PPCSinc Blogs

I can remember parties with my dad’s side of the family as a kid in the seventies and early eighties.  As the youngest of his litter, my dad missed out on World War II.

His brothers did not.

Parties on my dad’s side followed what became a predictable routine.  The women would prepare the meal while the men sat and smoked and imbibed various products from Anheuser-Busch.

At some point during the party, which inevitably would last into the late hours, the topic of the war would come up. 

And there I would sit…spellbound, listening to their stories and occcasionally interrupting to ask a question. I learned early on about the attack on Pearl harbour, our response at Midway, MacArthur’s long promised return to the Phillipines and my uncles’ involvement to make that dream a reality at Laihi, Rommel outfoxing the British in North Africa, the Allies landing at Normandy, the bombing of London, the battle for Anzio and, of course, the Sullivan Brothers.  In fact, I still hear the anger in my uncle Bill’s voice as he retold the story of the latter.

I can still see them all…laughing and carrying on.  Everyone happy to be together, reminiscing about old friends while Bacchus smiled on.

I remember having the thought as I grew older that I should write their stories down.  I feared they’d be lost forever. But I never did.  “The road to hell…” and all that I suppose. Slowly, but with all of the certainty that time has in its store, my uncles passed away one by one.

By 1999 my dad’s last surviving brother died. To date, I have interviewed several WWII vets, their wives and others who lived during that time.

In some cases, I’ve approached perfect strangers and inquired about their age and involvement in the war.  Most are quite happy to share their story.  In fact, their families are often thankful for the effort.

“I had no idea my dad lived through so much” is a response I hear or “She never talked about the war until this interview.”

Stories are essential to life’s experience.  Mosaics, tapestries, whatever image you prefer to use to describe them, stories surround us on all sides.  They entertain, educate, celebrate and sometimes call us to action.

Working at PPCS allows our staff an opportunity to capture stories that might otherwise have been lost.

They are stories of those who are homeless and often invisible to the community. 

Like all of us, these are folks who have been wounded in one way or another.  Their stories are of genuine heroic effort, accomplishments, set backs, honesty, dishonesty, addiction, illness, redemption, unimaginable rejection and hope.

So who knows?

Maybe by sharing some of their stories, PPCS can snare some unsuspecting bystanders who just might take an interest in the issue, come to appreciate its complexities and get involved.

Once thing is for certain, their stories deserve our attention.

I am the substance abuse specialist at Peter & Paul Community Services Positive Directions. I have been at the agency since February of this year. It has been a great experience for me to work so closely with a small group of staff and clients.

In the past few years I have worked as a casemanager with larger populations. This has been a positive change as well as a challenge to be creative and track improvement for myself as well as the guys I am working with. The greater challenge has been to look more realistically at the kind of changes that take place for the clients I am working with.

In the past as a casemanager, it was more about providing resources, supports and linking people to needed services. It was a little more obvious to evaluate the success/outcome of the services provided. If someone needed housing, mental health treatment, clothing or food, we had resources available and could quickly determine if we were able to meet the need. Those outcomes were measurable, but now, the measurement of change as I work with people day to day is more incremental…no less valuable, but not as easy to identify.

This has been a wonderful challenge for me at an amazing agency and working in such a unique program. I am always praying for a new challenge and it’s great to know GOD is listening. I suppose I will pray for greater understanding and patience. I am grateful to be a part of and witness the wonderful changes I already see in our clients in this exceptional program. I hope anyone who is interested in what we do will plan an opportunity to learn more about Positive Directions and Peter & Paul Community Services.

6 August 2007

The word used to describe internet journaling, (Can ‘journal’ be a verb? Isn’t that the nature of this rant?), is an ugly corruption. Last night I heard a commercial for a financial institution offering deals on what they called “refi.” I thought, how pathetically selfconsciously hip in a corporate way. I hope they paid the homey in their posse handsomely for that stupid bit of marketing banality. I hope they didn’t have to tell them to pull up their pants. I hate veggies and want to choke traffic reporters who refer to the “PSB.” I would rather call this blathering than, (ugh) “blogging.”

It was still 80 degrees this morning at 4. Now it’s bruising up against 100. Dog days of summer, crest of the season, the fresh shiny green of spring has passed and now it is the flat full muscularity of summer oppressing us all. A couple of days ago, I was driving in the county and noticed a few hundred starlings on some power lines. The gathering has begun.

You generally  notice it in the fall but it really begins at the high point of summer. Soon you will see hundreds, then thousands of starlings gathering together late in the day. It happens every summer into the fall. To whatever extent starlings migrate we are never at a loss for numbers. If ours go to Mexico then Canada’s come to us. It marks the time of the season. The cicada’s song fills the air, loudly droning their high pitched “Scree eee eee eee, scree eee eee eee”. When I was a kid, that song let me know school was just around the bend.  Sweltering heat beating down salty, sweat stained brows, running into and burning eyes make it hard to comprehend it is only 84 days till November first and another 151 beyond that to April Fools, (152 since ‘08 is a leap year). Was I always so time conscious? Halloween and April Fool’s were the time boundaries of what was then known as the ‘winter shelter’. I always found an ironic symmetry to those dates. 151 days with January 15th the dead center of the season. There is no real meaning there. I am just a sentimental, nostalgic fool.

Fall fashions are arriving in shops. Halloween and Thanksgiving hype is already occupying floor space in stores and the first Christmas catalogues are coming in the mail. Most of the folks we serve don’t have the luxury of a long view. They are more concerned with such ordinary things as trying to fulfill the very bottom of Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs.” (How am I going to eat today? Where can I go to the bathroom? Where might I get some sleep?) Being homeless is like jail without the benefits, no three hots and a cot. In jail you have a place you can’t leave. When you are homeless you have no place to stay, one hundred sixty eight hours a week with no time off for good behavior.

Comparatively speaking jail is stable. No one is telling you to move along. It is climate controlled. You know where your next meal, such as it is, is coming from. If you get sick they send you to the infirmary. When you are homeless, meeting your most basic needs is more than a full time job. Every now and then I meet someone who thinks it must resemble the adventures of Huckleberry Finn, boys on a lark. Yessiree, Bob. Enter the shelter between seven and nine, sleep within 18/20 inches of half a dozen other men, one or two who happen to be world class snorers. Dine on the wonderful cuisine, and enjoy the inevitable ensuing intermittent flatulence. Yea, Buddy. It is the life of Reilly. You have arrived. Actually, who in their right mind would claim such a sentiment? Again, who in their right mind?

I always thought the best reality show would be to drop contestants into Hobo Park, (aka Lucas Park), with nothing but the number to the homeless hotline and see how they fare. Well over half the people calling that number are turned away for lack of beds. No cash, no credit cards, no ATM, not even something that says who they are. Let us see how their survival skills serve them in an all-too-real world of challenges. How long would it take them to gather credentials like ID, social security card and birth certificate, establish income and savings while acquiring the bare modicum of household goods necessary to set up a modest home and then find truly affordable housing. It is more daunting than trying to renew your license plates by a long shot, and that is assuming you’re firing on all cylinders.

At 7 PM on Thursday 30 August 2007, the men in our transitional program will be guests on KDHX, FM 88.1. They will be reading from their writings from our Art CollabARTive. They will be sharing anecdotes and vignettes from their collective experiences. It is culled from a larger piece that will be performed at 7 PM, Friday 7 September at Christ Church Cathedral as part of CCC’s ‘Art and Soul Cafe’ series. It is powerful stuff. We will also be showing our ‘game’ based on being homeless and trying to achieve permanent housing. Revisit this site in the next week or two for more information on these doings.