Let them be cast into fire,

into miry pits, no more to rise!

11 Let not the slanderer be established in the land;

let evil hunt down the violent man speedily!

12 I know that the Lord will maintain the cause of the afflicted,

and will execute justice for the needy.

13 Surely the righteous shall give thanks to your name;

the upright shall dwell in your presence.

Dallas agency runs out of money to provide free heaters

Christmas Truffles Revisited

(and not the kind that grow in the woods)

It’s a Christmas tradition for my three grandchildren and me to bake decorated sugar cookies together.  I prepare the dough the night before and have it well chilled when they arrive the next afternoon.  Then, each of them armed with a rolling pin or an improvised version of same, we roll, cut out, and sprinkle the cookies to our hearts’ content.

Generally, their mothers, my daughters, look on and expedite the creative process by shuttling trays of tree-, angel-, Santa-, star-, heart-, reindeer-, teddy bear-, stocking- and blob-shaped cookies from our decorating table into and out of the oven.  Inevitably in the process, portions of dough are eaten or dropped on the floor, and sometimes both. Consequently, their mothers are generally somewhat reluctant to eat what the grand kids and I bake.

When we’ve finished, our workspace and ourselves look as if we’ve been hit by the remnants of a flour, chocolate sprinkles, and colored-sugar explosion.  Louis, Cora and Anna are now eight, eight and six, but we’ve done this since they were much younger, and the younger the children, the exponentially larger the mess.

This year, though, two of these fabulous fellow cookie bakers, Louis and Anna, have moved to Boston with their mom and dad, Mandy and Arnaud, where they are having a wonderful, new kind of Christmas — one that involves a fluffy and pristine blanket of snow, a caring circle of friends, special traditions of service to those in need, and some serious snowball fights!  So this year Cora and her mom, Rose, still Dallasites, came over with the idea of executing what I thought was my brilliant innovation:  making chocolate Christmas truffles for our family and friends (and ourselves, too, of course.)

I was prepared with recipes copied and printed from the Martha Stewart Living web site for chocolate ganache and truffles.  (Pretty much every item I cook during the holidays is a Martha.)  I had bought some good quality bittersweet chocolate and some organic cream and gathered together all of the toppings in which we’d roll our lovely and [in my mind] spherical ganache delicacies:  cocoa powder, cinnamon, hand-crushed almonds and pecans, powdered sugar, and even some green-tinted sugar and multicolored sprinkles (yes, artificial dyes, but it’s Christmas!)

Cora and her mom arrived, and we made the ganache.  Cora is a marvelous kitchen presence, as, like me, she marvels at the changes in ingredients with the application of heat and mixing, which I like to talk about in terms of laywoman’s ‘physics’, trying to incorporate the teensiest academic reference into our process.  So we oohed and aahed as Cora poured the bubbling hot cream over the chocolate bits and began to whisk them together, as we watched them began to swirl around and then blend, transforming themselves magically from a liquid and a solid into a glorious, incorporated silky brown goo.  Mama Rose pitched in with the whisking.

Then we poured out the ganache carefully into pie plates to cool, as advised by Martha, refrigerated it and went off to run an errand.

But not quite a long-enough errand, it seemed to us later.

When we came home, Cora and I excitedly assembled our truffle-making supplies:  white lotus-petaled bowls of my mother’s individually filled with various sugars, cinnamon and cocoa powder.  Cora armed herself with the melon baller and me with the coffee scoop.  We removed the ganache from the ‘fridge — it looked glossy and solid.  Powdering our hands with cocoa powder (per Martha again), Cora carefully broke the surface of the ganache with her scoop and ladled it into her hand in order to form it into a ball and roll it in a topping.  Then, slowly but quite unstoppably, the lovely chocolate mixture oozed through her fingers and drizzled itself in streams into a contented puddle on top of the nest of cocoa powder.

“Awwww, mannnn!” we said in unison.

But we were undeterred.  Experimenting, Cora figured out that with handfuls of cocoa powder, she could make her ‘truffles’ resemble a melty semi-semi-semi-solid.  My process involved ladling scoops of the mixture onto a plate, then sprinkling the liquidy blob with a topping.

When Rose came into the room to see our results, she tried hard to compliment us, but could really only say, “OOooooohhhh…  Wow.”

Still, sort of like the quintessential ‘visions of sugarplums’ one hears about, visions of the elegant truffles Cora and I would make, nestle into small boxes I’d collected, and give out to neighbors and friends as Christmas gifts (and, of course, ship off to Boston) had danced in my head for weeks.  So after Rose and Cora went home, I surveyed the results of our splendid effort and felt it would just be wrong to go down in defeat.  ”But I just wanted them to look pretty and round,” I whined to myself.

I re-refrigerated the chocolate blobbies, and, when I looked at them later, the magic of physics had indeed begun to reassert itself.  There was a subtle but noticeable change in their surface, from glossy to dull.  At last, they seemed to be ‘setting up’, so I gently reshaped them into balls, re-rolled them in their toppings, and laid them gingerly back on their plate in a picturesque pattern:  a cinnamon, a white sugar, a cocoa powder, a ground pecan.

And so, if you’re on our Christmas list, beware:  you may in fact be receiving Truffles Revisited.

KS

P.S.  I just ate one…  OK, three.  Believe it or not, they’re actually quite good if one doesn’t think too much about the process.

P.P.S.  In a wonderful irony, Santa just delivered a gift at my house (don’t know how he did it and kept up his rounds — NORAD has him tracked in Australia around this time) with a gift of Lake Champlain Handmade Organic Truffles from my Boston family!  The Lemon Ginger I just ate was yummmm.

Empty Streets

Last night I realized that this is the first year in many that I haven’t given away my winter coat, hat and gloves to someone living on the street.  However, lest this admission be seen as my attempt to cast myself as St. Karen for past impulsive generosity — the same sort of thing I’ve often seen other advocates do — I’ll quickly add that this year’s new self-care feels good.  I ordered a good wool coat from a catalog in early fall and am wearing it right now — indoors, sitting in a cafe.  And I fully intend to keep it with me until spring.

However, if I were inclined to drive around in downtown Dallas, as I’ve done for the past seven winters, and look for people who are out on the street and in need of warm clothing in order to give them something to wear or a blanket, I’d be hard put to find them.  The streets of our fair city are pristine these days late at night — free from those in need or want and, for that matter, of everyone else.

Last week I attended a lecture near downtown that ended around 10 P.M., so I drove through the central business district afterward — past The Stewpot, past The Bridge, past Austin Street Shelter.  It was cold, but not bitter, so there was no one waiting on the sidewalk outside The Bridge for ‘overflow’ to go into effect due to cold weather policy, and I saw only two people, walking quickly, on the streets.  At Austin Street last winter in my ’rounds’, I always found between five and twenty people sleeping either on the sidewalk or in the parking lots adjacent to the shelter.  But this year all of those areas are fenced in, and there was nary a backpack, sleeping bag or plastic-grocery-sack suitcase to be found.

I’d like to think this is a result of the unstinting efforts of homeless service providers and advocates to solve the problem of homelessness in Dallas — that we are a glistening city, a beacon on a hill, because there are no longer any homeless people in the downtown area.  But, as the newly-strengthened panhandling ordinances passed by the Dallas City Council show us, we are still, in Dallas, extremely concerned about the appearance of things, and I think the empty streets are much more likely to be a result of policing.  Our unhoused brothers and sisters are still with us.  They just don’t dare show themselves on the streets of downtown at night.

I’ve written about this in the past, so I won’t repeat my thoughts here.

http://www.pegasusnews.com/news/2010/feb/22/dallas-homeless-sweeps-are-counterproductive/

http://www.pegasusnews.com/news/2010/jul/13/dallas-be-great-city-must-we-all-look-alike/

But, like many others, I’m concerned that the creation of new ‘solicitation-free zones’ in the expanded ordinance has at its heart a deeper purpose than the desire to protect the middle class and the tourist who are visiting downtown from aggressive and ‘vewy scawey’ panhandling homeless people, and I worry about its application in practice.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/tv/stories/DN-panhandle_11met.ART.State.Edition1.27fee36.html

Here’s a quote from the Dallas Morning News article above:

“Bradley Kizzia, an attorney for Groden, said he is concerned the ordinance is written so broadly that the city could use it to crack down anytime on people like his client.

Groden was arrested in June for selling conspiracy theory merchandise in Dealey Plaza without authorization. He has sued the city, arguing his free speech rights were infringed.

“Nowhere in the [amended ordinance] does it even mention begging or panhandling. Rather, the ordinance is specifically aimed at ‘solicitation,’ which is broadly defined. I’m suspicious of the city’s intent and how the Dallas Police Department will be asked to apply the ordinance,” Kizzia wrote in a recent e-mail.

Kizzia said the ordinance appears to be tied to the Super Bowl and could be used to round up any number of people the city doesn’t want on the streets.

“The language of the ordinance’s prohibition on ‘solicitation’ is not aimed only at aggressive, coercive, or threatening conduct. Watch it be used against the likes of street musicians in the West End (who leave open their instrument cases for tips) and street preachers who accept donations,” he wrote.

First Assistant City Attorney Chris Bowers said the ordinance is targeted to panhandlers who work the streets for handouts.”

How will such a broadly written ordinance be interpreted by city officials, and how will it play out to those trying to survive on the streets?  It remains to be seen.

I can’t help feeling, as I reflect on the last seven years during which homelessness in Dallas has been an issue to which I’ve paid attention:  we just don’t get it in Dallas, and we never will.

KS

He looked at his own Soul with a Telescope.  What seemed all irregular, he saw and shewed to be beautiful Constellations;  and he added to the Consciousness hidden worlds within worlds.

~~ Coleridge, Notebooks

This post is in honor of my dad, Louis Shafer, whose birthday is today.  He was the bravest, kindest, funniest human being I’ve every known — the best friend a girl could ever have.  I will ALWAYS miss him.  KS

A Prayer

Refuse to fall down.

If you cannot refuse to fall down,

refuse to stay down.

If you cannot refuse to stay down,

lift your heart toward heaven,

and like a hungry beggar,

ask that it be filled,

and it will be filled.

You may be pushed down.

You may be kept from rising.

But no one can keep you

from lifting your heart

toward heaven –

only you.

It is in the middle of misery

that so much becomes clear.

The one who says nothing good

came of this,

is not yet listening.

~~ C. P. Estes

Here’s a beautiful letter and appeal from Brian Burton, Executive Director of The Wilkinson Center.  It speaks for itself.

Blessed

Brave people walk through our doors every day. Listen for five minutes to the wide ranging narrative of stories shared by the newly poor, working poor and homeless people, and you will agree.

One of my first awakenings here was walking through the hallways and asking people waiting for food, “How are you today?” Their consistent response surprised me. Despite a life lacking in possessions, safety, security, employment, health or even shelter, I heard them reply to my question over and over, “I’m blessed.”

Often the statement rolls off the tongues of bodies crippled by years of neglect and abuse. Some manage to smile or raise their hand above their head, as though they have discovered a place of solace and hope.

No matter how bad things get for the “I’m blessed” crowd, their attitude transcends circumstances and plucks hope out of thin air. “Tomorrow will be better, things will work out,” they explain to my disbelieving face.

The State of Texas is about to balance much of its galactic deficit on their backs, and yet these “I’m blessed” neighbors will, as they always do, forgive and love the rest of us. Mitigated by faith and our best attempts to “serve” them, they will make their own way with God, step by step, day by day, facing hardship and struggles inconceivable to me.

Indeed, they have discovered a place of solace and hope. It is a place accessible only when all else has been stripped away: a deep overflowing reservoir of faith in God and an implacable belief in a better tomorrow.

This Thanksgiving, given the anxiety that hangs thick in the air we breathe, it behooves us all to tap into that place of faith these neighbors have found so abundantly. In return for guiding us there, the least we could do is to thank them by sharing the resources we have that will make their hopes for a better tomorrow come true.

Thanks for giving,

Brian Burton

http://mywilkinsoncenter.org/

Faulkner on Fear

‘[The writer] must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.’

~~  William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Speech

“Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.  It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life.  If you haven’t had that what have you had?”

~~Henry James, from the Preface of The Ambassadors

I’ve developed a newfound passion for and obsession with the writings of Henry James after randomly picking from my bookshelf last week his The Portrait of a Lady.  I’m not sure how I’ve missed out on him all these years, except for random exposure to snippets of his work in high school and at university.  Nightly, however, full of awe, I read his characterizations with the awareness that I am in the presence of a master of insights into the workings of the human mind and heart and the quirks of human behavior.  There’s a reason these sorts of stories survive the decades — in this case over a century.  KS

The Stewpot ‘In House’ Art Sale Is This Saturday!

You are invited to attend The Stewpot “In House” September Art Sale on Saturday, September 25th, 3 pm – 8 pm in the 2nd Floor Gallery at The Stewpot.

This is a unique opportunity to view and purchase our homeless and at-risk friends artistic creations including acrylic paintings, water colors, oil pastels, mixed media works, jewelry, ceramics and more.

Most of the work will be on sale, with a portion of the work priced between 50% and 90% off!

90% of each sale goes to the artist with 10% going to buy more art supplies.

The “In House” September Art Sale will be at The Stewpot, 1822 Young Street, Dallas, TX 75201, across the street from 1st Presbyterian Church Dallas. Free parking provided.

Questions about the Sale or the Art Program? Please contact Stewpot Art Program Director Cynthia Brannum, cynthiab@thestewpot.org, 214-746-2785, ext. 235.

Jean Jones
Director of Volunteer Services
The Stewpot & Second Chance Cafe
- a community ministries program of 1st Presbyterians Church Dallas
214-746-2785, ext. 320
jean.jones@thestewpot.org
www.thestewpot.org

Conversations in Brief

I have a friend who is unhoused, and I fear he always will be.  He’s been given a ‘diagnosis’ — a label for a mental disorder — but he doesn’t necessarily know this, or prefers not to acknowledge it.  To get housing, he’d have to sign away his sanity in order to qualify for disability payments, and this is something he’s either unable or unwilling to do.

When I read comments on blogs about ‘the homeless,’ and hear them described by bitter commenters as ‘bums, no-goods, get-a-job,’ I think how my friend would be someone they’re referring to if they just saw him on the sidewalk.  Except he worked all his life.  He also attended the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M, excelling in physics and chemistry, and served in the military.  But somewhere along the line his mother died, and things in his mind and emotions began to unravel.  His last job, which he did faithfully, was drinks manager at a Sonic Drive-In.

The fog deepened.  Before long, he was on the street.

I think about him often, worry about him, too.  When the homeless-haters talk about the drunks and addicts on the street, I think of how my friend is clean and sober.  When they talk about the thugs that are the homeless, I recall his gentleness and non-violence.

I brought him a new coat during the cold winter weather last year, and as he was transferring his belongings from his filthy torn jacket to the new one, I saw that he had one possession — a tattered pocket-sized New Testament.

How does he survive out there in the hellish land of street life?  It’s hard to imagine and painful to ponder.  I question him about it, but his answers, as always, reveal little.  Enigmatic to a point.  I asked him recently if he felt safe.  ”Not really,” he said.  Not too long ago, he had a bad wound on his forearm, and I wanted to know what happened.  ”I don’t remember,” he replied.  But I can’t push for more.  He can’t tolerate a lot of conversation.  This summer I asked, “How are you in this heat?”  ”Hot,” he said.  Last winter I wanted to know, “How were you during the snow last week?”  ”Well, cold,” was his reply — two words!  That’s an improvement.  I’ve known him about four years, and it’s taken our conversation that long to progress to this level.

Today I sat beside him in a meeting where Parkland Hospital was being discussed.  ”Do you use Parkland?” I leaned over and whispered to him.  He must not have heard me right, because he turned and looked me full in the eye [he usually communicates only sideways and in murmurs] and replied, emphatically and perhaps a little testily, “PARKLAND.  MEMORIAL.  HOSPITAL.”  He apparently thought that I was either fairly dense or hard of hearing.  I didn’t give up, though:  ”I know, but do you use it?”  (One has to hold one’s own.)  He went into a brief and mumbled explanation — something to do with ‘phases’ — but the words trailed off and I couldn’t hear them.

His fingernails today were long but very clean (a first), but his t-shirt was quite grubby.  I’d luckily brought along a new t-shirt for him from Target in a dark gray, because it will probably need to go at least a month without washing.

“Where do you eat?” I asked him recently.  ”Nowhere.”  ”Well, how do you get by?”  ”Oh, Pepsodent helps.”  [Three words!]  I burst out laughing, and he did, too.  Eating toothpaste?  A little street/gallows humor.  So once in a while I’ll bring along a sack of fruit cups and those little tins of tuna salad with crackers.  Today I had some fresh organic bananas, which he pulled out and ate on the spot.  One day, I stuck in a couple of croissants.  ”Oh, croissants!” he said, delighted.  Two words again.

I feel very powerless about my friend sometimes, because I am powerless.  I often fall back into the old trap of wanting to ‘fix it.’  I can’t, though.  On a good day, I can take that step beyond fixing it and fall headlong into Grace, landing on banks of beautiful, towering, white, fluffy cumulus clouds, like the ones on greeting cards that talk about Heaven, and genuinely trust that everything will be fine.

Other days, I repeat to myself (not necessarily believing it and certainly not being able to live by it), ‘If you pray, don’t worry.  If your worry, don’t pray,’ a misquote, I believe, of Martin Luther.

On yet other days, I realize that to be near my friend — in his presence — is to know God directly.  I don’t have to do anything — just show up and realize that Love has shown up, too.

The hard part of being his friend is accepting that I can do nothing — letting go of expectations, forgetting that he’s a genius with unfulfilled ‘potential’, not expecting ‘progress’ on some sort of pie-in-the-sky bar chart.  ’Progress’ may come, or it may not.  However, it is not up to me.  But our culture doesn’t really allow for the possibility of not ‘moving up,’ does it?  Not ‘taking the pills’ in order to ‘get well’ or at least ‘function at an acceptable level’ in order to ‘fit in’?  Most of the time, neither do my own built-in biases.  This friendship constantly challenges me to see life…  not in gradesABCDF…  or dollars1to7figures… or positionsdirectorofsomething… or contributionsinkindfinancialgivingofyourtalentsandabilities — but as something that can just be still, and be more than OK — be holy and sacred.

KS

Recipe:  Your Tax Dollars at Work

Take: one group of faithful Christians from the Korean Church on a recent Sunday

Add: homeless individuals on the streets of downtown Dallas who are hungry and thirsty

Stir gently.

Toss in: food, conversation, loving concern

Let steep at approximately 105 degrees for 15 or 20 minutes.

Add some chilled bottled water.

Stir again.

Let spirits rise.

Bake at somewhere in the neighborhood of 110 degrees heat index.  It is best to cook this in the late afternoon on hot asphalt or concrete.

Just as the recipe is put into the oven, add 9 police cruisers, a paddy wagon and an ambulance.  (Ambulance may be required in case the police cruisers, paddy wagon, homeless citizens and church members don’t combine properly.)

Arrest first two ingredients — homeless people and church members — before they combine completely and something good happens.

Take all to jail and run their names to check for warrants. Be especially careful of the church members, as they can be an explosive, dangerous ingredient, doing good deeds where they may be unwarranted.

Release those ingredients which don’t have warrants.  Put the remaining ingredients in containers.  (Beware:  containers may already be overfilled.)

Yield: your tax dollars at work during an historic budget crisis in Dallas in which about 440 city employees will be laid off.  Though no one in the fire or police departments will be laid off, they will likely be required to take five furlough days by the fiscal year’s end.

http://cbs11tv.com/local/proposed.dallas.budget.2.1851343.html

KS

To Be A Great City, Must We All Look Alike?

Recently I received an e-mail from a Dallas church leader whom I greatly respect, and it contained this statement regarding people who are homeless in Dallas: “We don’t want them on our streets.  We don’t want them in our neighborhoods.  We can’t have it both ways.”

The debate on how and where homeless citizens will be housed has long been debated nationally, and the fight of neighborhoods to exclude homeless housing even has its own acronym:  NIMBY — Not In My Backyard.  This conversation in Dallas has recently become more open and heated because of a dispute between the agencies representing homeless citizens — in particular, the Dallas Housing Authority and The Bridge Homeless Assistance Center — and homeowner / business associations in North Oak Cliff, over the city’s plan to house up to one hundred homeless individuals in Cliff Manor.  WhiIe painful, the discussion is also desirable, because it is leading to a higher-profile airing of the many sides of the Permanent Supportive Housing issue.

For me, it brings to mind a question that is not always asked:  why do we object so vehemently to seeing poor people on our streets and in our neighborhoods, and is this objection reasonable?  Is having our streets free of ‘the poor’ a desirable goal?

I am reminded of several visits I made to Paris, France, several years ago when one of my daughters studied and worked there.  I found it to be the most exhilarating and beautiful place I’d ever been — architecturally stunning, and fascinating in its diversity.  The thrilling, dizzying mix of all sorts of people — on the streets, in the crowded cafes, rushing into the Metro; reading, sitting, lying on the grass; running, walking, cycling; old men and kids bowling in the parks — these things make it a vigorous, animated city, and I fell for it the first time I was driven through its environs by my future son-in-law.

I especially liked walking in the evening to the Champ de Mars, the park in front of the Eiffel Tower.  There I saw families picnicking, dogs chasing Frisbees, and people of every description playing games or music — even juggling fire!  Those gathered at day’s end in the large open grassy space are poor and rich, dressed up and dressed simply.

When I compare life in Paris with my experiences working with homeless people in Dallas for the last six and a half years, one particular difference leaps to mind.  Cities across America, including Dallas, continue to develop and implement strategies to get people who are homeless out of sight.  These include passing special laws that target homeless individuals — ‘sleeping in public,’ ‘criminal trespass,’ ‘blocking the sidewalk,’ — so-called ‘Quality of Life’ ordinances for which a person in business clothing would not be ticketed but which allow police to pinpoint those who ‘look homeless’ and try to hustle them from view.

We all know how the Quality-of-Life-Ordinance story concludes:  tickets that cannot be paid by homeless individuals, warrants for their arrest, jail terms which make their complicated life situation even more challenging, the filling of jails with people who are in fact generally not a social threat.  This much-written-about practice of shifting the homeless from emergency services to prison to back on the street is not only the costliest way of doing business, it’s utterly inhumane, because so many of the homeless are mentally ill and do not belong in jail.  So the people authorities want to get rid of haven’t gone anywhere, only now they have more obstacles to overcome in order to get their lives together.  It makes no sense at all.

While we strive here to keep our homeless citizens out of public view by enforcing these laws, in Paris no one was being ticketed for lying on the grass of the park or sitting on its benches, because everybody does these things — talking, laughing, singing, sleeping.  Yet, somehow that city has a spectacular ‘quality of life’ because its public life is vibrant and diverse.

I have come to realize that by trying to control the access of our least fortunate citizens to places and aspects of our common city life, we are attempting to create an environment that is homogeneous and sterile rather than one that is vital and alive.  Could this be a reason why revitalization in downtown Dallas continues to lag?  Is it really interesting to interact with and observe only people who are polished and look as though they just breezed in from ritzy a suburban mall?

The homeless are with us.  When we don’t see them, it is only because they have been forced into hiding.  We are creating a deceptive level of comfort for ourselves by forcing from view people who make us uncomfortable in their poverty.

The desire for homogeneity in communities used to manifest itself primarily in terms of skin color: Jim Crow laws, segregation.  While racism is still a significant problem in our country, now it seems that we at least pay lip service to the desirability of racial diversity, and civil rights laws are in place to enforce equal rights and give access to the judicial system when they are violated.  Whether you believe that racism has gone underground or has actually decreased, it’s still apparently acceptable to shun people because of their economic situation, especially when it comes to individuals who ‘look homeless.’  What is wrong with having people on the streets of our cities who may be dressed in clothing and groomed in a manner that is not ‘up to’ our middle class standards?  It seems to me that successful cities are not merely hothouses designed only for the rich and well-heeled.  A great city is a place where all kinds of people can live, as well as simply ‘be’ — not only people who look or dress a certain way.

Perhaps it would be a good thing if the current discussion, which began by a debate over the location of Permanent Supportive Housing for people experiencing homelessness, precipitated an identity crisis for us as a city and led us to look at ourselves both deeply and objectively.  Is it possible for us to step back and re-invision the Dallas of tomorrow from a different perspective?  Does our vision for ourselves really need to include having our streets free of everyone who doesn’t ‘look like us’?

Recently at Dallas City Council, two homeless women in attendance at the public meeting were asked by an advocate to stand.  Outraged, a city leader said he felt ‘ambushed.’  One puzzles as to what could possibly motivate such a statement.  Perhaps seeing people who are poor being called attention to in a meeting (a meeting that is in fact open to everyone) is offensive to some because it puts a human face on homelessness.  When we see and come to know people who are ‘poor’ as fellow human beings, it’s no longer quite as easy to marginalize them.  Once we see their humanity and recognize it as identical to our own, we may realize: it’s not ‘us and them’.  These could be our neighbors and our friends.

What is the cost to us as a city when we pursue policies that exclude a certain group of people from public life?  Besides the vibrancy which comes from diversity, at risk is also the greater good of the city — its moral fiber, its wholeness, its ability to address and solve hard problems such as homelessness.

I’ll bring up a point that I’ve not heard mentioned as we’re swept along in the tide of this essential and critically important battle to provide housing for 700 to 1000 long-term, street-dwelling homeless people in Dallas:  there will be a few people — a few — who will not want to go into housing, even though the vast majority want very much to be housed.  Therein lies a hidden danger in having as our goal city streets that are pristine in the sense of being homeless-and-beggar-free. It is important that our success in housing people does not become a further excuse to persecute those who are unable or unwilling to be housed.  It is not a ‘blight’ to see people on the streets of our town who ‘look homeless’ — ie, poor — but it is truly tragic when people desperately want housing and are unable get it.

We have to be wary of having as our goal a city which is visibly free of ‘poor’ people if the impetus for that goal is the desire within ourselves to live insulated lives, free of the necessity to view the suffering of others.

As the Dallas public becomes increasingly educated through informed public dialogue about the benefits of Permanent Supportive Housing, perhaps holding in our hearts an honor for our differences can help us understand that those who have had a very different life path from our own can still be excellent neighbors.

It is not easy or simple to walk the path of reaching out to those who are down on their luck by including rather than excluding them from public life, because when we do this, we share in their pain, and we may become temporarily uncomfortable.  But the upside is that our lives will be richer and more meaningful by far when we embrace our differences and realize that we are all — rich, poor, and in between — much greater and finer than we ever dreamed when we are able to work and live together.

KS

This article appears in the July, 2010 edition of Street Zine. http://www.thestewpot.org/

and on Pegasus News.com: http://www.pegasusnews.com/news/2010/jul/13/dallas-be-great-city-must-we-all-look-alike/?refscroll=13

The Medium Is the Message

“McLuhan understood “medium” in a broad sense. He identified the light bulb as a clear demonstration of the concept of “the medium is the message”. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that “a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.” ~~ Wikipedia

Marshall McLuhan is right.  And that is primarily what I took away from the Town Hall Meeting at Methodist Hospital this past Monday night over the city’s plan to house up to 100 homeless individuals in Oak Cliff Manor.  The [forgive the hyperbole] rabid [forgive the hyperbole again] mob mentality became the message — and the incivility [ understatement] of many in the group was, tragically, mostly what many of us gleaned from the interchange.  Whatever valid points were made by ‘the O.C.’ and its more rational, civil residents were lost in the cat calls and shouting down of speakers by the more outspoken [understatement also] representatives of the neighborhood.  I would have been deeply embarrassed to have them represent me, and I think many of the reasonable Oak Cliff residents may have felt the same.

You can keep up with the unfolding drama here:

http://dallashomelessnetwork.blogspot.com/

Meanwhile, a message from the thesaurus:

Uncivil:  ’Lacking in social refinement’

Synonyms:  rude, discourteous, disgracious, disrespectful, ill, ill-bred, ill-mannered, impertinent, impolite, incivil, incondite, inurbane, mannerless, uncalled-for, uncourteous, uncouth, ungracious, unhandsome, unmannered, unmannerly, unpolished, brusque, crusty, curt, gruff, harsh, intrusive, meddlesome, crabbed, surly, boorish, churlish, clownish, loutish

That doesn’t say it all, but it’s a start.

KS

Wayne Walker and ‘Our Calling’

I first met Wayne Walker a number of years ago on the parking lot of the then-city-shelter, The Day Resource Center.  It was a Friday night, and, as they did every Friday night, he and his group of fellow church members were serving a delicious hot dinner to around three hundred of Dallas homeless citizens.  They’d allowed me to join them to give away some gently used clothing I’d collected.

After dinner and the clothing giveaway, we all joined hands for a prayer circle, as people took turns praying aloud — for help with housing, with mental illness or addiction challenges, with family problems, or intercessory prayer for loved ones not present.  Everyone seemed to feel free to pour out their hearts with unfettered honesty, because it was clear that here — among this group that went by the name ‘Our Calling’ — people who were accustomed to being judged harshly in society were accepted and loved for exactly who they were.

It surprised me, because Wayne and his group were prosperous-looking, middle-class folks, many from North Dallas, and I wasn’t accustomed to seeing this kind of unconditional love for my street friends from folks who were ‘housed.’  In the coming months, I too would pour out my heart in prayer in front of this extremely diverse group, would (to my embarrassment) begin to cry in front of them over some private heartache, and would find myself lifted up in love by many hands on my shoulders — some weathered from living outdoors and some smooth.

It didn’t take long to realize:  here was Christian Love-In-Action — the way it’s ‘spozed to be’ [to borrow from the title of a book I like a lot.]  All my [unjust] stereotypes of North Dallas churches were swept away.  These people weren’t doing what they did for ‘flash’:  during and after dinner, I’d see them sitting quietly at picnic tables on the parking lot talking caringly to people who were struggling with homelessness, treating them with an equality, lack of condescension and sense of friendship that is rare.

During these years of Friday nights on the Day Resource Center parking lot, we invited then-mayoral-candidate Tom Leppert to come and serve dinner with us, which he graciously did.  I watched as Wayne took Mr. Leppert aside and asked him the ‘hard questions’ about homelessness and how he intended to help.  I was impressed by Wayne’s candor.

Wayne — a happily-married father of four and a trained theologian — was at that time employed to head up the media department of Dallas Theological Seminary.  As I got to know him better over weeks and years, I continued to learn more of (and be moved by) his knowledge and understanding of ‘street culture,’ the very personal relationships he had developed with people living on the streets,  and his unbending compassion and advocacy for the struggles and challenges in their lives.

For as long as I’ve known him, Wayne has expressed a deep longing to help and serve full-time among the ‘poorest of the poor’ living on the streets.  It is such a joy to see him doing that now and getting the recognition he deserves.

KS

Here’s a recent clip about him and his ministry from Channel 8:

http://www.wfaa.com/video/featured-videos/Our-Neighbor-Helping-the-homeless-95497244.html?utm_source=OurCalling+Newsletter&utm_campaign=c83a828ef8-06_03_10&utm_medium=email

http://www.ourcalling.org/

http://dallashomelessnetwork.blogspot.com/2010/06/called-to-help-homeless.html

What Makes a City Great?

~~ a description of street life in 1788 Paris, France ~~

“Summer arrived, and in Paris the life of the boulevards went on as pleasantly as ever.  Pleasure seekers gathered in the warm evenings to stroll along the broad walks under the huge trees, the roads were filled with carriages, the tables crowded at the outdoor cafes and gardens, where musicians played and people paused to rest and refresh themselves.  A visitor from England admired the ‘cheerfulness and whimsical variety of the spectacle, the confusion of riches and poverty, hotels and hovels, pure air and stinks, people of all sorts and conditions, from the Prince of the blood to the porter.’  Ordinary Parisians put on their best silk breeches and ruffled shirts and came in groups to stroll or dine, dandies paraded on horseback, fashionably dressed women sat at the little tables surrounded by their admirers.  Footmen, enjoying an evening’s liberty, sat and drank beer, old soldiers lounged and smoked, and talked of long-ago campaigns, shopwomen in their chintz gowns flirted with hairdresser’s assistants who courted them, hat in hand.”

“The buildings are very good,” the English traveler went on, “the walks delightful…”  There were amusements in abundance, from plays and acrobats… magicians and rope-dancers… There were puppet shows and concerts… and dancing dogs.  And there were many things to buy, cakes and fruit and flowers, prints and fans and lapdogs.  Peddlers ran along the roads… jumping up on the steps of the fine painted carriages to offer their wares to the elegant ladies and gentlemen inside….  There was much political talk, and the street orators held forth on the evils of the tax burden… but for the most part the worries of the day were forgotten.”

~~ To the Scaffold, The Life of Marie Antoinette, by Carolly Erickson, p. 198

The description of 1788 Paris above reminds me very much of Paris today in terms of its lively culture, and of why I love it.  It’s exhilarating and beautiful — architecturally stunning, but fascinating in its diversity as well.  The thrilling, dizzying mix of all sorts of people — on the streets, in the crowded cafes, rushing into the Metro, old men and kids bowling in the parks, people reading, walking, cycling — make it a vigorous, animated city, and I fell for it the first time I was driven through it’s environs by my future son-in-law about a decade ago.

When I’ve been fortunate enough to go there, I like most to walk in the evening to the Champ de Mars, the park in front of the Eiffel Tower, in order to watch the activities there:  families picnicking, dogs chasing Frisbees, people of every description playing games or music, or even juggling fire!  It is LIFE — vibrant, diverse, thrilling.  The people gathered at day’s end out in the large open space are poor, rich, dressed down, dressed up.  And — imagine this — no one is arresting homeless folks for lying on the grass of the park because everybody lies or sits on the grass — talking, laughing, singing, sleeping.  No ‘Quality of Life’ ordinances being enforced, yet, somehow — voila! — a spectacular quality of life!

One night at 1 A.M., the police blocked off the city streets to make way for over a thousand roller bladers who whizzed past the Eiffel Tower as those of us on the sidewalk whooped and yelled and clapped, cheering them on.  It was a night I’ll remember always.

http://www.tour-eiffel.fr/teiffel/uk/

Begging (panhandling in our terms) is a way of life for some in Paris, and even a profession for a few.  I remember my first ride on the Metro (subway).  To my surprise, a father and son came through the train car asking for money.  They were polite, low-key, almost matter-of-fact about begging.  Many people ignored them, some people contributed, they moved on, and that was it.  Not everyone likes begging, not everyone gives, but one can ignore it if one chooses.

What makes a city great?

These are the sorts of things which make a city fantastic and which draw people to it from around the world.  Successful downtowns are not hothouses designed only for the rich and well-heeled.  A great city is a place where all kinds of people can live, as well as just ‘be’, in open, green spaces — not just people who look or dress a certain way — EVERYONE.

The question of what makes a great city is a topic of heated debate in Dallas right now, particularly in terms of the question of where within the city to place affordable and permanent supportive housing.  Generally, in downtown and in outlying neighborhoods, the attitude towards permanent supportive housing and formerly homeless individuals who might be housed there can be tagged by the acronym NIMBY (not in my backyard.)

Cities across American continue to develop and implement strategies to ‘get the homeless out of sight’, both on a daily basis and in particular for special tourist events like The Olympic Games [see a recent article on Vancouver in The Street Zine, May, 2010.] These include passing ‘special’ laws that target them — ‘sleeping in public,’ ‘criminal trespass,’ ‘blocking the sidewalk,’ as mentioned above — so-called ‘Quality of Life’ ordinances for which a person in business clothing would not be ticketed but which allow police to pinpoint those who ‘look homeless’ and try to hustle them from view.

We all know how the story concludes:  tickets that cannot be paid by the homeless individual, warrants for their arrest, jail terms which make their complicated life situation even more challenging, the filling of jails with people who are in fact generally not a social threat.  This much-written-about practice of shifting the homeless from emergency services to prison to back on the street is not only the costliest way of doing business, it’s utterly inhumane, because so many of the homeless are mentally ill and do not belong in jail.  So the people authorities want to get rid of haven’t gone anywhere, only now they have more obstacles to overcome in order to get their lives together.  It makes no sense at all.

Rethinking: Let’s Have A Productive ‘Identity Crisis’ in Dallas!

It would be wonderful if this discussion precipitated an identity crisis for us as a city and led us to look at ourselves both deeply and objectively [but I’m trying not to get my hopes up.] What if we took several steps back and reinvisioned the Dallas of tomorrow with new eyes?  Does our vision really need to include having our streets free of everyone who doesn’t ‘look like us?’

The desire for homogeneity in communities used to manifest itself primarily in terms of skin color: Jim Crow laws, segregation.  While racism is still a significant problem in our country, now it seems that we at least pay lip service to the desirability of racial diversity, and civil rights laws are in place to enforce equal rights and give access to the judicial system when they are violated.  Whether you believe that racism has gone underground or has actually decreased to some extent (I think it’s both), it’s still apparently acceptable to shun people in terms of their economic situation, especially when it comes to individuals who ‘look homeless.’  What is wrong with having people on the streets of our cities who may be dressed in clothing and groomed in a manner that is not ‘up to’ our middle class standards?

Take a look at the debate over where the EVERgreen Residences, a beautifully-designed permanent supportive housing project put forward by First Presbyterian Church Dallas and The Stewpot, will/ will not be built and the at-times rabid opposition by the Expo Park / Deep Ellum business owners and residents.  When providing people access to safe, clean, well-designed permanent supportive housing is supposed give way to the ‘artistic ecosystem’ that is said by residents to be developing in an area where bars and entertainment are a large part of the social scene, maybe it’s time to seriously reconsider our priorities and the power that affluent neighborhood associations have to scuttle much-needed projects in Dallas.

http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2010/04/what.php

http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2010/04/strong_expo_park_showing_oppos.php

http://forum.dallasmetropolis.com/showthread.php?p=370143

Small groups with large opinions should be a part of policy making, but they should not be allowed to dominate it. When they do, nobody wins — except the influential neighborhood groups in the short run, and perhaps the particular council person in the area in the next election.  What is lost is the greater good of the city, its moral fiber, its wholeness, its ability to address and solve hard problems such as homelessness. So far in Dallas, in terms of housing, we have valiant efforts being undercut for the most part by powerful, affluent localized forces — a stalemate.

Where is bold, morally courageous, visionary leadership at the city government level?  If it’s going to show up, this would be a good time.  We have a lot of homeless and working people to house.  And housing is the only way we’re ever really going to get them off the street.

KS

A recommended read by Jim Schutze in The Dallas Observer: “City Hall’s Desire For A Fancy Downtown (Without Too Many Poor People) Costs Developers $30 Million”

http://www.dallasobserver.com/2010-05-06/news/city-hall-s-desire-for-a-fancy-downtown-without-too-many-poor-people-costs-developers-30-million/

This from the comments:  * JimS 05/08/2010 9:53:44 AM • There is an important element in this story which I neglected to get into my column or the subsequent blog item. The decision by Lockey and Mackenzie to obey the HUD rules and provide the amount of affordable housing called for in HUD’s national guideline was in good part a market decision. They told me they looked at what had been built already downtown and saw way more high-end capacity than the market wanted to absorb. They were well aware of the weaknesses in several of the completed projects and could see, for example, that Prudential would foreclose on the Mosaic, as in fact it did this week. They said to me, Why provide more chocolate cake when the market already has more chocolate cake than it can eat? So they saw a project that was more than half affordable as a good market play  - something that would rent up quickly instead of going belly up. I get the impression both of them also are people who think working people and young people are good for downtowns. And think about it. If you went to the quarter in New Orleans and all of a sudden it looked like Snyder Plaza in Highland Park, would you go back? Downtown Dallas is frozen and sterile because the people running it are afraid of anybody who isn’t rich. It would help if they were white, too. But that’s a suburb. Actually even our suburbs are more diverse than what has been created downtown. What we really see is an attempt at a replication of the Park Cities, where most of the decision-makers probably live. It’s their idea of cool. But they’re not cool. And they’re also not moving into it. To work for them, downtown Dallas would have to be Carmel. Which would suck. Anyway, I see a lot of comment here about listening to market forces. I think MacKenzie and Lockey would agree. They listened. The market forces said, More affordable. And City hall said, You’re toast.

It’s a Good Question, Isn’t It?

I first heard this song on a CD given to me by my friend, Sandy, and it’s one of my CD’s now:  Give Us Your Poor: 17 New Recordings To Help End Homelessness (Appleseed Recordings). Have you ever asked yourself this question?  We need to keep asking it. KS

Here and Now

by Mark Erelli

Cobblestone pillow
Newspaper sheets
Ten below zero
Sleeping on the street

Someday we all will have a home
A place to come in from the cold
Somewhere so high above the clouds
Why not here
Why not now

Pastures of plenty
For the tired and poor
Still too many hands empty
Behind the golden door

Someday we all will have a home
A place to come in from the cold
Somewhere so high above the clouds
Why not here
Why not now

Someday we all will live the dream
There’ll be no cracks to fall between
Somewhere where everyone will have enough
But here and now
It’s up to us

Someday we all will be at peace
And all of our suffering will cease
There’s more than enough to go around
Why not here
Why not now

Why not here?
Why not now?

]]> http://theintermittentvolunteer.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/its-a-good-question-isnt-it/feed/ 0 Karen http://theintermittentvolunteer.wordpress.com/2010/04/29/im-invisible-man/ http://theintermittentvolunteer.wordpress.com/2010/04/29/im-invisible-man/#comments Thu, 29 Apr 2010 19:59:10 +0000 Karen Shafer http://theintermittentvolunteer.wordpress.com/?p=2668 ]]> Thursday, April 29, 2010

Robin and Linda Williams and Their Fine Group

Once a year comes an event that a group of my friends and family look forward to with eager anticipation — a concert at Uncle Calvin’s Coffee House (Northpark Presbyterian Church) by Robin and Linda Williams and Their Fine Group.  You may know them from frequent appearances on the Garrison Keillor Show on National Public Radio, and from the Prairie Home Companion movie.

Our grand kids have been raised on their CD’s, and this year they were old enough to attend.  Friends got there early and got seats right by the stage, and it was magical to watch my three grandchildren sit spellbound looking up at the group, listening to the music and singing along to some of this wonderful band’s songs.

After the concert, Robin was kind enough to give me permission to include the words to one of the songs from their Buena Vista album on this blog.

Thanks, Robin and Linda, for being a major highlight in our year!!!

*****

‘I’m Invisible Man’

*****

I’m Invisible Man

You see me I’m not there

Unnoticed so no one cares

But I’ve got a driver’s license from Birmingham

I keep it to remind me who I am

Cause I’m Invisible Man

~~

I’m Invisible Man

My box says this end up

It’s where I sleep and keep my stuff

In a country of cardboard and cement

A shrine to the Great Embarrassment

I’m Invisible Man

~~

I’m Invisible Man

I ain’t lost I’m just misplaced

Just cause you can’t see my face

You judge me for a life misspent

For being two pay checks shy of rent

I’m Invisible Man

~~

I’m Invisible Man

I’m your sister; I’m your mother

I live in hiding, tucked under cover

I’ll do anything for a ride in your car

For a little spare change, for a drink in a bar

I’m Invisible Man

~~

I’m Invisible Man

You don’t know me, you know who I’m not

I fought in Vietnam and Iraq

I don’t sleep at night I can’t stand my dreams

I’ve fallen into the vast unseen

I’m Invisible Man

~~

I’m Invisible Man

I live in Tampa and LA

And every town along the way

From New York City to the San Francisco Bay,

My home is Shanty Town, USA

I’m Invisible Man

*****

http://www.robinandlinda.com/

http://www.unclecalvins.org/

]]> http://theintermittentvolunteer.wordpress.com/2010/04/29/im-invisible-man/feed/ 0 Karen http://theintermittentvolunteer.wordpress.com/2010/04/17/vision-of-a-man/ http://theintermittentvolunteer.wordpress.com/2010/04/17/vision-of-a-man/#comments Sun, 18 Apr 2010 02:57:54 +0000 Karen Shafer http://theintermittentvolunteer.wordpress.com/?p=2663 ]]> Saturday, April 17, 2010

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

Vision of a Man

I watched a man move down the walk,

A man whom I call friend –

A lonely soul who lives outdoors,

Whose struggles never end.

Belongings in three grocery sacks,

A clean shirt (for today),

His long hair streaming down his back…

I watched him walk away.

‘Why can’t I help him, Lord?’ I cried.

‘Why can’t I fix his pain?

There’s so much I would like to do…’

Yet there he goes,

Again.

Just then, the world –

The street, the cars –

(As I stood and watched him go,)

Became a field of diamonds…

And I somehow saw

The Whole.

For just one instant –

Sparkling, clear –

When Time stood still,

And God was Here,

A gentle voice

Into my ear…

Whispered,

‘It is so much deeper than that.’

And I saw…

My friend is Perfect,

Though broken he appears.

I saw…

My friend is Sacred,

Exactly as he is.

He’s not in need of fixing

Does not call for repair,

Or people looking through him

As if he wasn’t there.

He doesn’t need

Untangling,

Like a twisted knot of twine.

Does not require

Coercing,

To walk a different line.

He does not need

A drug, a rule, a class, a bath, a fine.

What he requires

Is caring,

And the privilege

Is mine.

Karen Shafer

c 4/17/10

Dear Readers,

My blog has decided it needs a Spring Break Sabbatical.  Not that it actually accomplishes so much that it really warrants a vacation, in my opinion.  It’s telling me that it’s been in business for two years as of Valentine’s Day. Whatever.

I’ll be the first to admit that it doesn’t always live up to the work ethic that I, as its mother, hold for it, but I don’t want to be overly critical.  It has a life of its own, after all.  And I have to acknowledge that, even if one doesn’t hear from it all that often, it does indeed ponder the problems and issues it addresses much of the time — so perhaps it needs a breather.

To these ends, (and acknowledging a certain unhealthy co-dependence between myself and my blog), I’m respecting its wishes and taking a break, too.  If you want me to email you when we come back, send me a message at this address and I’ll do so:

“The Garden” <thegardensouthdallas@earthlink.net>

Thank you so very much for reading,

Karen

‘Tough’ Versus ‘Love’

On the day before the Big Snow of February, 2010, two weeks ago, a Crisis Intervention team from the City of Dallas — (now part of the Dallas Police Department) — raided the homeless camps under a bridge.  All of the personal possessions of the camp inhabitants — clothing, blankets, coats, years’-worth of belongings — were shoveled up by two bulldozers, and four to five loads comprising the contents of the ‘cardboard community’ were dumped into city trucks and taken to the landfill.

Raids by the city of homeless camps are commonplace and routine in Dallas.  I would suggest, however, that our city has reached a new ‘low’ in terms of human decency and compassion when a raid is conducted under these circumstances and in this weather.  Where does one start to address such an occurrence?

By early the following week, people in the camp were still without adequate [cardboard] shelter, blankets, coats and clothing.  Their non-replaceable personal possessions were permanently lost.  Think of the time that intervened between the raid and the week that followed.

At our house, where family members who were without power stayed together, we built a snow igloo, drank coffee, changed wet clothing about ten times a day, scrounged firewood that was dry enough to make a fire in the fireplace, and watched movies together at night under piles of blankets.  Even with the added warmth of the fireplace, the central heating rarely stopped.  It was a great snow — a fun adventure.

Not so much fun, however, if you’d just lost your cardboard home and everything you own in a raid by a city that is supposed to have your best interest at heart.

Witnesses to the ‘sweep’ say that, just prior to the raid, no warning was given.  The trucks arrived at 10 minutes to 2 P.M., and at 2 P.M., the dozers started scooping up the small cardboard community.  It is my understanding that the city has agreed, after outrage by ‘housed’ citizens and advocates about these sweeps in the past, to give at least an hour’s notice to camp dwellers. Instead, in this case, the camp members were allowed a ‘one-time carry’:  in other words, all that they could gather in their arms one time, they were permitted to keep.  Of course, those who were at work at the time of the raid were out of luck.

If you were allowed a ‘one-time’ carry of your personal belongings, what would you choose?

Officials are also supposed to offer shelter at the time of the raid as an option.  Witnesses say this procedure was not followed in this case.

Here is the city’s perspective:  they want to force these homeless individuals into shelters.  But the individuals involved don’t want to go.

The shelters provide an invaluable, lifesaving service with remarkable dedication.  Yet there are good reasons why some people don’t want to go into them, feeling that they’re safer in a community on the street.

If  the goal of these raids is to encourage homeless individuals to get permanently off the street, it seems counterproductive to seize their belongings, when these belongings often include personal papers such as birth certificates and other identification which are critical to seeking housing.

Could it be that, if we’ve spent $23 million on a homeless assistance center and still have people living on the street, their presence is simply an affront to the city’s stated goal of Ending Homelessness by 2014?

These sweeps by the city are obviously ineffective, inhumane, and have been rejected by many cities nationwide as unacceptable practice in dealing with street-dwelling homelessness.  It is a mark against our city that they continue here with impunity.

KS

Link:  Pegasus News: “Dallas homeless sweeps are counterproductive”

http://www.pegasusnews.com/news/2010/feb/22/dallas-homeless-sweeps-are-counterproductive/

Link:  Dallas Homeless Network Blog:

http://dallashomelessnetwork.blogspot.com/2010/02/tough-versus-love-dallas-homeless.html

We Are the World

Check out this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Glny4jSciVI

Cold Weather Policy and Our Homeless Neighbors

Driving around downtown in the cold weather in the days preceding the Big Snow in Dallas, I began pondering our city’s Cold Weather Policy for our neighbors who are living on the street.  I had recently learned during the monthly Homeless Advocacy Meeting at The Stewpot that a January, 2010 report by the National Coalition for the Homeless points to 40 degrees F as the temperature recommended for activation of Cold Weather Policy nationwide.

The City of Dallas currently has a policy of 32 degrees — freezing — for such activation:  putting shelters on overflow and opening enough emergency shelters to give everyone a bed.

I was happy to learn this week from Dennis Strickland, Lead Case Worker at The Bridge, that staff there has implemented a policy closer to the NCH recommendation:  37 degrees, or a wind chill of 37 degrees.  They also now allow ‘self-referral’ of guests after 10 PM during cold weather.  There was at least one night during the Big Snow that the gates of The Bridge were not closed for re-entry at 10 P.M., which means there was an open campus. Homeless guests are allowed to sit up in the Welcome Center all night, and, if necessary after referrals and pick up from other shelters, the dining room can be opened for sleeping after getting in extra staff.

These are important and significant improvements over last winter and show an ongoing commitment to accommodate our friends on the street and keep them safe from injury and hypothermia.  The Bridge staff seem to be coping as best they can within the limits of their space availability.

I would love the see the city as a whole move toward adopting all of the recommendations in the NCH report.  The entire report is worth a read.  Here are some highlights that struck me as particularly pertinent.  It is of particular concern that, although ours is far from the most harsh climate in the United States, it is in fact the most dangerous for people living outdoors.

http://www.nationalhomeless.org/publications/winter_weather/index.html

p. 15

the most dangerous cases of hypothermia do not occur when the ambient temperature is far below freezing.  Instead, Dr. O’Connell says, the worst cases they see arise when the days are warm (between 40F and 50F) and the nighttime temperature drops to the mid-30’s.

Temperature cut-offs should be avoided, since the effectiveness of a shelter is decreased when the population it serves does not know, from night to night, whether the shelter will be open.  If a temperature cut-off is necessary, due to financial or other reasons, the cut-off should be at least 40F in order to prevent the most dangerous cases of hypothermia, according to Dr. O’Connell.

p.17

An exemplary winter shelter would be open 24 hours each day between October 1 and April 30, regardless of temperature, as well as any other days during the year when the temperature falls below 40F.  It would also admit all homeless people, regardless of sobriety status or past bans, unless they are violent or causing an extreme disturbance.

It is also important to note that a consistent, across-the-board policy throughout a set number of months and all shelters builds trust between the homeless population and the service providers attempting to help them and indeed to keep them alive.

KS

http://www.nationalhomeless.org/

My good friend, Nancy Johnson, just sent me this poem by Thich Nhat Hanh, one of my two or three favorite sages, and the only one who is still living.  I want to share it with you.  The thing about Thich is, he himself has lived through hell-on-earth during the Vietnam War era, yet has always been and remains a man of peace.  What an inspiration.  KS

Please Call Me by My True Names
by Thich Nhat Hanh


Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow —
even today I am still arriving.

Look deeply: every second I am arriving
to be a bud on a Spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
to fear and to hope.

The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
of all that is alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing
on the surface of the river.
And I am the bird
that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily
in the clear water of a pond.
And I am the grass-snake
that silently feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.
And I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo,
with plenty of power in my hands.
And I am the man who has to pay
his “debt of blood” to my people
dying slowly in a forced-labor camp.

My joy is like Spring, so warm
it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.
My pain is like a river of tears,
so vast it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and my laughter at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart
can be left open,
the door of compassion.
1989

I’ve often observed that, if one has a sandwich or a blanket to share with our friends living on the street, there is a grateful response, but a hug, eye contact and a smile are the things that are most appreciated.  We all need to know that we matter.  KS

Our Brokenness

“The moment has come to talk about our brokenness.  You are a broken man.  I am a broken man, and all the people we know or know about are broken.  Our brokenness is so visible and tangible, so concrete and specific….  There are many things I would like to say to you about our brokenness.  But where to begin?

Perhaps the simplest beginning would be to say that our brokenness reveals something about who we are.  Our sufferings and pains are not simply bothersome interruptions of our lives;  rather, they touch us in our uniqueness and our most intimate individuality….  Our brokenness is truly ours.  Nobody else’s.  Our brokenness is as unique as our chosenness and our blessedness….

Although many people suffer from pysical or mental disabilities, and although there is a great amount of economic poverty, homelessness, and lack of basic human needs, the suffering of which I am most aware on a day-to-day basis is the suffering of the broken heart…  In the Western world, the suffering that seems to be the most painful is that of feeling rejected, ignored, despised and left alone.  In my own community, [L'Arche Daybreak Community in Toronto, Canada], with many severely handicapped men and women, the greatest source of suffering is not the handicap itself, but the accompanying feelings of being useless, worthless, unappreciated, and unloved.  It is much easier to accept the inability to speak, walk, or feed oneself than it is to accept the inability to be of special value to another person.  We human beings can suffer immense deprivations with great steadfastness, but when we sense that we no longer have anything to offer anyone, we quickly lose our grip on life.  Instinctively we know that the joy of life comes from the ways in which we live together and that the pain of life comes from the many ways we fail to do that well.

How can we respond to this brokenness?  The first response… is to face it squarely and befriend it.  This may seem quite unnatural.  Our first, most spontaneous response to pain and suffering is to avoid it, to keep it at arm’s length;  to ignore, circumvent, or deny it.  Suffering… is almost always experienced as an unwelcome intrusion into our lives, something that should not be there.

I am convinced that healing is often so difficult because we don’t want to know the pain…  The deep truth is that our human suffering need not be an obstacle to the joy and peace we so desire, but can become, instead, the means to it.  The great secret of the spiritual life… is that everything we live, be it gladness or sadness, joy or pain, health or illness, can all be part of the journey toward the full realization of our humanity…  real care means the willingness to help each other in making our brokenness into the gateway to joy.”

~~Henri Nouwen, Life of the Beloved