I am sleeping on the ground. Well, on cardboard really. One of more than 2000 people who are homeless on the streets of Vancouver tonight. The majority of these homeless folks hang around a small inner city area called the Downtown Eastside. It’s the ghetto to go to in Vancouver if you are looking to score crack cocaine or hook up with a prostitute… or if you want to learn more about God’s heart for the urban poor in Canada’s most dysfunctional neighbourhood.
Servants’ charism is the incarnational approach, and we are committed as a community to intentionally living in the Downtown Eastside, rather than popping down once a week to give out sandwiches. But what does it mean to be incarnational amongst the homeless, especially when you have a family? Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, “You can’t expect a man who is warm to understand a man who is cold” and Jesus, who left his own comfort zone to live and minister amongst us, prayed that we would follow in his footsteps: “as you have sent me into the world so I also send them.”
So, a couple of us decided to spend 7 days and 7 nights living and learning as homeless men on the streets of our own neighbourhood, the Downtown Eastside. A week on the streets doesn’t make us experts on homelessness. I don’t even pretend to know what it’s really like to have no safety net and nowhere to turn, for days, months or even years on end. But theologian and activist, Robert McAfee Brown said, “Where you stand determines what you see” and he’s right. This week I want to stand alongside our homeless friends, gain some insight, and hopefully get a glimpse of the streets the way God sees them.
We have no money in our pockets and no wallets, (though I have somehow accumulated 26 cents by the end of the week). We don’t have a change of clothes, but I do make my friend Jason bring deodorant. And we have chosen not to stay in shelters because there is a chronic shortage of beds. Instead we are sleeping on the ground or on park benches, huddled in doorways and on sidewalks, wherever we can find some respite. We follow others’ lead and use pieces of cardboard retrieved from dumpsters for bedding, insulation from the creeping cold that makes our bones ache.
We eat in soup kitchens – and I do mean we eat soup. Soup, soup, soup – breakfast, lunch and dinner. Nothin’ but soup…and bad coffee. Supplemented by stale donuts. No-one ever starves in the Downtown Eastside. Though you might get sick of soup and starch. There is free food at 7:30am, 8:30, 9:30, 11, 12, 1pm, 2, 3:30, 5, and 7pm. You just gotta know where to go, and at some places be willing to sit through a sermon first. (Note to new homeless people: get a list of freebies from Carnegie Hall on the corner of Main and Hastings.)
After the first two nights of shivering on park benches, chased away from almost every good spot by park sprinkler systems and security guards with blinding lights growling, “Time to move along guys,” we are almost ready to pack it in. The words of Jesus, “take up your bed and walk” take on a new meaning. It is desperately hard to sleep and we find ourselves wandering around at 5am waiting for public toilets to open (at 7am). We are like zombies, the living dead.
Thought #1: Have we criminalized homelessness?
One security guard chases us from under a bridge and my new friend Lex asks him where we can legally sleep. He replies with a roll of the eyes and a sarcastic voice, “In a house. Duh!” Lex, a guy about my age with ill-fitting clothes and feet full of blisters from trudging the streets, just shakes his head and turns away. He has nowhere to go and no money but is full of plans and hopes to get back on his feet soon. The next morning I see him again, sound asleep..sitting up. Public toilets, and even portable loos brought in for special events are locked up at night (people no longer need them at night, right?), public spaces are out of bounds for sleeping (even libraries, drop-ins and community centres will kick you out if you snooze there during the day). Busking requires a license. Everywhere we turn we find ourselves breaking the law just to get through the day and carry out normal human activities such as sleeping and going to the toilet.
“Get a job you homeless bum!” – Gladly! If I could just wake up and stop feeling like someone had injected me with horse tranquilizers. I can hardly muster enough brain cells to read my Bible and pray, let alone do anything productive – and this is after just a few days on the streets!
Thought #2: No-one chooses to be on the streets, and its really hard to get out of the Downtown Eastside vortex once you’re here.
Everyone we speak to, like Emily – about 16 and pregnant, either has hopes of trying to get some kind of housing, or has pretty much given up after a series of failures. The housing market in Vancouver is real tight, and the amount you get for accommodation on welfare ($375 a month) will only stretch to a tiny cell in a Downtown Eastside rooming house slum – no kitchen, shared bathroom, (cockroaches are free though). With nowhere to prepare food, and little money for eating out, you are forced to live in an area with lots of soup kitchens and charitable services like the Downtown Eastside. Just one of the reasons the Downtown Eastside is such a trap.
Before experiencing this shortage myself, my entrepreneurial side might have gotten excited about the heated housing market in Vancouver, and tried to figure out a way into the property speculation game. But now I think a little more hesitancy is in order. Its not right to profit from a system that spirals a basic human need like shelter out of the reach of so many.
We struggle to sleep, but the Downtown Eastside never sleeps. Even at 4am there is a gaggle of drug dealers and prostitutes congregating around the corner of Main and Hastings. The back alleys are darker and scarier at night, with people either in the throes of drug-induced ecstasy or drug-reduced agony. During the day, Hastings Street throngs with people pacing and looking for their highs. The dealers whisper as you walk by: “rock”, “morphine”, “T3’s” and “BC bud”.
I walk inside to get off the street. And I notice it is full of addicts as well. People rushing around looking for the next high, eyes glazed. Everywhere we turn, the dealers offer tempting things designed to dull our pain and make us feel good again if only for a while: “plasma-screens”, “iPods”, “designer clothes”. Luckily, disheveled people like I am this week aren’t really welcome in upmarket shopping malls and so I turn back to the street, and a different kind of drug addict.
Thought #3: We all do drugs and its only the drug dealers who win.
It’s seems to be a fundamental characteristic of human existence that we are driven to dull our pain and emptiness. For some, it’s the box in the corner of our living room that helps us to switch off from life’s stresses and watch “reality”. For me its often junk food (and boy would I kill for a Big Mac and a coke right now). For others it may be shopping, alcohol or prescription drugs. The difference between us and the folks on the streets is that a line has been drawn whereby our drugs are legal (though still quite harmful), and their drugs are not (that line has been drawn in different ways at different times in history like the prohibition era). Our drug-taking is hidden and we do it in privacy because we have homes. Today I read the words of Jesus in Luke 6 (I planned to read the whole gospel of Luke this week but I’m only up to chapter 6): “Do not judge and you will not be judged. Do not condemn and you will not be condemned.” And I think of my drug-addicted friends (the crack-addicts and the shopping addicts). Judge not Craig for there but by the grace of God you go.
The wide-spread drug use is one way of coping with the harsh life of the streets. Especially for the many with traumatic pasts or mental illness. One friend was abused as a little girl by a sick mother and her Satanic pals, and drugs became a way of forgetting that past… and her present. Once you use, it’s desperately hard to wrestle free.
Mostly though, drugs seem to be the main means of making relationships in the Downtown Eastside. Bonding over a beer, or a joint, or a crack pipe is the only way many people know how to connect with others.
It’s 10pm and I’m lying on the sidewalk reading a book, when a homeless girl asks if she can sit beside me. I hesitate because I am married. She sits anyway and pulls a can of beer out of her pocket. “Here you can have this”, she says hopefully. I actually like beer but there is something tragic about this situation. A young girl, maybe 20, is so desperate for connection with someone tonight that she will approach a complete stranger and offer them a beer in exchange for friendship. I mumble my excuses and she leaves, but I am pained by her pain.
Thought #4: People long to belong.
The people I am meeting in the Downtown Eastside are not starving for food. They are starving for friends. And the isolation of folks in the drop-in centres and soup kitchen lines is heart-breaking. There are hundreds of service-providers here. Free food, free clothing, free this and free that. And its much appreciated. But at the end of the day its still one-way charity: disempowering and de-motivating. The deepest need in the Downtown Eastside is not more soup kitchens, shelters or hand-outs. Its the need to be loved and to have someone know your name. Someone who gives a toss if you live or freeze to death tonight. In our charitable quest for efficiency, to reach the most people, and to outsource the hospitality that used to be provided to the stranger from our own homes, we have lost something critical. We have lost relationships with the poor. We feed them by the thousands. But we no longer know their names or their stories. And so they long to belong. And its precisely that breakdown of relationships, with family, friends, a support network, that makes it so hard to get off the street.
I close my book and turn over to go to sleep on my patch of cardboard and I wonder if that girl will find someone to love her, or if she will just find someone to abuse her.
Morning comes and its our last day. I never thought we’d make it but somehow we have. We have stumbled into the mind-numbing routine of drop-in centres, parks and soup kitchens that gets us through the day, along with hundreds of others.
It’s Sunday, so we go to a Downtown Eastside church and someone tells Jason to take his baseball cap off ‘cause its disrespectful. The vicar talks about how the Jesus we follow was homeless (Luke 9:58) and asks what does that mean for us.
I don’t think it was an accident that Jesus chose to identify himself with the homeless and the poor. Remember the blind panhandler in the gospels? The disciples asked Jesus, “Who sinned here?” but Jesus rebuked them saying, “You’re missing the point. This is not a chance for you guys to play the blame-game. This is an opportunity for God’s love and mercy to flow.” (Jn 9:2) And that’s exactly what I think he’d say about the Downtown Eastside.
[Craig is the International Coordinator of Servants. Craig and Nay Greenfield have been in Vancouver since late 2006, pioneering a new Servants team and intentional community in the Downtown Eastside. Some names have been changed for privacy.]
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