Thursday, November 25, 2010

Some Pictures!

In light of my last post on this blog I figured I should post something a little more upbeat.  My sister suggested writing about the things I am thankful for (bwahaha yeah right!) since today is in fact Thanksgiving, but instead I'm putting something up that my friends from home have been bothering about., coughbethcough.  So here are some pictures of my house, my job, and some other stuff I've been doing.

 Ok!  So this is my house!  The one and only 2709 Guilford Ave.  Our house is nicknamed the Arrupe House after Father Pedro Arrupe.  Look him up, he's a pretty cool guy.
The view from our front door.  Our living room is directly to the right, the main room you can see is the dining room, and our kitchen is in the back.

Our family room!  Full of wonderful used couches and a TV that usually works!



 Me and my roommates at our Thanksgiving dinner we had on Friday.  Unfortunately Tim isn't in this picture because he was taking it!  Anyway, starting from the left and going clockwise we have Erin, Stephanie, ME!, David, and Matt.








These next two photos show my bedroom, or to be more specific, my half of the bedroom.  First we have the part of my room that is visually pleasing with my bed and all my fun things I hung up.  Two things: 1.  My flag is a peace flag, it is not is support of pasta sauce.  2.  If you are wondering what that calendar is and can't quite tell, it is in fact a Twilight calendar.  And I hang it with pride, thank you Sarah Cole!




And then the not so nice part of my room.  I purposefully left out the floor so you can't see my pile of dirty clothes.  And no, that purple scarf is not mine, it was already there.


Ok so this is my work!  The St Vincent de Paul Beans and Bread Center!  This is the outside of my building.  And we just got approved for expansion so a whole new building will be going up behind these two.  Unfortunately it won't be open until after I'm gone.  :(  Also, you will notice in the pictures that there aren't any people.  I took these pictures after we closed because out of protection of my clients, I'm not allowed to take pictures of them.
This is the day resource center, where clients can pretty much come and hang out all day.  Besides case work, which is what I do, there are usually other things going on for the benefit of our clients.

 This is my casework desk!  I didn't take a picture of my other desk in my office, because it's pretty underwhelming and I don't do a lot in there.  Anyway, this is where I meet with all my clients everyday and try to provide them with whatever it is they are looking for.  Clothing, housing, shelters, jobs, health care, food stamps, cell phones, IDs, birth certificates, eviction prevention, mental health treatment, and drug/alcohol treatment are just some of the things I do on a daily basis.




This is our dining room.  Lunch is served six days a week and never closes, not even in Blizzards.  There are 34 spots available at one time and we usually serve between three and four hundred people each day.  Due to my case work schedule I don't get to serve in the meal program very often, but every time I do it's a blast.



 So this chaos is my storage unit.  One of my main responsibilities is organizing all the new donations of clothes and hygiene items that come in, so I can give them to my clients during casework.  It usually isn't this crazy but we get a lot of food donations during the Holidays.  I'm in the process of setting up a canned food giveaway for next week.  So guess who went through all that food earlier this week?  Yep...me.


 Ok so due to me being kind of dumb, these pictures are going to be pretty small, but hopefully it'll work.  Anyway, since he wasn't in the last picture, I felt obligated to put in a picture of Tim.  So that's Tim.  The picture above is really awful and I apologize.  Anyway, that's all of us at the National Aquarium with one of Jesuit support people Sean.

This picture is from the Stewart/Colbert rally.  In the ensuing party I was the only person from my house so I was adopted by the Camden house.  


These two pictures are from our party during Labor Day.  The first one is me and Tim with the lovely ladies from Raleigh.  They're a fun house whom we often swap drunk messages on our phones with.
This picture is me and Tim dancing.  After being challenged to a dance contest we may or may not have busted out a choreographed dance to Bye, Bye, Bye.  We also may or may not have practiced for a few hours the night before.

 This is my house!  Finally all six of us.  Ok starting with the bottom row.  Steph is from San Antonio and went to Our Lady of the Lake University, she works at St Francis Academy running an after school program.  Erin is from Connecticut and went to Holy Cross, she works at the Public Justice Center mostly doing eviction prevention.  Matt also went to Holy Cross and is from the 'Cuse, he teaches at Cristo Rey, a Jesuit High School..  Tim is from Atlanta but went to school up at Boston College, he is a resident assistant at the Don Miller Homes, a place for people with HIV/AIDS.  Dave also teaches at Cristo Rey.  He is originally from Cleveland, now lives in CT, and went to school at Providence College.

And this last picture is of me at the Newark Christmas party, after getting rid of my costume I had parts of eleven different JVC communities costumes on.  Great Success.

Ok well thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed all the photos.  As always, please post any comments or questions you have.  Love you all!

Monday, November 22, 2010

A Rough Day at the Office and a Call to Action

Last Thursday, the 18th of November, I arrived to work about a half an hour before I’m supposed to.  This isn’t anything rare, as my arrival time is influenced solely by what time my bus picks me up.  As busses run on schedules, 8:30 is becoming the time I now start work.  Anyway, I showed up to work where things were on the brink of chaos, due to none of the security cards being there yet.  After I helped one of my coworkers Carl, who is an incredible man with an incredible story, set everything up, I walked back to my office thinking that this was surely going to be one of those days.  I had no freaken idea.
As soon as I got to my office I got a Carl who was working at the front desk saying that there was someone from John Hopkins Hospital on the line wanting to speak with a social worker.  As I was the only social worker there at the time, the call went to me.  I answered the phone, introduced myself, and asked what I could.  She replied, “I’m a social worker in the Emergency Room at JH, I have a Mr. (name omitted, sorry guys), and I need to get in touch with his next of kin.  The address for Beans and Bread was the only contact information he had on him.”
Oh shit I thought.  It is not a shocking statement to say that a lot of homeless die for various reasons; exposure, drug overdose, murder, malnutrition, or any other of the numerous causes.  I had wondered at various points in my first three months in Baltimore if I was going to have to experience the death of any of my clients.  Obviously that answer is yes.
With the social worker from John Hopkins still on the phone, I looked up the client’s information on our online database.  I didn’t recognize the clients name, we literally have over a thousand clients, with hundreds using our address as their own, and I wondered if I even knew him.  The information provided by our database proved to be of no help.  I then asked the social worker for a description of the client so I could go around to my coworkers and ask them if they could identify the man.
The first two people I talked to were one of our case managers for our permanent housing program and one of our security guards, both of whom had been at Beans and Bread for several years.  They quickly identified who the client was and in saddened voices told me who he was.  It was with great astonishment followed by sudden sadness that I realized who the client was.  He was someone who came to Beans and Bread everyday for apparently many years.  Minding how own business he came in not saying a word and slept for a couple in the exact same chair until we had to kick him out when we closed.  It then dawned on me, as we were standing in the front room, that I had seen him in that exact spot the day before.  It was a really weird feeling for me.
To this day I am surprised by how much this has been affecting me, I barely knew the man and don’t think I actually ever spoke with him.  This was an important moment for me because if I want to keep doing social work and working with the world’s poor I have to see this side of it.  One of the biggest things that struck was when a coworker responded after finding out by saying “There goes another name on the memorial wall.”  The death wasn’t a surprise, it was almost routine.  This situation really started getting to me as I found out more details about the death.
Every morning our clients line up to be either the first in line for our meal program or to sign up for casework and the other things our outreach center offers each day.  Since we do not open our doors until 8:30, many clients wait for quite a while to get into our facility.  From what I understand, the client collapsed while waiting in line on Thurday morning.  An ambulance was called, but didn’t show up for a half hour!  By that time it was already to late.  This is unacceptable.  Ambulances are often called at Beans and Bread due to clients going through withdrawal or having mental health breakdowns, and it would seem the dispatchers thought this was one of those times.
But I can’t get the thought out of my mind that they simply did not care, that a homeless man’s life is less important than the “average” mans.  Like so many times in our clients life, the system had failed him.  I do not know anything about his background but I am now mostly speaking in generalizations.  His education system failed him when they failed to provide an adequate education, quality teachers and equipment.  The prison system failed him when they locked him up for drugs or alcohol instead of helping him get treatment and kick his addictions.  His economy failed him when there were no jobs available for people with disabilities or addictions.  His city failed him when they were unable to build new houses to replace all those that had been torn again.  We failed him when we walked right on by without a word, or a smile, or even a quarter.  I failed him as his case worker, when I never reached out and try to provide a service that could have saved his life.
The time must come when we reevaluate our priorities as a society.  There is often a saying about the people of our generation who are interested in social work in that we really only care about the topic we are working on.  Like in my case, homelessness.  If we can realize that all the problems of our society are interrelated then maybe real progress can occur.  We can not continue to live the lives we living, because they directly lead to the suffering of others.  Changes have to be made.  And these changes need to be drastic.  But more than anything, we have to care.  We have to care about the lives of every single person we encounter and to do our part to improve the lives of those around us.  If every single person in the United States found even one cause and contributed, what a difference it could make!  Apathy can no longer be the defining adjective for our country, it must be love.  As someone much wiser than me once said, you don’t have to like everyone, but you do have to love everyone.
Thanks for reading, God Bless.  Please comment if you have any questions, comments, or concerns.