Harold and Vicky; and good news for Maggie

Bart shook his head. “A man drink like you do,” he said, “he gone die!”

The Kid thought about that for a moment, then said, “When?”

-- from “Blazing Saddles”, 1974 (slightly novelized version)

“He’s been drinkin’ rub,” Sheila said, “and some o’ that!” she added, pointing to an empty bottle of Jack Daniels.

I passed the information on to the ambulance dispatcher. It was Friday morning, and Bruce (who can be seen on our video presentation about The Lord’s Rain) had come into the ministry to get me to call 9-1-1. “Someone’s havin’ a seizure,” he said.

“Rub” is rubbing alcohol, which is usually watered-down or mixed with Listerine, but Sheila insisted that Ashley had been drinking his straight. Ashley was lying on one of the benches, twitching slightly on his left side. He was breathing normally, a fact confirmed when the dispatcher had me watch him and say “now” whenever he took a breath. But the ambulance was on its way and got there in a couple of minutes.

Before they got there, Ashley came to and managed to sit up. “I’m epileptic,” he told me, and a couple of the others said, “he’s OK – he doesn’t need an ambulance.” But Sheila laid down the law. “They need to check him out,” she declared.

It turned out that one of the paramedics knew the patient. “Have another seizure, Ashley?” Ashley nodded. “Want to go to the hospital and get checked out?” “Yeah, I wanna go,” Ashley replied. They walked him to the ambulance and helped him in. As we watched him, Sheila pointed with her foot to the bottle of Jack, almost in wonder at the amount Ashley had put away.

Again, I marvelled at the compassion shown by the paramedics. Not only did one of them know Ashley’s name, but also remembered that he had a broken collarbone, which had not been repaired – probably for the same reason Jim Ritchie hadn’t had surgery to repair his collarbone: too much risk that he would fall, break it again, and get infected.

On Saturday, I strolled over to Pigeon Park again, and there was Ashley, sitting on the same bench, slugging back something from a bottle. I asked him what happened at the hospital. He didn’t really know. “That was Thursday,” he said.

“Friday.”

“No – Thursday. I woke up at home this morning.”

 Nothing I could say would shift him from that belief. Apparently, he’d lost a day due to the stroke.

“Hey – I’m alive,” he said, smiling and taking a pull on a bottle of something dark and strong-looking.

A couple of the others at the park came over and chatted and one, whom I’d never seen before, said, “thank you for praying for us.”

What can one say, besides “you’re welcome”?

I’ve said before: The Lord’s Rain has been serving basic human needs beyond the need to be physically clean. People anywhere – especially in a place like the Downtown East Side – have a basic need to know that they’re in right standing with God. Being prayed for goes a long way to that end.

Anyone can do that, too – although it’s important to offer the prayers in the hope-against-hope that knowing how much God loves them will gradually provide greater comfort than rubbing alcohol, Jack Daniels and whatever Ashley had in that bottle.

===

The word “gradually” is important. My friend, Cal Weber, who leads Campus Ministry at the BCIT (BC Institute of Technology), once noted that water, flowing over a rock, has the same impact as a sledgehammer; it just takes longer. But when the job is done, the rock is completely worn away, without the big chunks a sledgehammer leaves behind. So it is with Ministry.

===

It is six weeks, now, since Vicky, one of our regulars, came into The Lord’s Rain. She bypassed the coffee line, looked at John, Danilo and me and burst into tears. “Harold died this morning,” she said.

Harold was her male companion (for want of a better term: they weren’t married, and “boyfriend” sounds trivial, especially under the circumstances), and she had woken up that morning to find he had passed away in the bed beside her.

On Friday, Vicky was back at The Lord’s Rain, still grieving, carrying with her the little leaflet from the memorial service. She poured her heart out to John, which was actually a good choice, as he had had a similar experience – waking up one morning to find his roommate dead on the kitchen floor – and he is known to people in the area as an excellent listener.

---

How about a little good news?

I have mentioned Maggie before, although I’ve only seen her in The Lord’s Rain once. A very small woman, somewhere between age 45 and 60, she gets around by pushing a wheelchair (although she recently got a walker, which is easier to handle). For the past couple of years, she’s had a little camp in a doorway on Cordova Street, just around the corner from The Lord’s Rain. Last year, the space was renovated into a restaurant and delicatessen, but the proprietors let Maggie stay in the doorway, which isn’t being used, anyway. A gate was installed and Maggie was given the key. Little by little, her camp has grown, with pillows, a sleeping bag and books, and people drop off food for her, or she goes out to find a meal from one of the outreaches.

On Friday, she called me over. “I’m moving into my new place in December,” she announced.

It turns out, she’s had a room at a single-room-occupancy (SRO) hotel called the Marble Arch, which is just outside the DTES. “I’ve been payin’ rent there,” she said, “but I refused to go back until they fixed the place up. It was declared number-one-worst place in the city.”

But now, it appears, the renovations have been done. “I got new furniture and a kitchen with a microwave that works!” It appears that she’d been paying rent for her room at Marble Arch, which held it for her in the mean time. Disabled and ravaged by drug abuse (it’s hard to say which followed the other ) and occasionally subjected to verbal abuse, like the guy who yelled at her, “you brought it on yourself!”, as he blew her off, Maggie is about due for a break.

===

(Do you remember a song from the 1980s, called “The Way It Is,” by Bruce Hornsby and The Range? The opening verse describes a homeless guy begging on the street, and someone drives by in a car shouting, “get a job!” We all nodded sagely and opined how awful that was and how true and but it must be someone else who had such a stinking attitude. To borrow Walt Kelly’s overused line, we have met the enemy, and he is us.)

===

An article in today’s Vancouver Sun makes interesting reading. It’s on a national study that’s just been released on housing for the mentally ill, and suggests mentally ill people tend to “do better” living in self-contained apartments scattered around the city, rather than in SROs concentrated in a particular area. They benefit, the study suggests, from being around healthier people and socializing more. Interestingly, the NIMBY factor among people already living in these neighbourhoods is not as pervasive as some might have thought.

It reminds me of a remark our friend Marty made a few months ago. “It’s too easy [on the DTES]. I can call a dealer any time, then take two steps outside my door and meet him.” Others consider “getting the heck outta Dodge” to be a main goal in life. The important thing is to impart sufficient hope to them that they will, like Maggie, see that a breakthrough is not just desirable, it’s possible.

Gentrification is not a four-letter word!

The high gate used to be a drop-site for drugs and stolen property.

Today's Province newspaper gives front-page treatment to a situation that's been brewing for the past week or so on the Downtown East Side: protests over a new restaurant, Pidgin, right across the street from Gospel Mission/The Lord's Rain.





The windows are about 2/3 blacked-out from view from the street,
so I played "Secret Sam" with my BlackBerry to get a look inside.



The Province article is very well-balanced (I think the editorial is bang-on, too), as it quotes a couple of regulars in the area -- like John, whose family has run Wing's Cafe (in the same building at the Mission) since the 50s, and some of those who hang out at Pigeon Park -- as saying the protesters "aren't from around here" and it makes me wonder why they've singled out Pidgin when there are at least 4 other new restaurants within the same block -- Nelson the Seagull and Rainier Provisions in the Rainier Hotel building, the resurrected Save-On Meats a bit further west on Hastings, and Acme Cafe a couple of doors past that.

Maybe it's because Pidgin has posted a statement on its windows that hits the "gentrification" issue head-on. See, there's a fear that the current incursion into the DTES by developers, buying and renovating delapidated properties will drive out the poor. As it is, the new developments have included a lot of low-cost housing and quite a few of the people who come into The Lord's Rain have found clean, new homes in these developments.

Rather than a bogeyman, gentrification is a unique opportunity -- it's a point I've made before and it's the notice Pidgin posted in its windows makes the same point -- an opportunity for two distinct groups of people to get to know each other. Let's face it: the image most people outside the DTES have of the area is the "Canada's Worst Postal Code" label hung on it by the activists. Were they to spend any time there -- say, having a nice dinner -- they might actually see something different. They'd see human beings, like themselves, only with a key difference: they made mistakes that they were not able to recover from as elegantly as others.

Who knows? Maybe while walking from the parking space on Cordova Street or the bus stop on Hastings, the restaurant patrons might strike up a conversation with the gang in Pigeon Park, and as an old Anglican minister once said to me, "you can never hate a man once you've talked to him."

Certainly, the menu at Pidgin could attract a "different" kind of crowd. If you're into trying out "cured steelhead, asian pear, ginger, sesame" ($13) or " beef tataki, black garlic, gruyère, woodear, wasabi mayo, chips" ($14), you would be attracted to the place. You might not be so inclined if they were just another burger-and-fries place.

So foodies and others get a first-hand look -- not the story getting fed by the activists -- and then start considering solutions that step outside the gimme-gimme answers the activists keep pushing. They might even see Gospel Mission and The Lord's Rain across the street, which has been ministering to people in the area since the Great Depression and changing lives in a positive way (without taking any taxpayer money).

And maybe that's what the protesters don't want. A quote in the Province article may say more than the speaker really wanted to: “The rich don’t need another playground down here in a poor area.” Is it that they want it to stay segregated? Do they want to see the DTES stay the way it's been for most of the past 40-odd years: a cauldron of despair, drugs and living death, ignored by the well-to-do. After all, if people start seeing what it's really like and start coming up with solutions that actually might raise more people out of poverty, there won't be as great a need for activists with demands which I believe are unreasonable and unachievable -- and at the very least, require someone else to spend the money.

You have to wonder why.

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.

Pigeon Park - back open again!

It's been the subject of a fair bit of cynicism and suspicion ... and no little frustration on all parts for various reasons ... but one of the focal points of the Downtown East Side is back in business, as it were. Pigeon Park officially re-opened on Tuesday (Dec. 15), after being closed for several months for the work on the Carrall Street Greenway.

Pigeon Park is the primary reference point for Gospel Mission/The Lord's Rain. Barry Babcook occasionally refers to the Mission as "The Pigeon Mission" (although that's becoming less and less common) and for about four months, it was really hard for us to describe to people where we were located, because "Pigeon Park", for all intents and purposes, didn't exist.

One interesting little anomaly: I think I'm stopped illegally in this picture, because there's a "no stopping/bus zone" pictogram at the front of that space ... but no sign at the other end. There aren't any buses going down that block, anyway, but as you can see from the trolley overheads above the car (look closely), the buses will be back soon.

What's really neat about this is, here is our little church - right in the midst of this lovely Greenway. People taking advantage of the new facility, be it for biking or walking, will see Gospel Mission, and I believe will start to see the good-news stories that are coming out of both the Mission and The Lord's Rain. People might suggest that the Greenway and renewed Pigeon Park are connected with the great bogeyman called "gentrification", but I say this Greenway is really a pathway that will, at last, bridge that Great Divide between the DTES and the ROTC (Rest Of The City). As I've said before, we have to stop looking at the poverty and homelessness and hopelessness issues as a matter of Us and Them. It's Us and Us, and once we get our heads around that, we'll be more than halfway there.

Besides, don't people in the area have just as much a right to nice-looking streets as those in other parts of town? Just like a shower and a fresh set of clothes, there are times when sprucing up the outward appearance can do wonders for the inward reality.

What I really like about the renewed Pigeon Park -- and the Carrall Street Greenway -- is the message the city is sending to the area. With all the beautification going on as the city prepares for the Olympics, that's a stretch that could have been ignored -- but it wasn't.

And yes, it is called -- now and forever -- Pigeon Park. There was some talk that it would be re-named "Pioneer Park", in the way that other parts of Vancouver grope for signs of "heritage", even as 21st Century high-rises (oh-so-environmentally-friendly, dontcha know) sprout like ragweed around us. But no: the official Vancouver Parks sign proclaims that Pigeon Park it shall be. Really - no other name would have gotten any traction at all.

Mind you, there's a certain historical/heritage aspect to the name Pigeon Park, because I seem to recall a time back in the Hippie 60s when there was a controversy over making that the official name. Must check with Chuck Davis - he'd know.

Not that the renewed park doesn't have a streak of ersatz history. I think I noted in a previous post that they'd installed streetcar rails in the pavement. I believe the streetcar did run along that route (the old BC Electric carbarn is across the street, now home to an art gallery and a variety of offices, including those of Red Robinson and Bruce Allen), but what makes the rails such a strange addition is that they fool nobody. For one thing, they run at sidewalk level, not at street level. On the other side of the carbarn, on Pender Street, streetcar rails also cross the sidewalk and then continue running across the street. If you really tried to run a streetcar along those tracks, that'd be a heckuva bumpy ride going from the sidewalk to the street.

There are Biblical analogs to Pigeon Park, as well. I've written before that the DTES is Vancouver's "Samaria", and Jesus makes special mention of that area in His instructions to us. When Jesus journeyed towards Galilee, He went via Samaria and then stopped and rested beside Jacob's Well, a place that had over 2,000 years of history behind it even then. It was a place where you could be guaranteed to meet a Samaritan. Pigeon Park is right at the edge of the original city limits of Vancouver, and would have been a site of some kind of settlement -- right back to the native Indian villages prior to the arrival of the white man -- for generations.

Jesus went out of His way to reach out to Samaria and Samaritans, and we need to remember that He also called on us -- His followers -- to make that a priority.