Drought Dodging

 Colorado’s Pikes Peak Region held its collective breath as the winter months reluctantly gave way to spring on the calendar. Overall, the area had again fallen way short on precipitation. Weather forecasters weren’t waiting for a hot summer stretch of weather to talk about drought. Drought was already a front-burner topic of conversation in February. It seemed that there had been no winter respite from it this year.

Then it snowed; late and not a lot, but enough to notice. And it snowed again, and again; rarely enough to overwhelm anyone with the thought that the drought was over, but enough to take courage that the moisture deficit wasn’t completely taking over. In recent weeks, it’s even rained. Sometimes it seems like the sky is spitting and nothing more. But a few times we’ve enjoyed those gentle hours-long soaking showers, and days where the ground may not have puddles forming but stayed wet all day.

No one’s saying the drought’s over, but there is hope.

Another kind of drought is a frequent visitor to rescue missions every year. It runs roughly from Easter to mid-September. It is during those months when the food on shelves in mission warehouses quickly becomes sparse and sometimes stays that way until the holiday season. Sometimes financial donations dry up, too, during these months.

Rescue missions do different things to cope with the season of drought.  This year, we are blessed with a variety of friends who are using their talents and community roles to stem the impact of the drought. Our local baseball team, the Colorado Springs SkySox, is using the stadium front gate as a collection point for food and more at every home game.  The Broadmoor is coordinating a benefit golf tournament to be held in a few weeks. A friend of the Mission is using his car wash business as a catalyst for a benefit event not long from now. And a local golf pro, Greg Stafford, is using a world record attempt for most 300-yard drives in an hour to raise funds for the Mission this summer (check out www.drives4lives.com sometime soon for details). That’s just the beginning of friends who are stepping up to help Springs Rescue Mission dodge the drought this year.

No one’s saying the drought’s over, but there is hope.

“And Use Soap!”

Amid our holiday bustle, let us pause to consider the wonders of soap and its personal hygiene cousins. 

Public health documentation indicates that the introduction of bathing, and bathing with soap, was the turning point to send disease rates downward in a number of infectious disease events from the mid-1800s through the late 20^th century. The disease downturns often came years, if not decades, ahead of vaccine development. [i]

(Parents of the civilized world, now you can show your children the written evidence that bathing with soap is truly a benefit to individual and public health. “And use soap!” should not be limited to the speech of June Cleaver, after all.)

So when our neighbors in need at the Mission show up with a need for hygiene items, we pay attention. You see, the study also shows what our practical experience affirms: without effective and ongoing personal hygiene, the possibility of suffering infections and infectious disease goes up substantially. Simply put, their health suffers without soap, shampoo, deodorant,  toothpaste, toothbrushes and the other commodities that figure into staying clean.

Homelessness and poverty often make staying clean a challenge. You can imagine sleeping outdoors, having to walk some distance to secure a shower, and then trying to launder your clothing (or find new) in an effort to keep rashes and sores to a minimum. Can you imagine how difficult it is to maintain the positive effects of that shower without soap and shampoo, much less laundry detergent? 

For many of our homeless and impoverished neighbors, it’s an everyday challenge that can actually be worse in Colorado winters than summers.

The increase in families and individuals stopping by to secure the basics of life has drained our shelves of health and hygiene items of late. We need the simple stuff—soap, shampoo, toothpaste, toothbrushes, feminine care products, diapers, deodorant—to help hundreds of families and individuals avoid skin and wound infections as well as communicable disease in the next few weeks. Can you help? Any size of any hygiene product is welcome.

A little soap (and it hygienic cousins) will work wonders today, just as it has for centuries before.

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[i] The Soap and Detergent Association, “Against Disease: The impact of hygiene and cleanliness on health.” November 2008. Accessed at http://www.againstdisease.com/documents/SDA_Against_Disease_final_cover_11808.pdf. Face it, you always knew Mom was right.

Guest Blog: They Live at the Bottom

Sarah Stacy is one of the Resource Advocate "angels" I often refer to in Light on Las Vegas Street. A tireless champion for the chronically homeless in the Pikes Peak region, Sarah manages the Resource Advocate Program for Springs Rescue Mission. The focus of her job (which she loves) is people at high risk who have often been written off by friends, family and the community at large. I've been pestering Sarah for several months to let us hear what's on her mind through a guest blog. As you're about to find out, she delivered!

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“My clients don't hit bottom; they live at the bottom. If we wait for them to hit bottom, they will die. The obstacle to their engagement in treatment is not an absence of pain; it is an absence of hope.” Outreach worker (Quoted in White, Woll, and Webber, 2003).

This quote resonates with me as a Resource Advocate in the Springs Rescue Mission's Resource Advocate Program (RAP). The chronically homeless with mental illness and addiction that we serve have no basis in their life or life-skills set to desire treatment of their illness, their addictions or their chronic homeless state. They have no money, they have no relationships or support systems, and often they don't even have a roof over their heads. 

And yet they are wonderful, uniquely created humans with great strength and courage buried under years of abandonment.  They are persistent in obtaining the necessities of physical survival like food, showers, laundry and good shoes to walk the many miles required to survive.  They have amazing and unexpected good humor as they deal with the realities of life on the streets. These are the lambs God has given the Resource Advocates at Springs Rescue Mission to feed according to His Word in John 21:15.  I rejoice in that calling, because these lambs are easy to love and respond positively to the most basic of human courtesies. And I benefit far more than the lambs do in the course of obeying the command to feed them.

There are some who fail to enter or respond to treatment because they are not experiencing real pain from the effects of their addictions. These are people in families where the family suffers the pain, where the consequences seldom become life or death; family that continues to bail addicts out of jail, family that continues to provide shelter and food and protects individuals from the harsh realities of loss in addiction.

That is not the case for the clients of RAP. By and large, they are middle- to late-middle aged white men who have lost all contact with family and have destroyed every relationship they've ever had. A few are quite young and already experiencing multiple encounters with the criminal justice system. They have frequently worn out their welcome on friends' couches, so they endure the rigors of living outside. Without point-blank asking, I believe that almost all of them have been repeatedly abused from a young age – sexually, verbally and physically. Those who are not victims of outright abuse suffer the effects of very dysfunctional and non-supportive families of origin. 

Treatment for chronic homelessness doesn't really exist outside of the Rescue Mission, and treatment for mental illness is difficult to come by when you have no financial resources or insurance. (Colorado ranks 47^th in the nation in availability of psychiatric treatment beds.) Almost as bad, there are very few drug and alcohol treatment programs geared to the homeless. Even if there were programs available to those with no income, making a transition through detoxification and treatment at the same time as making a transition to living in a building is extremely stressful.

How then, should mere care and ministry workers respond to this condition? The answer is amazingly simple: be a bringer of hope, and sit back and watch as God uses hope to move people with addictions and illnesses into treatment and those on the streets into homes and families! 

A recent study actually measured improvements in hope among clients of a homeless day center and the results were surprising. They learned that activities as simple as attending peer-support groups for addiction and seeking advocacy in obtaining housing can improve the level of hope our clients self-reported. Baby steps taken with a supportive person alongside actually deepen the perception of hope among the hopeless.

There are many ways that an advocate who works with the hopeless can bring growing awareness that recovery is possible:

• Recognize the humanity of each homeless, addicted and mentally ill person you encounter. That's the easy way to begin nurturing the God-given life deep inside of our vulnerable neighbors. The homeless person in front of you has a name and a story. And chances are, that story is deeper than you ever imagined. Can you imagine what your life would be like if you were a body in a line at a soup kitchen, a number on a loaned towel at a public shower facility or the source of the scent that has other library patrons wrinkling their noses in disgust?

• Help the addicted person in front of you to count their strengths. Addiction and chronic homelessness eat away at hope slowly. When a hopeless person can recount the strengths they already possess and when those strengths are affirmed, validated and nurtured by an advocate, baby-step changes begin to occur. The end result of that journey is the birth of hope for a changed situation.

• Understand and communicate that homelessness and addictions are chronic conditions and recovery may take some ups and downs. If an advocate takes relapse and discouragement in stride as part of the process, steps are made toward incremental recovery. Recovery is not an all-or-nothing deal. Often the effects of different encounters and different attempts at sobriety and treatment are cumulative. Studies have shown that most people who have entered into stable recovery had three to four unsuccessful attempts at recovery in the previous eight years.

• Let the addicted or homeless person you know take the lead in their own recovery. As a middle class American most likely you have a clear vision of “how to”. Your ideas and cultural values may actually present obstacles to a person to whom they are foreign. If the individual you are working with has a goal of obtaining housing and you know that they have a criminal record and lack of finances that precludes housing you can still name the goal “obtain stable housing”. There will just be a few extra steps to getting there for some of the chronically homeless, like getting an income from a job or disability payments, learning to pay bills, and staying sober enough to remember where the home is.

• Love unconditionally. If we believe that recovery is a process with ups and downs, we won't be disappointed or judgmental when our homeless friend has relapses and difficulties, we will love steadfastly and fiercely. We can support and encourage the next forward step knowing that eventually there will be more “ups” than “downs”.

We are the hope-bringers to those who live in addiction and chronic homelessness but we as individual providers are not responsible for their recovery. Our friends are each responsible for their own recovery with the anointing and guidance of a Father in Heaven who loves them more than we ever will be able to. It's that love of God, shown on earth by our actions, that can bring freedom, peace and recovery.

365/7

Is there life at the Mission after the holiday season? Yep.

Will the hustle and bustle and open hearts of Thanksgiving and Christmas keep our homeless and at-risk neighbors in Colorado Springs secure until late next October? Nope.

Life goes on for the Mission and the homeless we serve after the holiday season. The needs we address during the holiday season don’t let up once the calendar changes into the New Year.

Here’s the drill: After an at-risk family leaves with a holiday food box in December, the food generally lasts them into early January. Then they may need more food to supplement their food stamps, or to give them some breathing room that allows them not to choose between having food and, say, keeping their lights and heat on.

Or, for just a minute now, imagine you’re homeless and on the streets. You get a great Christmas meal at the City Auditorium from the Mission. If you know how to make the rounds you’ll get a few really filling holiday meals a week either side of Christmas. Then you return to your life of meals at various agencies around town; good stuff when you get to them, but you just don’t always get to them on time.

And when the weather turns foul, sometimes you choose between exposing yourself to the elements for a long walk to a hot meal and staying in the trench you dug under the bridge with several others to share and preserve body heat. Sometimes food shows up when you need it and sometimes it doesn’t.

In the middle of this crucible of need are agencies like Springs Rescue Mission. Day in and day out, beyond the events that draw media attention, homeless and at-risk people can come to the Mission for clothing, referrals for medical attention, hot meals and a message of hope (six days a week) at Samaritan’s Kitchen, food boxes, and even household and hygiene items.

The Mission served roughly 4,000 meals to about 2,300 guests between its Thanksgiving and Christmas events at the Colorado Springs City Auditorium. That covers two days of food service, one day per event. The other 363 days of the year the Mission provided a combined 196,000+ meals to our neighbors in need between hot meals through Samaritan’s Kitchen, box and sack lunches, and contents in food boxes. We also served an additional 35,700 people the other 363 days of the year. [i]

The point here is that the need for thousands of at-risk and homeless people in El Paso County doesn’t disappear for ten months even after a very busy and fruitful two months. Events are certainly wonderful, and in many ways necessary, times of celebration and introduction of neighbors in need to the services available at the Mission and other agencies. But the challenge to respond to our neighbors in need goes on 365 days a year, 7 days a week. The stories of people like you helping others can be just as dramatic in February or July as in the second week of December. A food drive in March can be just as important (believe it or not) as one in November.

You get the idea. Clearly, we are grateful for all that happened to benefit homeless and at-risk children, women and men this holiday season. But just as clearly, fighting homelessness and poverty is a 365/7 task.

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[i] To check on these and other SRM program service statistics for FY 2011, start on Page 2 of SRM’s latest Form 990 at http://www.mysrm.org/images/stories/PDF/990_for_FY_10-11_-_SRM_FY10_990_Public_Inspection_Copy.pdf.

Silver Bells, Anyone?

City sidewalks, busy sidewalks….[i]

“Can you get out of my way?”

Josh moves at a slower pace because his calorie intake today isn’t sufficient to support his walking at a brisk shopper’s pace the Wednesday before Christmas. He’s not staggering right now. He’s just not moving fast enough for the downtown sidewalk traffic. The sub-freezing air is being driven by a constant breeze. Not much to that wind, but it still reduces the temperature’s impact by another seven degrees into single digits.

Dressed in holiday style…

“Mom, he stinks!”

This is Josh’s first Christmas as a homeless person. He was kicked out of his home, probably rightly so, when he lost control of his temper and took his first swing ever at his mother. (Good thing he was so drunk that he missed.)

Josh is still learning the ropes. He needs to find someplace that will maybe give him a change of clothes and the stuff he needs for a sponge bath. He needs a warmer coat. He also needs to eat, soon.

In the air, there’s a feeling of Christmas…

Josh stops for a moment to survey the setting around him. He sees a guy he might be able to talk to, who is manning a Salvation Army bucket. Josh walks over, letting shoppers pass by him, trying to stay downwind of as many people as possible. Josh doesn’t even open his mouth and the guy looks at his watch, looks at Josh, and speaks.

“Dude, you can still make it to the Mission for dinner. Straight down Tejon, right at Las Vegas Street. Twenty-minute walk, and you’ve still got half an hour to be there.”

Josh makes it a few minutes ahead of time. Samaritan’s Kitchen is warm, and they let people in before the meal starts. He finds an empty chair between two guys who sort of look like he does. The food is hot and seems to warm up the conversation around the table. Josh discovers that there are options for homeless people in Colorado Springs. Most of the recovery programs sound way too restrictive for him, at least as he hears about them from those around the table.

Josh also knows he can’t stay homeless forever. At least he hopes he won’t. His mom asked him to come home for the family Christmas meal, but also made it clear he wasn’t welcome to stay. He’s learned from his new friends that the Mission has a community meal two days before Christmas. Maybe if he plays it right, he can eat well for a few days running.

But then, he’ll have some hard decisions to make before the really cold weather hits. Detox? A recovery program? Ride out the winter and hope for an early spring? Sober up and beg to come home until a job comes along?

Soon it will be Christmas Day…

Josh stabs at his dessert and shakes his head. How did Christmas end up like this, anyway?

He’s too much of a rookie to know it, but almost everyone else in the room is sharing the same thought.

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[i] Excerpts from Silver Bells, italicized in this article, are property of their authors, Jay Livingston and Ray Evans (© 1950, 1977), and used here for educational purposes. Work originally published by Paramount Music Corp.

The Beauty of Demolition

If you’ve ever had a life-controlling issue, you know the drill. You also know the drill if you’ve ever had a loved one with a life-controlling issue. Part of recovery is making the decision, again and again, is showing no mercy to what controlled you.

You cut the ties. You torch the bridges. You leave it in another life.

And anytime something reinforces your choice to be free, you cheer. That’s what’s lighting up the faces of the men in our New Life recovery program here on Las Vegas Street. This week we celebrate the expansion of the Life Recovery Center, which houses the program, by tearing down a big sign that says “Liquor.”

The sign is on the building adjacent to the current residential center for the men in the program. In fact, the current building shares a wall with what was once a very popular liquor store in the neighborhood. Starting next week, thanks to a very generous grant, we’re refurbishing the former liquor store into more rooms for the recovery center.

Sweet irony, isn’t it? Poetic justice for a lot of the gentlemen we serve here. You see, their basic decision to stay sober is one they make every day – and it’s not always easy. The chance for them to help replace a venue that fed their addiction with a place that could stabilize their lives and relationships and future? Beyond words.

Let that crane swing, and listen for the cheers on Las Vegas Street. Demolition can be a beautiful thing.