26 March 2008

Immersion in community

This past weekend, my husband and I participated in a short “homeless immersion” activity in Portland through Hands On Greater Portland. Typically this activity is an overnight excursion where someone stays outside overnight, has limited or no money, and has a series of activities they must complete like finding a loaf of bread without paying for it, finding out the process to get a single room occupancy in a hotel, and finding bathrooms open all hours.

Our experience was over a few hours… just a taste. We met in Old Town a representative from JOIN and a fellow who had spent many years living on the streets. We walked through Old Town learning about shelters, service organizations, and the reality of living on the street.

Things I learned:
• There are no family shelters in Portland. Families are often split where a male will go to one shelter and the female and children to another. This is not unusual. Baltimore has just one family shelter.
• There are no shelters for women in downtown Portland.
• There are about 2,000-3,500 people living outside in Portland. 1 in 4 of those individuals are children. As a point of comparison, there are 12,000 people who are homeless in Washington, D.C.
• There are beds for about 25% of the homeless in Portland.
• Most shelters require a TB card to stay there to verify they do not have tb.
• One shelter requires that the men lock up their own clothes during the night so they won’t leave in the middle of the night.
• JOIN has an innovative model where they get people into houses first and provide services to help with the transition. An alternative model is to piece together services after eviction or to focus on employment first.

One of the parts of the afternoon was to eat at a shelter along with folks living on the street. I had a strong reaction to this opportunity. I felt like it was disrespectful to “parachute in” for one meal and know that I could walk away and buy lunch wherever I wanted to. It felt like I was a tourist in their life. Would me eating there keep someone else who needed a meal from eating? I didn’t take the opportunity to eat in the shelter. I am still thinking through that decision. Maybe I should have focused on listening to the other’s I had the potential to eat with and then tell their story to others.

It was an emotional day. Learning the reality of living on the street and the difficulty of getting an i.d., getting services, finding a place to eat, and finding a place to sleep was palpable. But it was just a few hour experience. What’s next? What do I do with the emotion in my gut and questions in my head?

One of the questions to our leaders was what should we do next? They recommended volunteering our time in a shelter or supporting one of the organizations we heard about. Is that enough? Does that make a difference?

So many questions. It is good to have questions and it was a very valuable experience.

1 comment:

Mom2Miles said...

wow, what an interesting experiment. I imagine it *would* be very uncomfortable/upsetting in a lot of ways. I had no idea they split up families in shelters. That doesn't seem right. I worry, too, about whether a "little" thing like serving meals for an hour or two really makes a difference with such a huge issue as homelessness.