A seeming disconnect

It's hard to know what to make of this one.

Being Christmastime, it's not unusual for churches and other groups to make forays into the Downtown East Side and food or meals or do something Yuletide-ish. It's quite nice, really: Wednesday night, a group of young people strolled through the streets, carolling; Saturday night, an a cappella Gospel chorus rocked it up in Pigeon Park. In many cases, people are out there because they want to do something to help the situation, because they hear and read about it so much in the media. Don't think the people in the area don't appreciate it. But last night -- Monday -- something strange happened that can't help but leave one wondering.



The pile was about 5-times this size and in front of the window.





I arrived at the Mission with the Monday night bread pickup from Cobs in West Van to find a mountain (I kid you not) of clothes piled in front of the building. The doorway to The Lord's Rain was blocked; there was a Canadian Tire shopping cart in among the clothes, and a guy was picking through there.

There are two signs on the window of The Lord's Rain: NO SELLING OF ANYTHING IN FRONT OF GOSPEL MISSION OR THE LORD'S RAIN. So I pointed that sign out.

"I'm not sellin' nothin'," he said. "I'm picking some stuff out."

"Then whose is it?"

"The group that was over there (Pigeon Park) put it here. They said they'd just leave it here and we could go through it."

"They", it turned out, was a church group, but no one seemed to know the name. They had set up tables in Pigeon Park and handed out turkey dinner, boxes of food and used clothing. One fellow told me there must have been 500 people there. Global TV covered it, so they apparently had some advance work going on.

It was truly a "drive-by" blessing. I had gone to the Mission at 5 to pick up the bins for the bread; then we got back to the Mission around 7:45. During that time span, they had arrived, set up, served, torn down, and left, their final act being to take the unclaimed clothes and dump them in front of our building -- unaware that it was private property.

I'm not an alarmist, but one wacko with a cigarette lighter and a mad-on at the world could have done a lot of damage to our building and the people at the service inside.

So I piled as much of the stuff as I could -- clothes of various descriptions, shoes (some of which matched) and so forth -- onto the shopping cart and pushed the cart around the corner, putting the rest of it beside. Then I called Global TV, to see if they had a contact. I wanted to talk about this with someone who was responsible before deciding how to respond. The assignment desk, however, couldn't find the initial news release and the reporter only remembered talking to someone named "Sean".

Randall told me this morning he'd tried to speak with someone who was serving food and got a terse -- almost rude -- response. "We're a church group." "Oh, yes? Which church?" "Just a church."

One of the things that really ticks me off is that it's not as if no one was in the Mission at the time. As you can see in the photo, there are at least two large signs saying "CARRALL STREET CHURCH" on the front: there's also the illuminated sign showing The Lord's Rain, the wooden sign outside Barry's office window and a big flashing pseudo-neon sign that says "OPEN". Surely, somebody might have thought to ask if it was OK.

(To which I would have replied, "no", because we already have an enormous supply of clothing that we're trying to get rid of. But I never got that chance.)

Why give out boxes of non-perishable food when it could have bolstered the Food Bank's supplies? Why hand out clothing with no backup plan for the stuff that doesn't get taken? And why be rude to a "local" who just wants to know where you're from?

Not having spoken directly to any of the organizers, it's hard to say if they were being contemptuous or ignorant (dumping what was essentially junk could be a product of either or both); but it's a sign of what appears to be a disconnect between suburban churches and ministries on the Downtown East Side. It's rare to hear from them the rest of the year, and evidently this church group was unaware of our existence. They mean well, and they want to do something, but I really think the onus is on them to educate themselves about who's already doing what. The dinner idea is lovely, but what happens on the other 364 nights of the year? Who's there? How are they dealing with the situation? What do they need? (Hint: the answer is not necessarily money.) If they find those answers, they can concentrate their efforts and their obvious well meaning where they do the most good.

People living on the DTES -- druggies, pushers, prostitutes, mentally ill, people on disability pensions, down-and-outers -- are often like kids. You can throw all the money you want to at them, but at the end of the day, all they really want is someone's time, attention ... and love. And as Christians, we're supposed to love the unlovely. Trust me: on the DTES it's not hard.

After all, as I've said, there's really no shortage of money, food or clothing, but the laborers are few.