No Place to Sit

Yesterday I was waiting to meet up with my outreach compatriots, sitting in my car and watching all the humans walking, driving, running, biking along Mission Street. I spend a lot of time thinking about humans, being annoyed, baffled and loving them. I was talking to my dad the other day who said, “Humans, they ruin everything.” He was kidding- sort of. There’s a lot of philosophy that goes along with spending a significant amount of your time trying to minimize some of the suffering in this world. I’m sure that sounds arrogant to some, but all people involved in outreach work know that burnout is the biggest danger. It’s way more dangerous than the people we work with. To keep going you need to answer questions such as: Am I actually helping at all? What makes a life worth living? Can people change? Should I have expectations? Could my time be better spent?

Philosophy is the backbone to my actions. What keeps me going is believing that interpersonal interactions make up a life. So that if my work just involves one on one moments, that’s okay, even if what I do is insignificant in the grand scheme of need, lives are still improved. I have no numbers for the City to ask for grants or prove my worth (though my program does collect those sorts of data), but I know that a woman asks for me by name now when I can’t go out because I bothered to visit her at the hospital once. I know the boyfriends and husbands are happy that there are folks who look out for their women’s needs, like socks and soap. The women show us pictures of their children, they tell us about their illnesses, how long they’ve stayed clean, and how frustrated they are when they can’t.

I don’t know how much growing up Christian has affected what I do. I assume growing up with stories about a God who came to live on earth to hang out with poor people and prostitutes must have been some inspiration to a girl who chooses to do the same. I don’t come with the same message though. I never ask anyone to stop sinning, or become someone new. All I really want from my clients is to make safer decisions: use clean needles, condoms, buddy systems. And I want for them to have the resources available when/if they decide they want to change their lives.

I also want something else for them, and it’s the same thing I want for myself. It goes back to that second question- What makes a life worth living? Little moments of happiness and peace. This is even harder to record in numbers, and I suspect that it’s something that a lot of my clients have stopped thinking about in reference to themselves. Lately I’ve been wondering how that goal can be brought into outreach work. As a volunteer, the longer I work and the more I get to know my clients, the more joy and happiness I get. I hope the women feel the same, I want them to know that we aren’t there because we feel sorry for them, or because we have to be, but that knowing them makes the rest of our lives better.

Tomorrow I’m going to get to connect with some folks in a different way. I’m volunteering with Mary Ann Finch of Care Through Touch to celebrate Maundy Thursday by washing and massaging homeless people’s feet in the Tenderloin. I participated last year and one of my clients was an 82 year old man getting his very first foot massage. It was a really tender experience, and working with Mary Ann is always inspirational. Her goal is to give people love and caring through gentle touch, and she provides free massage every Thursday for the women at The Mission Neighborhood Resource Center for Ladies Night.

I’m looking forward to doing some work where the only purpose is to provide people some pleasure or relief. Basic needs are crucial, but Joy is nice too.