Across the Great Divide

Ten Questions the Unsheltered Survey Didn't Ask Today.

Today I counted one bike trailer with personal belongings, one carrying scrap, one shopping cart, one loaded tricycle and one wheeled walker loaded with laundry.

Today started with one of our guests—a world-champion passive-aggressive—walking past me and saying, we need a real security officer around here.

Welcome to the annual point-in-time count of unsheltered individuals. 

The Day Center where I volunteer is one of the survey locations in Mesa County, and I had the opportunity to observe as well as collect a few surveys after the volunteer collectors left.

For a variety of reasons,* the methods result in an under-count. And there is no survey to collect the following information from my day at the front door.

1. Why Buffy felt the need to read a five-page letter out loud.
2. Why Thomas decided to mess with the survey-taker by slipping in and out of several accents, then into complete gibberish, and then revert to plain English to declare: I'm 41% Hungarian. 
3. Why Joanne subscribes to The Economist.
4. Why Donnie is so tired of being outside.
5. Why Ron came in this morning with a 20 oz. go-cup from a truck stop six miles away. (He feels safe leaving his camp out by the freeway and walking here each morning. He also knows when they have to dump excess coffee to keep it fresh and he can get a free cup.)
6. Why I haven't seen James until this week. (Because he now has an indoor place to live on Orchard Mesa and doesn't come in as regularly.)
7. Why Rick had all his campsite belongings on his back last Wednesday and did not today.
8. Why one young man with a shopping cart was so jumpy and wouldn't give his name. (I let him
   

   Dogs are vital companions but they are not allowed in shelters, so their homeless owners may have to live outside.
   in anyway because he seemed so vulnerable; he stayed until we closed.)
9. Why Robert seems less optimistic than when I wrote about him last year.
10. Why the number of people with therapy dogs seems to have increased this year.

_____

*These counts are conducted on the same day across the country to estimate the level of homelessness in a community and to compare numbers with prior years. 

This year the survey counted only "unsheltered" individuals who slept "outside or in any place not fit for human habitation" last night. If they consider themselves homeless but happened to sleep in a shelter or couch surfed or did not consider their car "not fit" or simply refused to participate, they would not be counted this year. However, the unsheltered data reported very easily becomes confused with the homeless data.

Other reasons including changing methodologies, volunteer skill at obtaining responses and the mobility of the homeless individuals who may not be found or appear at one of the collection points.

Four Vacuums Later, We're Still Standing.

My fourth vacuum cleaner since starting at the Day Center.

This week at the Day Center I realized I have survived three breakdowns.

Put another way, I am now pushing my fourth vacuum cleaner. (Or maybe the fifth, counting a little hand-held one.)

The work we do is the same every day, a limited menu of tasks, most of which involve cleaning. Laundry, showers, shaves and haircuts, toothbrushes and tooth paste, Q-tips and deodorant, health checks—and scrubbing restrooms, tables and chairs, coffee urns and ashtrays.

If you want to feel a sense of progress or improvement or global advancement, you have to look at the people in the room.

Over time, you witness big transformations, but you also see sudden falls and a cycle of dysfunction. For some, success simply means they are still standing. 

Maybe we had some victories this week, but it's much easier to count the six new intake forms I collected today. They mean six individuals walked in our doors for the first time.

Some have been homeless for years. One woman, my age, has been homeless for three days. One man is passing through town and needed help with a prescription. One woman walked in that morning feeling overwhelmed. She left with clean laundry and smile on her face. As she headed toward the Catholic Outreach office, she said, "I have a lot better outlook now."

I saw one young guy for the first time since I've been back. He had a new girl friend with him, the third in past three years. He's always seemed like a person who has the tools to make it. But he's here and the girl friends aren't.

Then there's this new vacuum. I thought I was losing my mind when I couldn't find the on-switch. It's not as if I'm unacquainted with these things.

Finally, I had to ask. It's the red button halfway down the side, invisible from the position of someone ready to start cleaning.

There's a metaphor in there somewhere about experience blinding you and change requiring you to learn simple things all over again.

Outliving those vacuums is a good measure of longevity—and a caution.

If you're only about the dirt, you'll wear out fast.

*****

Tracy and Kelvin were among the very first Day Center guests to open up to me when I was a newbie. Without their friendship, I might never have written my novel, Inhabited.

There were hugs all around when I gave them their copy.

 

 

A Change of Scene, Some Familiar Faces, and the Same Old Story.

Driving to the Day Center in Grand Junction, I wondered how different the place might feel on my first day back after seven months away.

Although there are superficial similarities with Peace House Community in Minneapolis, the Day Center bustles with more activity and a slightly harder-edged group of people. More folks here are living rough, in their vehicles or in shelters.

Rolling residences like this one are more likely to turn up here in Colorado.

At Peace House, we tend to serve those who have grabbed at least one rung on the ladder of stability. Here, a higher proportion of folks are dealing with addiction, mental illness or prolonged periods of unemployment. One man said today a potential employer asked for his resume and he didn't have one; he'd last worked in 2003.

While the Day Center, like Peace House, is an oasis compared to the streets, the energy here is more elevated and so is the volume. Washers and driers run over conversations and a guitar gets passed around to different hands that evoke different sounds. A woman holds it in her lap and plays dobro-style. Her singing voice is clear and her notes bend with a bluesy sophistication, but she speaks in a staccato stream-of-consciousness rippled with paranoia.

Today, a local architect is observing. He's prominent locally and has donated a great deal of time and resources to the design of low-income and transitional housing here. Apparently an upgrade and expansion of the Day Center is being considered.

His presence is one more sign of the progress this community has made in expanding housing options for the poor. At the same time, his questions and the hubbub around us signify how complex and entrenched are the issues related to homelessness.

Today, S.O. came in. I met him three years ago when he came to the Day Center and refused to give his Social Security number, information we request of all first-timers. He did come back another time and I got to know his story, which included a stint writing for a newspaper years ago.

He has a quiet, avoidant manner and is always surprised that I remember his name. Being treated as a consequential individual is not an everyday experience, but maybe his surprise is also related to the head injuries he's suffered. They affect his memory and concentration. 

S.O. first came to the valley in 2002 and became a resident when he lost his drivers license to a DUI.

He told me a story about winching junked cars out of the river and cutting them into two-foot long pieces he and a friend could sell at the scrap yard. He found work building storage units and even an upscale residence. He's an apprentice-trained journeyman carpenter, but he hasn't worked much since the recession. He lives in his mini-van.

He turns sixty this month and both his shoulders are shot. With the help of a disability lawyer who's in town a couple days a week, he's going through the process of qualifying for disability benefits. The process is drawn out purposely, it seems, to discourage applicants and reward only the persistent, despite the reality that a lack of persistence is a common symptom of disability.

He'd had a companion for a while, but they both had scrapes with the law and he lost track of her. A while back he was in McDonald's charging his phone and stepped out for cigarette. While he was outside, a clean-cut, college-looking kid went in the door and came running out with S.O.'s phone. All his contacts are now missing and people don't know how to reach him.

It's like losing part of yourself, he said.

Theft is a constant issue. He had two bikes stolen last year and a third crushed by a truck backing out of a parking place as he walked by. The Salvation Army gave him a bike for bell ringing this Holiday season and within days, someone stripped the brakes off it.

I'm summarizing here. His transportation travails are actually more maddening than this, but he seems to accept them.

Still, I can see the wear and worry in his eyes when we talk and when, an hour later, he walks past me without seeming to know me.