CityTeam

I left the center with Will yesterday. We were making good on plans to visit CityTeam, $1 a night homeless shelter where many of our guests eat and sleep after leaving here. We made sure not to leave until 7:00pm--just in time for the prayer service--and had plans to stay for dinner. Understand that Cityteam is a nighttime place, unlike ours, the Champion Guidance Center, which closes at 2:00pm. It was the last Thursday of the month which apparently and to Will's excitement meant chinese night. I was a little skeptical.

CityTeam works like this: If you're not on the "bed list" you call as soon as the phones open, about 9:00am, to get on "standby." You get on the bed list through repeat stays, i.e., if you had a bed last night you automatically get a bed tomorrow. So, the only way in is through the standby list, made possible by guys who can't or don't stay consecutive nights. The facility sleeps 50, but as Will said, "they fit every bit of 55 or 56 in there." From outside and afar the place itself could have been a popular jazz club or a hip New York warehouse nightclub: groups of loiterers huddled around, smoking cigarettes, low voices talking speckled with the occassional friendly outburst, and everybody waiting for something to happen. I saw some of the homeless stereotypes--the disheveled hair and mismatched clothing--but I saw more regular, average guys just looking for a place to sleep.

I saw many familiar faces. There was Wayne, a former intern who now works full time for the Society yet remains homeless, who said "People look at me and they say in surprise, 'you're homeless?'" There was "D," the tall extrovert slapping hands and laughing. There was Maurice and Bill who showed up for the Chinese food.

The first thing you see when you walk in--imagine two medium-sized, high-ceiling classrooms without the seats--are the grey mats, stacked up against the wall in four large stacks. These, I realized, were the "beds." In the place where the mats were to be laid out there were chairs organized around the big screen TV which plays the repeat movies. "Guys get tired of Field of Dreams after a while," Will told me.

Everybody knew the drill. All at once everybody huddles around the sidedoor to get frontline position for the food. "They're late," said Wayne.

As I stood in line I saw what could have been a racially charged fistfight be neutralized when Larry, a large jolly couldn't hurt a fly kind of guy, positioned himself between the two men. "Hey!" he exclaimed, and I assumed he was going to start something, "just chill," he said, "just chill out." "Larry," Wayne told me, "is a peacemaker."

Moments later, in the front of the line where Larry wasn't, an asian man was pushed to the floor. "We need more Larrys," I thought to myself.

I waited my turn and walked in to get my Chinese food from the nice crew of Chinese girls. The food was good. The dining room couldn't fit everybody at once so, in drill sargeant tone the manager kept reminding us to leave as soon as we were finished.

As I left CityTeam I was strangely energized. In many ways it was good for my ego: the rich white boy went to and returned from the homeless shelter unscathed. I must, however, understand that this sense of pride stems from a prejudice: it operates under the assumption that spending and evening with homeless people is inherently dangerous. I learned to the contrary that people survive. So, the question is not not "how do we do it," but instead "how is the environmentin in which its done?"

Empathy: Is it Possible?

The Seldom Seen Acting Company gathered once again on Friday, September 16. The question was "can one man hear another man's story, and feel it deeply enough to be able to pass it off as his own when in front of a live audience?"

In sympathizing with the ever-patient director, I thought the rehearsals must be, at the same time, the most frustrating and most rewarding experience of her week. The task is frustrating indeed for "herding cats," as Steve says, is a great description of getting our homeless community together for a group activity: interns are finishing up their laundry, the phone is a constant nuisance, guys are constantly walking in univited, and tired from a night on the sidewalk the participants sometimes fall into slumber. Nuisances, however, are a regular difficulty for any facilitator. Quite irregular however, is the necessity of neutralizing the suspiciousness of street mentality pervasive among our community. Living on the street is mankind's closest approximation of the "every man for himself" philosophy, for being homeless must truly feel like constant warefare. One must struggle for food, for shelter, for warmth; when you are not begging for a dime to ride the bus, you're fending off harassment from the police; you witness homicide; you fend off crack; you give into crack; if you're not insane yourself, you must protect yourself from all the other crazies; and you constantly deal with the psychology of being the nation's lowest class citizen. In short, one develops the defense mechanisms necessary for survival: "I must behave as though no one genuinely wants to help," because, well, most of the time it's true.

Try carting off that baggage in a matter of hours and laying the groundwork for a live performance to boot.

The difficulty of overcoming this barrier is precisely what must make the experience so rewarding for the facilitator. The key to unlocking the suspicion and gaining trust, which is so vital for cooperation, is to allow participant ownership. No homeless person, crazy or not, would waste any bit of time rehearsing for a play--surely they could spend their time finding food, shelter and job--unless, however, the play was his own. So they have created a name for themselves,"Seldom Seen," and a title for their performance,"Sleeping: It's a Wake Up Call" which involves the reproduction of powerful monologues drawn from the simplest of sources: their own experiences.

This brings us to our original question: is empathy possible? Assuming the Company will select the most powerful stories for performance, and assuming not all of the powerful storytellers are willing or able to perform, the Company is faced with the challenge of allowing one member to perform another member's story, and cultivating enough empathy so that an audience has no doubt the performer is the original storyteller.

At this point, it became personal. Presumabley the best way to help someone is to know what they are going through. So, what must I do to genuinely understand these men? Can I really know the impact it would have on my psychology without actually seeing a fourteen year dead from a gunshot to the eye? Can I possibly feel what its like to be imprisoned, falsely or not, without being behind bars myself? Can I really address racism without being discriminated against? Can I even fathom the actions I would take to score another hit or the guilt I would feel in the sober aftermath without being an addict mysef? In short, can I understand homelessness when I have a home?

To the above questions, I have no answers.

Needs and Wants: Why Discern?

Besides developing an admiration for the homeless volunteers who usually work the post, manning the hygeine room, a distribution center for soaps, razors, shaving cream, deodorant, socks, underwear, detergent, cologne, and all manner of toiletries, retaught me on a very micro level the macroeconomic tenent of limited resources satisfying unlimited wants. And then I began to rethink it.

"It's about satisfying needs, not wants," said Steve.

But the line between needs and wants blurs quite readily when one hands out soap. I ended up, as a general rule, fulfilling every request as best I could given the limited resources of our stock room. I followed the rule of empathy: if I was in his shoes would I feel legitimate requesting a razor with more than one blade? Growing up as the ugly american that I am (see "Ugly American" by Tom Gahl at http://svdp-alameda.blogspot.com/2005_04_01_svdp-lameda_archive.html) I handed out razors until the supply emptied.

I realized I must work within the limited constraints lest we spend all our resources in a short amount of time and thus close our doors. This is the practial problem facing most non-profits and I will continue to work within this framework.

However, granting the economists their prized assumption at least for the time being, we must at the very least recognize it on a sliding scale. For example, while the Champion Guidance Center struggles for soap and makes a picture-perfect microeconomic example of a macroeconcomic principle, a local office of PricwaterhouseCoopers has an entire department dedicated to document creation. The office supplies of a nationwide public accounting or law firm are, for all reasonable and practical purposes, unlimited.

The question is: is that right? On the sliding scale of organizations with more or less resources, it is right that the one that serves wealthy clients so as to make money has better or unlimited access to resources than the one that makes money so it can serve poor clients?

The question reminds me of a contrite yet profound visual memory of a poster in my Catholic elementary school, just outside the Kindergarten classroom: "I'm waiting for the day when schools have everything they need and the Defense Department has to hold a bake sale to pay for bombs."

The poster may at first seem too "John Lenin Dreamy" for casual cyberspace passersby but the observation that the self-interest model demands that the individual or organization has access to resources only in as much as he/she/it can sell itself may lead to more profound questioning. What is so wrong with our priorities that organizations which feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, protect the immigrants, and organize our youth must advertise in order to survive?

And why can't I give out as much soap as I damn well please?

This morning I sat on a set of stairs leading up to a skating rink, smoking a cigarette, and underneath these stairs a man found his temporary shelter.

When I volunteered for Camp Merry Times they refused to refer to the children as "cancer kids," rather, they were "kids with cancer."

Friday, my roommate and I walked home from St. Vincent de Paul and turned, on account of the construction, down 21st instead of 17th as is my custom. Deep in converstation we almost forgot to bring to the front of our consciousness the sight before our eyes: a man and a woman sifting through garbage for the valuable tin and plastic cans, redeemable for nickels and dimes at your local ghetto's recycle center.

I saw this same act in the garbage cans surrounding the goose sanctuary on Lake Merritt, just after chatting with a coworker who is homeless during my walk around the water.

I was asked for change by a man residing with the birds but refused because I only had a twenty.

The theme of this blog is simple: my time here is prying my eyes open; yet it is not without resistance.

Reading about unjust systems in the novels of Dostoevsky and the essays by Marx may bring one to the crest of action; but witnessing the systems themselves can substitute for no mental imagings spurned by essayists.