Thursday, August 18, 2005
From sheltered life to shelter
One of the best bits about working at the shelter is when someone trusts you enough to speak to you in confidence. This happened to me on Wednesday, when one of the guys I play poker with said he might be a dad soon (he finds out next week). I was so excited!! But, of course, the stuff people tell you in confidence isn't always good. The conversation continued.
The guy started telling me one of his pot stories (he has several). I wondered where he got the money for drugs from (the obvious answer would be crime, but I was giving him the benefit of the doubt), so I asked him. It turned out my optimism was unfounded.
“I rob stores,” he said, nonchalantly.
“Oh.” I wasn't really sure what else to say. “How do you hold them up?”
“With a knife.”
“Oh”, I said, slightly more emphatically. He told me he worked with an accomplice who was “even more willing than I am to kill people.” I was even more lost for words when he told me he'd stabbed a guy in the hand for not doing what he said.
I guess I shouldn't really be surprised to hear stories like this. After all, life is pretty tough on the streets, and lots of worse things have probably happened. But I still find it hard to grasp how bad things can get.
It's also easy to look at the people who come to the shelter and say “Oh, poor innocent victims, the world has dealt them such a cruel blow.” And it has. But a lot of them, for various reasons, are pretty far from innocent. So you have to tread a fine line between patronizing them, or saying that crime, drugs or violence is right, and judging them.
I guess I'm doing an okay job, because the guy who runs the morning programme wants me to start interviewing people who come to the shelter, to find out about their background so they can be helped. Sounds like it could be good.
In the meantime, I’m getting used to the fact that one (or possibly more) of my friends enjoys stabbing people. That is really weird.
