Volunteer at The Lord's Rain

The Lord's Rain -- the street-level outreach at Gospel Mission, which provides showers for people on the Downtown East Side -- has a number of opportunities for volunteers. These provide a unique chance to interact with people who have been essentially "written-off" by society and truly need hope and a hand-up, rather than a hand-out.

The volunteer positions are in early mornings -- between 7 and 8:30 am -- on Mondays (women only), Thursdays and Fridays. Duties involve:

• making and serving coffee
• handing out towels, soap, etc.
• finding clothing or shoes when asked
• cleaning up

But most importantly, these volunteer positions involve interacting: listening to people and encouraging them. Just knowing that someone from "the outside" cares about them can give someone hope to carry on, and hope is probably the most precious commodity on the DTES.

If you are interested in this opportunity, please contact Janet Klassen, Assistant Pastor (and responsible for The Lord's Rain) at janet@gospelmission.net. 

Another volunteer position involves driving: we need someone to pick up the end-of-day product donation every Monday at 7pm from Cobs Bread in Caulfeild Village in West Vancouver. It requires a car -- a small hatchback will do -- and the ability to lift and load the bags. Once the product has been picked up, it needs to be delivered to The Lord's Rain -- either that same night or the following morning. 

If you are interested in this volunteer position, please contact me at drewdsnider@gmail.com.

You can find out more about the story of The Lord's Rain in this video presentation.

Junior - and the joy of giving

Frankly, I'm getting sick of writing obits for members of my "family".

In the past year, we've lost Barry Smith and Tina, and many others have come and gone over the years. "Let us learn to show our regard for a man while he is alive and not wait until after he's dead," Meyer Wolfsheim, a character in The Great Gatsby, said, so in that spirit and noting that Junior's time is short, I'd like to spend a few words on him while he's still around to contradict or embellish.

Junior comes across as a rough-hewn Cockney git, and when I first met him, he constantly sported a red ballcap with the flag of England on the back. He loved to talk about his rough past, with dark allusions to underworld connections. 

A few years ago, I let him make an "important" phone call. The call evidently went to voice mail.

"Junior. Later." And he hung up.

That more or less summed up the Junior Mystique: was he calling some gang connection? Setting up a rendez-vous? Calling a non-existent number and making us think he was doing some big business deal that dared not speak its name? 

A few weeks later, someone came into The Lord's Rain when Junior was there. "Don't I know you?" he said. "I don't know you," Junior replied. "Weren't we in Maple Ridge?" the stranger persisted, referring to the provincial jail. "I don't know you," Junior repeated.

Junior turned his attention back to telling whatever joke or anecdote he was telling me, and the stranger kept hanging around.

"I wanna ask you something," the stranger said at length.

"What?"

"Come out here with me."

"Not a good idea," I mumbled towards Junior.

"I ain't goin' nowhere," Junior said to both of us.

"No - come out. I just want to ask you something."

Junior ignored him. The stranger still hung around. I was distracted by something else and when I looked back, both of them were gone. Suddenly, Brad -- a former volunteer -- rushed in. "Drew! Get out here!" We went out and there Junior was, sitting in the alley with his back against the brick wall, bleeding from the side of his head. Junior wasn't into talking at the time, but Brad saw it and said he'd been brought down with a single sucker-punch. I called 9-1-1 for an ambulance. Junior was remarkably cooperative as they helped him in, as if the hospital would be his witness-protection program for the time-being.

When Cheryl Weber came to do a feature on The Lord's Rain in 2009, Junior suddenly stood up and recited the Pater Noster -- the Lord's Prayer in Latin, in its entirety. Cheryl's photographer shot it, although none of the footage was used.

His real name is Eric. One day, I asked him the obvious question. "How did you come to be called 'Junior'?"

The story that followed was one of those ones that was so off-the-wall, it had to be true. It turns out, he was born in India in 1948 to a 70-something member of the British Raj. Dad -- who I believe was Eric Senior -- moved back to England and left the lad in the care of his sisters in India. He eventually found his way to England, some time in a public school (what we refer to as "private" schools in Canada) and running with gangs and criminals and tough guys around Nova Scotia and Quebec on a motorcycle. Names like "Mom" Boucher, the notorious Hell's Angels kingpin, would roll off his tongue like an informant out of the back of a darkened van. Whether his talk was bigger than the reality, slightly embellished or absolutely 100% true, we may never know.

At the end of the day, Junior has been a loner. I've never known him to associate with anybody, and in many ways, a 10-minute visit to The Lord's Rain -- maybe to get coffee, maybe not -- seems to be the closest he comes to social interaction. The tales of underworld connections, while they may make some of us say, "yeah - right ...", may be Junior's way of isolating himself from the world. I still don't know why he got punched in the head.

Almost a year ago, now, Junior showed up at The Lord's Rain. The ballcap had been replaced by a large white cowboy hat. "I got cancer," he told me, matter-of-factly. "The docs say I won't see Christmas." I prayed over him for healing and peace.

The "docs" have missed the mark by several months. He comes in from time to time, by now, wearing an expensive black leather jacket.cowboy boots and a very impressive-looking watch; he also walks slowly, with a cane, and he wears sunglasses. He has grown progressively gaunt and pale in the past few months.

Yet there's still a bit of the swagger to him, and, almost to keep his own spirits up, he invariably has a joke. "Have you ever heard of an African elephant?" "Yes." "This over-sexed African elephant mated with a rhinoceros. You know what you call the offspring?" I shook my head.

"'ell-if-I-know."

(Believe it or not, I just now got it. You have to say it over a few times, I guess.)

And off he went. I figured this might be my last chance for a picture and this might be the most appropriate: a lonely figure, leaving me trying to figure out a joke as enigmatic as the man himself.

===

Maybe there's a bit of the latent bureaucrat in me -- and considering I couldn't organize a sock drawer, that could draw some guffaws from people who know me -- but when a new donation of clothing arrives at The Lord's Rain, I prefer to take some time sorting it and making sure we know what's in it. It could be that I've seen too many occasions where people have descended on a pile of donations like a pack of Tasmanian Devils on fresh carrion.

So when my friend Gloria arrived recently with a sackful of clothes her teenage sons had gathered -- along with a large garbage bag filled with new socks -- I naturally told John that we'd take some time to sort them before we'd give them out.

But then I went upstairs, and John, being the impetuous sort that he is, opened the bags and let the guys have at it. 

OK, so I didn't get to do things in an orderly fashion: but the guys were remarkably restrained and clearly delighted with the new shirts that had come in. And then I looked over at Gloria. There's a reason why she's nicknamed "Glow" -- she has this million-watt smile that could sell asphalt toothpaste and copper-wire dental floss, and she was totally ecstatic to see the pleasure people were getting. 

It proves a point we've often made here: you think you're ministering to people at The Lord's Rain; it turns out, it's the other way around.

Marty's New Chance - and lucid speakers

I think I've mentioned Marty before in these emails. A teacher whose life was dragged down by drug addiction, he first raised my eyebrows* when he supplied the line, "each man's death diminishes me" after I had quoted John Donne's "No man is an island, entire of himself ...". It was my first glimpse of the level of education among many of the people in the area. It wouldn't be my last.

*(I can only raise both eyebrows: the ability to raise only one, raised to an art form by Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter Whimsy and my friend Arlene for comedic effect during an drama exercise, has always eluded me.) 

Marty has had a few false starts on his road back. For a time, it looked like the school district would lift his suspension: that didn't happen; he worked for a time as an advocate through the health region: I'm not sure how that ended. Teaching people is his forte, and not having anyone to teach has been the toughest part, I think. Lately, he's been looking into teaching English as a second language, but that requires certification, certification requires taking courses, and taking courses requires money.

Marty had been searching for grants, scholarships, etc., etc., with no success, but this morning, he had some better news to report.

"The Housing Society (the non-profit group that administers his housing situation) is going to help me," he said. Apparently, he's to take some preliminary courses, receive an honorarium for that, and the deal is, if he plows the honorarium into the tuition fee, the housing society will pay for the rest. "They want to know that I'm serious."

"Praise the Lord," I said. "A second -- another -- chance."

"'Another chance' is right," he said. He's had more than a few and he knows it: one of his enemies through these struggles is that little voice that keeps nattering at him that he's messed-up before, so he'll probably mess up this time. We need to keep Marty in prayer that he'll get that supernatural strength to push past that voice and keep focused on "newness". It's really the only chance any of us has.

===

"I've rarely seen her that lucid."

That observation came from a friend who recently retired from 20-plus years as an advocate for Vancouver's homeless, and we have a lot of mutual friends in the area. The presentation on The Lord's Rain that I delivered in late June includes clips from people who've been involved in the Ministry. That includes the people who come to the place. (The presentation can now be viewed online, and I hope you'll take some time (48 minutes) to check it out. If you would like a DVD copy for your church, home group or organization, please let me know and I'll pop it in the mail for you.)

There are several people I refer to as "fallen geniuses" at The Lord's Rain. Lojas (pronounced like the Spanish "Luis") is one -- a Hungarian fellow who has tried more ways than I can count to find his way of serving the Lord and spreading the Gospel. At Rainbow Mission, he would put on puppet shows of Bible stories, using "puppets" that amounted to pieces of cardboard with appropriate names printed on each (like "SNAKE" for the story of Adam and Eve). He pitched to me a game he had been trying to develop, "Gospel Chess", in which no one defeats the other: since Jesus is about Unity, the idea is not to "take" the other player's pieces but bring them all together as one. I left our meeting understanding one thing: here was a genius -- and a devout and dedicated one -- but something was misfiring.

There are others who are similarly well-spoken, with advanced vocabularies; but there are times when their sentences make no sense. Not to me, anyway. Sometimes they're silly; sometimes they're ranting; often, it's as if they were reading a script made up of unconnected words and phrases, and the writer has written each word on a separate slip of paper and tossed them all into the air.

But when I put them in front of a camera to talk about The Lord's Rain and what it means to them, their expressions become remarkably clear. I think that tells you something about the spiritual impact it has on people. 

Rudy is not one of the "fallen geniuses": he's lucid every time I talk to him. He's not in this presentation, but he said a very important thing about The Lord's Rain a couple of years ago, when CBC TV did a feature on the place. In an interview (and I can't relate this with any kind of false humility), he referred to me and said "he always has time to listen to us." I'd hardly spoken to him up to that point, so he had no way of knowing that I was going through one of those periods of self-doubt, wondering if what I was doing was really doing any good. Somehow, Rudy was moved to say something, and when my friend Gloria, who did the interview, relayed that to me, it was as if the Lord had used Rudy to say to me, "hang in there, kid!"

And now, I'm afraid he's very ill -- more than he's willing to let on. He comes in every morning -- he used to come in with his wife, Audrey, but I haven't seen her in some time (he tells me she's fine, but tends to sleep late) -- and sits quietly with his coffee. He's never asked for anything, but The Lord's Rain has become his "morning place".

A few weeks ago, he told me he had an appointment at an AIDS clinic. "Is it serious?" I asked, which was kind of a stupid question, in retrospect. "I'm fine," he replied. He's never said that he actually has AIDS or what, but it's clear that he's been losing weight rapidly, and that's a very bad sign. But as Jesus has said, sickness -- even a supposedly incurable disease (like death, in the case of His friend Lazarus) -- is an opportunity for God's glory to show, which is why we need to lift Rudy and Audrey up in prayer.

More media for The Lord's Rain

It puts me to shame.

Here I am, a guy who rarely uses a few words when a thousand will do, and the most effective media articles about The Lord's Rain have been ones with "enforced" space restrictions. Leah Bolton's piece on JoyTV10 about the logo contest is one example; another is Kate Webb's front-page story on the recent funding crisis, which quickly brought in donations to keep us open for a year or more.

Now comes Kent Spencer's piece in Sunday's Province ---- from his weekly department, "The Moral Question". Definitely worth reading, because Kent deftly captures the vibe of the place. One correction: in the third- and second-last paragraphs, the quote is incorrectly attributed to me; in fact, it was Danilo who said it. (I've asked The Province to run a "for the record" correction.)

The article also refers to The Lord's Rain as being my "brain-child". As I put together the presentation I gave at Westpointe two weeks ago, it became more and more apparent that God has been lining this thing up since long before I showed up, unannounced, at the Bowery Mission in September 2007. I nearly drove myself nuts, in a minor sort of way, thinking about the connections that had been formed decades before and how they all led to the creation -- and continuation -- of The Lord's Rain. When the time was right, h

He brought it all together. Indeed, it was Barry who had a strong leading that The Lord's Rain had to open before the end of April, and so it did -- on April 30th. That was not a day too soon: if we had waited much longer, we would have been caught by the worldwide economic crisis, and one wonders how readily people would have contributed then.

But then, because of that financial collapse, the W. Garfield Weston Foundation set up a special fund to help charitable organizations get through that period, 

"Brain-father"? No - more like "brain-midwife".

=== 

Bravo for Life's Little Ironies Dep't.

"I got up this morning, flung open my window,
took a deep breath and chipped a tooth."
-- Johnny Carson on the LA smog

"Howdja like to be living in those apartments?" Ralph asked.

Ralph is a relative newcomer, certainly a what-the-heck-are-you-doing-here? fellow who seems to be compos mentis so one wonders how he wound up on the Downtown East Side.

We were outside on the sidewalk, and Ralph's attention was drawn to a large truck, idling in the alley across from us. The first of the attached photos shows the great billows of dark blue-gray smoke were wafting towards the windows above. Vancouver has a by-law limiting engine idling to 3 minutes, and this truck would have barely met the AirCare standard (40% opacity for trucks newer than 2001).

"And - coff-coff - make sure you recycle!"

OK ... stuff happens. Then the truck started moving and turned into Carrall Street, at which point, we saw the side of the vehicle.

The second of the attached photos shows the side-view: yes, it was collecting recyclables as part of Vancouver's "greenest city" initiative.

A little unclear on the concept?

"I just want to be left alone"

Maybe I've seen too many episodes of "The Closer" (although I don't think that's possible: best cop show on TV and when I saw the series finale, I felt like I was saying goodbye to some good friends), but whenever I see a body lying awkwardly in an alley I suspect the worst. Seeing large puddles of a reddish substance nearby just heightens the suspicion. 

So when I spotted a body lying awkwardly in the alley across from The Lord's Rain, I took notice; and when I saw large reddish puddles near him, I got even more alarmed. The fellow was breathing, which was a relief, so I knelt down and touched his shoulder. 

"Hey, bro'," I said. "You OK?" His eyes popped open. Bright blue eyes, under a close-cut crop of grey hair with a reasonably clear face.

"What?"

"Are you OK? Aside from lying face-down in an alley, let's say."

"Yeah. Yeah ... I'm just relaxed."

"Really? Heckuva place to be relaxing. Do you know where you are?"

He glanced around. "Yeah. What time you got?"

"10 to 8."

"OK. I just wanna be left alone."

"Hey, no problem. We got some coffee across the street, if you'd like some. Right where the sign says 'OPEN'."

I started away. One fellow walked past me down the alley and kept on going, barely looking at the man. A couple came over and the woman asked, "is he OK?" "Apparently," I replied. 

Just then, an unmarked police car pulled up and two cops got out. "Are you the one who called us?" one of them asked. "No," I said. "Someone called us." "He says he's OK." 

"Really: I'm fine ..."

The other cop knelt down beside him and they chatted for a bit. The first policeman -- older than the other, with an English accent -- came over to me. "Can our friend come over for a cup of tea or coffee?" "Absolutely," I said.

But after chatting with the man and helping him to his feet, he headed away down the alley, and the two cops went back to their beat.

===

For a brief period on Saturday, The Lord’s Rain looked like a convention of emergency personnel. A man had come in, ripped out of his mind on something, and promptly fell down. Danilo helped him to his feet and guided him to a bench beside the wall. No sooner had he sat down than he reeled and did a head-plant on the floor and lay there, unconscious.

John called 9-1-1. At the same time, another of the guys ran out and flagged down a passing police car. Two women constables came in, donned blue latex gloves and started trying to wake him up. 

At first, they had no success, and then, just as firefighters arrived (first responders), he started to open his eyes. He had a nasty red-turning-to-purple bruise on one eye and dried blood around one ear – apparently acquired before he came in. The police managed to get him sitting upright with his back against a chair and the firefighters started looking him over.

“I don’t need to go to hospital,” he kept asserting, throwing in some verbal abuse as the firefighters got more adamant that he should, “just to get checked out”.

“Listen,” one of the cops said, “you may have a head injury and you should let them check you over to make sure there isn’t damage in there.”

Another photo that won't go viral:
emergency personnel caring for someone.

“There’s nothing in there!” 

By now, the police sergeant in charge of that sector had arrived, along with the Ambulance Supervisor. The more they tried to convince him he should go to the hospital, the more he declared he was perfectly alright and didn’t need to go to the (EXPLETIVES DELETED) hospital.

The ambulance arrived. By now, we had about 10 uniforms inside, as if John had simply said "yes" when the 9-1-1 operator asked, “do you want police, fire or ambulance?”.

People, apparently, cannot be forced to go to the hospital if they don’t want to, no matter how convincing a case the emergency personnel make. Our friend suddenly got to his feet and stalked out of The Lord’s Rain, pausing to spit at the ambulance. 

“Amazing, isn’t it?” Danilo remarked after everyone had left. “When someone who’s on drugs sees people in uniforms, they get that rush of adrenalin and they immediately act like they’re sober.” 

I ran into the police sergeant a short time later. They were able to track the fellow to a SRO hotel, where he’d barged into someone’s room and started breaking things. “We got him cleaned up and got him home,” he said.

Every time I read or hear about “activists” claiming police unfairly target people on the DTES or see some amateur video that purports to show “brutality”, I think of scenes like this one. There are plenty, but strangely enough, you won’t find anyone with a cell phone camera eager to post pictures of them. So I thought I’d tell you. 

===

In the presentation I’ve been working on to spread the word and solicit support for The Lord’s Rain, I mention that the whole building and success of the project has been an example of God “getting His ducks in a row” long before He even planted the idea of providing showers for people on the Downtown East Side in anybody’s head. Connections formed years, and in some cases, decades, earlier – such as The Oasis and Andrew Sheret – re-surfaced to make the facility come to pass.

Now, it’s happened again. One of the common needs of the people we serve is footwear. “Street foot” is a nasty affliction, and many times I’ve seen feet that were positively rotting from the effects of wet and unsanitary footwear. That’s why it’s so important to keep up our supply of socks, and why we welcome donations of shoes of all kinds and sizes when they come in.

Following the media attention we got in the past month, we were contacted by the owner of Quick Cobbler. The shoe repair business has a charity giving program, in which they take in used shoes, fix them up, and donate them to the needy. Would we like to be included in the program? Of course, we would. So, praise God and blessings to Ron Nijdam and his company, we will be receiving shipments of reusable shoes every couple of months.

So what’s this long-term connection? 29 years ago, your agent was working in radio in Victoria and was hired to do a TV commercial. I played a newscaster (a real stretch, to be sure), interviewing “the shoe on the street” to see how they prefer to be repaired. The shoes – English accent for a pair of Oxfords, “Valley Girl” for a pair of outrageous-looking runners, rough and tough guy for a pair of work boots – all agreed on the same repair shop. At the end, cut back to newscaster, declaring that this shop can handle any situation. Camera tilts down to reveal newscaster has three legs. Hilarious.

The client? Quick Cobbler. Ron was with the Victoria store at the time.

The commercial may have been lost over time (I’m asking around, because I'd love to get a copy), but there are at least half a dozen people who remember it. And now the connection re-surfaces. If you have any shoes that could still bless someone – with a bit of fixing-up – you can find more information at http://www.quickcobbler.com/homeless-shoes.html or bring them around to the Quick Cobbler location at 430 West 2^nd Ave. in Vancouver.

And of course, if you have any socks you can donate to the Vancouver Sock Exchange, let me know and I can come and pick them up.

===

new logo

The Lord's Rain has a new "visual identity": a logo (which I've attached, as well) submitted by Justin McKay in response to a contest.

We like the fact that it has simple, quasi-corporate lines, while bringing together the Cross, an image of rainfall -- "latter rain," if you will -- and a very peace-inducing color scheme. 

Justin receives an eclectic set of prizes: a homemade birdhouse (built by an uncle of Janet Klassen, the assistant pastor at Gospel Mission -- and overseer of The Lord's Rain), a gift certificate to Army & Navy, and a set of tickets to a Vancouver Canadians baseball game. Marylee Stephenson, proprietor of an online gallery called "Indian Art From The Edge" (www.indianartfromtheedge.com), which promotes native Indian artists on the Downtown East Side, joined Janet in reviewing the entries, and the people who come into The Lord's Rain voted.

Janet presents the prizes to Justin

===

Amelia and I ran into an old friend from the Mission: Charlie. He’s an Eskimo (both he and another evangelist friend, Rob Gordon, call themselves “Eskimos”, rather than “Inuit”. Rob says “Inuit” refers to a specific group, while “Eskimo” is more encompassing) and Amelia has talked with him through many of his challenges. He’s tackled booze, marijuana, tobacco, and spends a lot of time just reading his Bible. "I been straight for months now," he said. "But you know what happens when you stay straight? You lose your friends."

"Those kind of friends, you don't need," Amelia said. "Besides, you make new ones," I added.

That can make it tough when one "cleans up". I remember Gilbert, the first street alcoholic I ministered to back in Victoria. He came to a series of healing services at the Victoria Miracle Centre and asked to be delivered from alcoholism. After four services, he declared himself clean, and in fact, stayed off the bottle and started to show how his life could be like without booze. But he wanted to see his friends, and couldn't resist going back to the downtown core to show them how clean he was. "They keep telling me, 'you'll be back,' and I tell them, 'no - I'm clean for good!'" 

Human nature being what it is, one often finds that people in a bad situation tend to resent anyone who tries to break out of it. That seems to be particularly true with people who turn to Christ to find a new life: the world is right there, reminding them of what they used to be and how they got there. 

And Gilbert did slip, winding up in the same sad milieu. I spoke to one of the ministers at a shelter/outreach in the city and told him how Gilbert's life had started to turn around after the prayers. "Yeah, I heard about that," he replied. "I didn't think it would last."

Thanks for the support.

Mind you, I wasn't much help, either. I was new to the Christian walk and didn't understand the importance of discipleship: being there for someone who's received the Lord and reinforcing their faith when it starts to flag.That's why I keep telling people that, while funding is an ongoing issue at The Lord's Rain and Gospel Mission, the real need is for people. Jesus didn't say, "the fields are white for the harvest, but we need money to do it"; He said, "we need workers to bring the crop in"; making sure the trumpet of faith sounds louder than the white noise of doubt.

Unclear on the Concept ...

... a little venting: don't mind me ...

I heard a theological postulate today that absolutely made me cringe. A friend of mine related a teaching she'd heard from a theologian who’s also something of an activist on the Downtown East Side. He re-told the parable of The Good Samaritan as “The Good Drug Dealer”. The idea, apparently, was to illustrate the extent to which Samaritans were reviled in Jesus’ time.

Nice try, but …

I have written in the past that the Downtown East Side is Vancouver’s Samaria, but this is not what I mean. The warping of this parable may give us an idea of the antipathy towards Samaritans, but I think this theologian owes the Samaritans an apology for comparing them to drug dealers. After all, Samaritans did not choose to be Samaritans, but no matter how you slice it, drug dealers are in that occupation by choice. Their sole purpose is to make money for themselves, and they have little concern for the people whose lives are ruined or cut short because of that “purpose”.

The flip side of this polemic is even more chilling: that’s the idea that we should consider drug dealers to be like Samaritans – downtrodden and discriminated against by virtue of their place in society. It sounds like the prelude to a clever civil liberties lawyer's argument for a mistrial on the basis of chronic harassment.

Now, if this theologian had used the story of Zacchaeus in Luke 19:1-10 instead, that would have been an interesting parallel. Zacchaeus was a tax collector, and in those days, tax collectors were reviled for ripping off people, handing over money to the Romans and raking down a fair bit of it for themselves. Zacchaeus was so short, he had to climb a tree to get a look at Jesus as He walked by; Jesus spotted him and invited Himself over for dinner. By the time Jesus gets to Zacchaeus’ place, Zacchaeus has repented, is restoring to those he has robbed four times over, and gives half of his goods to the poor. If we substituted “drug dealer” for “tax collector”, that would have made for a great story of redemption.

Or was this theologian trying to make us feel warm-fuzzies for drug dealers and decide they’re really not so bad and are just misunderstood like Samaritans and we should let our daughters marry one?

In the words of Sam Goldwyn, “include me out”.

This is the same kind of thinking that leads purported Christian leaders to have a choir sing "Amazing Grace" when a court case involving InSite is heard: as if it's God's will for His people to be kept in a drugged-out zombie state, so long as it's "clean"; or to side with the "Occupy" movement, when Scripture calls on us to submit to authority, no matter how "bad" it may seem to us. I wonder if this is why it's so hard to get churches outside the DTES to get involved with ministry there?

She just happened …

What brought her to the city was some sort of scholarship –

Some fancy New York fashion institute.

Her junkie boyfriend took to crime which took up too much of her time:

It only took a year until she took a different route.

-- “She Just Happened”, Mighty Mighty Bosstones

I’ve found myself slipping into my anecdotage this past month. It was partly to do with turning 57 and explaining to people that yes, I am old enough to collect my pension, albeit a “reduced” one; but also to do with meeting up with my high school grad class for our 40-year reunion.

The experience was fun, but it was tempered more than somewhat by the discovery that 17 of our classmates – well over 10% of our total number – have already passed away. One of my friends noted sadly that, with the women, it appears that cancer took many of them; many of the guys died from drugs.

And then there was Vicky. Murder, we were told.

According to one of the few people who had any contact with her after graduation, she had fallen in with a seedy crowd. I had heard that she had found employment “displaying her shape”, as Damon Runyon delicately described it, at various clubs around the city. At the time, I had simply said, “hmm”, but didn’t think much of it.

But at the time, I didn’t know what that crowd could be like, and apparently, neither did Vicky. I don’t know any more about the circumstances, and I don’t think I want to – the more I’ve thought about it over the past couple of weeks, the more I’ve remembered how dear she was to me. The idea of her being killed by someone else’s hand is something I don’t want to contemplate.

Vicky and I were never an “item”, although I did ask her in 11^th grade if she’d “go around” with me. She laughed in my face, not unkindly, kissed me on the cheek and said it would be best to keep it as “just friends”. Cool: I was no stranger to rejection and she was a nice friend, anyway. At least she was honest. 

Vicky was the partner for my first "stage kiss". In 10th grade, we played boyfriend-girlfriend (I was the boy) in a student drama festival production. In one of those ironic situations that can only happen in high school, I was cast as her father in My Fair Lady the next year: Alfred P. Doolittle to her Eliza (although I pulled out of the production due to schoolwork); and the year after that, she played my aunt in Arsenic and Old Lace. 

In fact, Vicky learned Cockney for her role of Eliza and would use it outside of rehearsals. In class, she would mutter, “I ‘ave ter git me pensoh” in that accent. Even now, I hear Vicky’s voice when I look for a “pensoh” to do the weekend crossword, although I had long since forgotten why that phrase and voice were so embedded in my mind.

So while we weren't "involved", Vicky and I were fairly close friends and she opened up to me in ways you could only open up to a good friend. We sat together in Socials 11, talking about places we wanted to go to and things we wanted to do with our lives. Over the phone, she once read me a poem she’d written: “it’s not about anything I've done,” she said, as if she needed to explain something beforehand; there’s no doubt that the line, “and then he impales you with his sword of love,” did require some background.

It was about a year or so after grad that I heard my “good friend” was doing a strip act. That was the last I heard of her until I saw her name on the list of “angels” passed around by the organizer the reunion.

What just happened?

She just happened, she just happened to cross my mind.

Without warning, she crossed my mind:

What just happened to me?

The other night, I found myself letting out a heavy sigh from time to time, for no apparent reason. I hope my wife will forgive me.

Not to diminish what it was

Well, there’s no reason to, because

Ago, it was so long and away, it seems so far.

Whom are we kidding, guys?

This spring has brought a new crop of people into The Lord’s Rain, although the new young women have not started arriving. High school isn’t finished yet, so I suppose that influx is a month away, as girls, talented, confused and starry-eyed, fall in with guys who promise easy money and “things”, so long as they “do a little work for them”.

One of the new girls: the guy in the shades
appears to be "with her".

Other “she”s have just happened to cross my mind lately: women who would come into The Lord’s Rain and then, not come in anymore. Shannon, Leanne, Chrissy, Charlotte, Cherie, “Little One”, who was the first woman to have shower at The Lord’s Rain: have they stopped coming because their lives have turned around and they’ve moved away? Or have they, like Vicky, run afoul of their “boyfriends”?

Jade

(On reflection, Shannon is a slightly different case: she was a bright light at the Mission, overcoming her own issues to talk to others and, if nothing else, expressing a pure love to them that reached out in ways I couldn’t seem to. She and her husband, Brannon, found a place on the south end – a considerable distance away from the DTES – where it was quiet and Brannon could rest and take care of his various kidney and liver problems. The last word I got about Chrissy is that she goes to Ontario for extended periods to see her family.)

Jade, who came in to Ladies’ Day at The Lord’s Rain when it first launched on Friday nights in 2008, died of blood poisoning a few months later.

I have hopes for Davona. It’s now three years since I saw her with her baby, Shine. We collided in Waterfront Station, which is sufficiently removed from the DTES that, it appears, she has turned things around.

This leads, by a grand leap in thought process, to musing about the Great Stupid Question about the disappearances of women from the DTES a decade ago. By “stupid question”, I refer to something a former colleague in Victoria radio, the late Joe Easingwood, used to say: “The only ‘stupid question’ is the one that doesn’t get asked.” In all the finger-pointing at police for the way they handled those cases, I never heard anyone address the question of how those women wound up on the DTES in the first place. Why had they left their homes? Why were they reduced to selling their bodies to get drugs? 

Why, indeed, did Vicky get lured into a world that eventually took her life?

(Another "stupid question" is, where were the media, which leapt all over the revelations but didn't start digging until relatively late in the game? I remember getting a call from one of the women's relatives in 2002, when I was assignment editor at a station in Victoria. Because the answers had to come from Vancouver Police and we had limited resources as it was, I seem to recall we decided to "leave it to the Vancouver stations". Maybe I should have pushed to get our Vancouver reporter to do some digging. I wonder ... But if I was getting calls in 2002, how many reporters were getting similar calls at that time or earlier? What happened with the story then?)

Of course, the view from the bleachers is always clearer than the view on the field. I remember the experience of a woman I knew in Victoria about twenty years ago, whose daughter fell in with “the bad crowd”. Shari was a single mother, raising two children and holding down a job, so she wasn't at home when school let out. Her son had activities like sports that kept him occupied, but the girl quickly found other "interests", and it wasn't long before certain young men started convincing her that her mom didn't really love her but they could give her something her mom couldn't. 

Shari tried everything she could think of, including showing up at one hangout with her (large and imposing) boyfriend and a camera, snapping pictures of everything and everyone before dragging the girl home. It made a lot of people nervous, at least for a time. There was even a “scared straight” session with Victoria Police, in which one cop told the girl, “I carry a gun, and I won’t tangle with those guys!”, but the impact was only temporary. The lure of the vast opportunities in Vancouver and a nice trip to Hawai’i with some very nice gentlemen, coupled with the repeated conviction that she was being denied something on the home front, proved irresistible.

(Another flashback takes me to the killing of Reena Virk 20 years ago in Victoria: the crowd she had fallen in with -- and which ultimately turned on her like a murder of crows attacking an injured member -- had also convinced her that her parents were preventing her from "living".)

It's tough - especially when parents who try to "train up a child in the way he (or she) should go" (Proverbs 22:6) are portrayed as "stifling" their children and denying them their freedom. 

So while that “unasked question” may appear to be rhetorical and not a little judgmental, there are answers, and none of them is simple.