A Volunteer speaks...
Here at Beanies we talk to many people. They share a coffee with Sue, and share their experiences - what it is like to be homeless, what some of the drivers are, success stories and plans and schemes, as well as some of the heartbreaks, and some stories too graphic to share.
Today the coffee mugs are full, and we talk with a volunteer from a Shelter. He'd like to remain anonymous, but we will call him Dave.
He begins...
What gets me is the total lack of understanding out there. People think "it can't happen to me", walk past a homeless guy and don't look, lets pretend it isn't happening. That I see all the time, but when the "Powers" - the ones who allocate funds and support - when they don't understand... That's when I despair...
Dave paused, and went on
We have watched them come and watched them go and since we
opened our doors in the '90s, there have been between three and four thousand
people who have spent the night at our shelter. The Single Homeless, the ones rarely in Priority Need. Some of them have
been there many times, some only once and we never saw them again.
The ignorance of some on the 'outside' has been quite revealing when
considering even this basic aspect of life in our Shelter. I have heard Councillors
and even Officers of the council suggest that the fact that some have come to
us on many occasions is somehow our failing.
Such suggestions would be laughable if the people making
them were not the ones responsible for allocating resources to help the
homeless. As it is, it is just sad and rather frightening.
People who voice these thoughts display a remarkable lack of insight into the nature of Single Homeless people.
To us at the Shelter they are not "The Homeless", they are so much more than names on a piece of paper, and certainly deserving
of far more respect than they have been given.
Why do people return to the shelter again and again?
People have returned to us because there was nowhere else
for them to go as no one else was prepared work with them. Often if we had not,
they might have died on our streets as they were doing in the years before this Shelter opened. As many are still doing as support and funding is being withdrawn.
I have always regarded the fact that we never gave up on
someone as being one of our strengths and we have had the privelidge of seeing
many break this cycle of homelessness and eventually succeed, but at their pace
and not ours.
There is so much more to 'seeing' than just using our eyes.
How is it that we can look, so hard at something but so often see something
else?
It was David Brandon who said,
“If only I could
resist the urge to trace my patterns on your heart I could see you.”
He was talking from the standpoint of people who spend their
time hindering whilst convincing themselves that they are actually helping.
Basically he was saying that we need to see people as they actually are and not
merely as the result of our preconceptions. We so often see only what we want to
see rather than what is there.
I mention David Brandon because all too often, people like
him, the true architects of effective work with single homeless, are forgotten as
the current political views so often dictate what is actually done.
The thing that most gets in the way of helping another is a
desire to see the other person as “helped” or as a changed human being. It
stops us seeing them as they are as we only look at how we wish them to be.
We WANT them to be
better (according to our beliefs of what “better” is) and get frustrated and
angry when they are not as we would like them to be; hence there is an
increasing tendancy to criminalise the homeless person. We should never forget
that we are only a lost job or a few missed mortgage payments away from it.
Homeless isn't a choice
It
could happen to anyone!!!!
We have become so adept at deciding on “what
should be” for other people or other institutions that we have lost sight of
what actually is. We are expected to uselessly
do efficiently that which should not be done at all. Box ticking. Statistic interpretation. Hidden homeless... lost in the Bureaucratic maze of perfect form filling...
Doing the wrong things in the right way will
solve nothing; it is as bad as doing the right things in the wrong way, both increasingly
lacking any semblance of compassion.
For as Brandon wrote after firstly stating
that compassion was the most important ingredient in a helping relaionship:
And how this conflicts with current thinking
where we talk about “places of change” or even changing people. We seek to
change them in order that they comply with our view of what they should be...
“In our
hearts we know we frequently offer little assistance to people... We demand
that they suit our ideas of them rather than pursue their own pathways of
personal growth - interfering rather than intervening...” (Brandon)
The Golden Rule states that we should:
· Treat others as we would like to be treated
or
· Not treat others in ways we would not like
to be treated.
And I would add - stop demonising the people who need our support. We are all human, we all deserve respect and understanding.
There is nothing intrinsiclly wrong with austerity but austerity without compassion or austerity without following the Golden Rule will do little more than further divide an increasingly fragmented society, breeding little more than xenaphobia.
To live in harmony is to live without fear and if I was to choose between fear and harmony, I know which I should choose.
Thoughtful words. Thank you Dave.
Here at TeamBeanie we support 6 Partner organisations each year via Twitter where we are @beanies_masato
Our Partners 2017-18 are
@onebigfamilyHTH
@llamauUK
@HoH_MK
@GCMcare
@ObanHopeKitchen
@TheBusShelterDT
we try to share thoughts and information
we try and bust a few myths
we try and sell stuff to help the homeless via our Partner outreach organisations
If you would like to buy the link is here
http://www.masato.co.uk/collections/masato-homeless-support
