What its like to work at a homeless shelter

I thought I'd continue with yesterday's post and write a little more about what its like to work at a homeless shelter.

I have never ceased to be amazed at the breadth of issues we face here. Domestic violence, mental illness, child protective services, housing, Social Security, unemployment, food stamps, job searching, resume building, obtaining a GED. We deal with perpetrators and victims, child abusers and children.

The issue of homelessness extends far beyond a lack of housing, or a lack of a job. And our services don't extend much beyond being a safe place to be. We offer coffee, computers to print out a job application or to build a resume, a dry place to store your bags. A TV to watch movies or the news on. Sometimes we have donated clothes. Couches to sleep on if you've spent your entire night walking around town. We have a bathroom.

We provide GED pre-testing, but not really a place to study.

We have phones that you can call the domestic violence crisis line, but we don't have a secure women's shelter. (Not that all victims of DV are women, but a separate shelter would help).

We have computers to print out job applications, but not bus tickets so that you can get to the job.

We will have donations of socks, gloves, and hats in December, but not in March when it still gets below freezing every night.

Every day, we face inadequacy after inadequacy. Homelessness is a large problem without much of a solution. There are pieces we can chip away at, such as substance abuse or unemployment. But the problem of homelessness isn't as simple as we like to make it out to be. It isn't just a lack of housing.

Which can make working here pretty tough. Every day you see things that you wish you could forget, but you can't. Constantly we face a lack of donations, a lack of supplies, a lack of resources for an ever expanding population.

It's tough to describe what its like to spend day after day here. You get used to the smell of stale urine and beer, the ribald humor, calling 911. But there lies the rub. If you get to used to it, you become calloused and uncaring. But if you allow it to get to you, you remain vulnerable to the immensity of human suffering.

When we had our commissioning mass at orientation, our area director told us these words along these lines as he gave us our crosses "the weight of the world is not yours to bear alone, but you are not free to abandon it."

It's a tricky line to walk.