by Ron Hall
The plight of the homeless had torn at Carolyne’s heart when she traveled to downtown LA in the predawn hours to visit the commercial flower market there. “I exit at Sixth Street and head down to Maple,” she says. “You notice the people with cardboard boxes wrapped around them and see tents set up all along the street.”
The police allow the homeless to pitch these makeshift bedrooms by night but require that they clear out by six in the morning. “So many people say, ‘Oh, well, these people are just drunks and addicts,” Carolyne says. “But I remember one morning when I saw a mom and her small children packing up their stuff. As a mom, I can’t imagine what that would be like. I wondered what this woman must have suffered in her life to arrive in that position. It was heartbreaking.”
The Snows live in Santa Clarita, a small town just north of Los Angeles. While there is very little homelessness there, there is a large Hispanic community pocked with poverty. After reading Same Kind of Different as Me, an idea began taking shape in Carolyne’s mind: a community garden with beds set aside to grow produce for food pantries serving the homeless and the working poor. She envisioned a garden that could not only provide nutritious food to people who needed it, but that could also attract children to a service project and teach them the value of sowing and reaping, literally, in their own community.
“I felt this was something I could do that would bring people in and involve them without being churchy,” Carolyne said. “I’m not really a ‘religious’ person. Spiritual, yes. Organized religion, no.”
But starting a community garden turned out not to be as easy as finding a vacant plot of land and diving in with roto-tillers. The logistics of involving children in the project required that the garden be centrally located. As the idea developed, it made the most sense to launch the garden at a public school.
Carolyne’s research led her to a Los Angeles–based group called the Garden School Foundation, a group that in 2003 started a prototype garden at central LA’s Twenty-Fourth Street Elementary School, an institution where 100 percent of the students come from homes with incomes low enough to qualify for free school lunches. The Garden School Foundation’s philosophy is that “schools should be like parks, not prisons; the best way to learn about good food is to grow it; and children have to know nature to love it.”
Carolyne went to visit the prototype garden, which included neatly cultivated rows of vegetables, a garden shed, and straw paths meandering through the plot. “The kids working in the garden were so polite and so respectful,” she remembers.
When Carolyne commented on the children’s behavior, the man in charge told her that the students were what is known in “educationese” as “at-risk” kids—that is, students from extreme poverty, whose neighborhoods were riddled with gang activity, crime, and drugs.
Carolyne, from the upscale suburbs, observed the kids’ model behavior and tried to imagine the kinds of homes they went home to at night. “You could see the value of this project to them,” she said. “You could see that the garden was providing something for these kids that went beyond health and nutrition and what’s taught in a science class. It gave them someplace to go, a sense of community, a purpose.”
After visiting the Twenty-Fourth Street school, Carolyne headed back to Santa Clarita with a clarified purpose of her own. She wrote a proposal for her own school-based community garden that would not only serve the poor but also tie in with California education standards. “It’s not just a pretty garden,” she says. “A lot of research has gone into it.”
At this writing, Carolyne is lining up funding for the garden, which she hopes to launch during the 2009–2010 school year and provide free produce to two local food banks. While she has volunteered in the past at a community hospital and with the PTA, her introduction to another side of Los Angeles has enriched her world and brought out in her a new compassion for the poor.
“There’s a little bit of Deborah in all of us,” Carolyne says, “if we’ll just let it be there.”
23
Ron
Spending hours each week captive in a kitchen that smelled like rotten eggs boiled in Pine-Sol was bad enough. But I fervently did not want to be touched for fear of the germs and parasites I suspected floated in every particle of the air.
Chef Jim and Deborah chatted easily while I mentally balanced the ledger between pleasing my wife and contracting a terminal disease. I had to admit that his idea seemed like an easy way to start—serve the evening meal once a week, and we’d be in and out in three, four hours max. We could minister from behind the rusty steel serving counter, safely separated from the customers . . . The whole arrangement seemed like a good way for us to fulfill Deborah’s desire to help the homeless without our touching them or letting them touch us . . .
In early 2009, Denver and I were invited to speak at a fundraiser on the campus of an affluent college situated, postcard perfect, in the middle of an immaculately groomed Norman Rockwell town. Board members for the city’s homeless shelter were trying to raise money to complete construction of a new facility. It was an invitation we’d turned down a number of times due to scheduling conflicts, but the people who ran the shelter kept after us.
“Our shelter is in terrible condition and has been for years,” the director told me, “but the city won’t get behind us. We need someone to come and help.”
Finally, it worked out that Denver and I could say yes.
Our talk was scheduled for late in the day, so we first paid a visit to the shelter the director had said was in such bad shape. By then, Denver and I had traveled to more than two hundred different homeless shelters and programs in towns across America. But never had we seen anything like this.
Typically, cities stash their homeless in the ugliest building in the ugliest part of town, but this shelter was an absolute disaster. Situated in a rundown old storefront in an abandoned part of town, the mission was smack up against the railroad tracks. The dilapidated structure had to be at least fifty years old, and it appeared not to have seen a coat of paint since it was built.
Inside, we saw thirty-eight men stacked like galley slaves in a dimly lit room large enough for three. Scanning the room, I saw mix-and-match bunk beds lining the walls, which were stained with a collage of what appeared to be urine, smoke, and vomit. The mattresses on the beds looked as though they’d been recovered from a bomb site.
Denver and I exchanged glances, and I could read his eyes. He’d never seen anything worse.
Down a hallway, the floor of which was lined with patches of green linoleum that peeled away to reveal rotting plywood underneath, were equally luxurious bathroom accommodations: one commode and two showerheads for all those men. Looking at the grime embedded where grout used to be, I concluded that there hadn’t been a can of Lysol in the building since the days they cooked it in kettles. As Denver and I moved to the dining room, I looked up to see that the ceiling was bowed and caving in.
I had seen the homeless living in burned-out buildings and cardboard boxes. But I had never seen them living in worse conditions in a facility that purportedly had not only volunteers but also a purpose and a goal and a budget. In fact, the only thing this shelter had going for it was walls and a roof to keep out the cold. Even then, Denver said, he’d rather have slept under a bridge.
Later that day, Denver and I spoke to a crowd of seventeen hundred people, which included everyone from the governor’s wife to judges and state representatives—cream-of-the-crop citizens from the city and the state. Never had I lit into an audience before, but what I had just seen made the skin on the back of my neck burn.
“The whole world knows who you are,” I said. “You have a great, world-class university here. You have nationally ranked sports teams. But you have the last-place homeless shelter. Of the more than two hundred we’ve visited, it’s the worst in America we’ve seen. As proud as you are of your city and the university, this is how you treat your homeless people?”
I wanted to as
k how many in the audience had ever been to the shelter to lend a hand. But I didn’t because the shelter director had already told me the answer: fewer than 20.
I then quoted from Matthew 25, which says Jesus will judge the nations based on how they treated “the least” of “these brothers of Mine”:
All the nations will be gathered before Him; and He will separate them from one another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats; and He will put the sheep on His right, and the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on His right, “Come, you who are blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.” . . . The King will answer and say to them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me.”
I pointed out to my audience the little catch in Jesus’ words: “to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine.”
“If you thought Jesus was coming to your shelter today, would you have left it in that condition?” I asked. “Guess what? Jesus is at your shelter every day, and He doesn’t like the way it looks and smells.”
That night, the city raised eight hundred thousand dollars toward completion of the new shelter. After the talk, a woman walked up to me, her face flushed with embarrassment. She was the wife of the board member who was raising the money.
“I’m so ashamed to tell you this,” she said. “My husband and I have served on the board of the shelter for years, but I’ve never been inside. I didn’t realize how bad it was.” The closest she had come to actually helping the homeless in her town, she said, was dropping off old clothes on the shelter doorstep.
“The good news is that you’re doing something about it now,” I told her.
That woman’s former attitude—and her present shame—reminded me of no one more than my sorry self. I know what it’s like to “help” from afar, to do some throwaway, feel-good gesture like giving away some clothes I didn’t want anyway or to go through the backbreaking labor of scribbling out a check. Before Deborah dragged me down to the Union Gospel Mission, the last thing I wanted to do was get my hands dirty.
I remember the first time I went down to the mission with Deborah to volunteer in the kitchen. One of the first people we met was Chef Jim, a sixty-five-year-old former head of catering for an international hotel chain. After Jim’s son died tragically, his wife wound up in a mental institution. Chef Jim drowned his grief in twin rivers of alcohol and drugs and wound up homeless. Now he was cooking at the shelter while he worked at rebuilding his life.
Chef Jim and Deborah hit if off right away. But while they yakked in the mission’s greasy kitchen, I was calculating how quickly we could dish up some grub for the vagrants, then get the heck out of there. I was willing to help the homeless, as long as I didn’t have to actually interact with them.
On and off for eighteen years, Denver had slept on the sidewalks by the Worthington Hotel, which was probably two hundred feet from my art gallery. Not once when I saw homeless people did I offer them a penny or a cup of water. I felt that any contact with these down-and-outers would be a smelly, unpleasant encounter at the very least.
Before meeting Denver, I thought of the homeless as trash on the street and prayed that our city officials would find a Dumpster large enough to hold them. My art gallery had been robbed by a couple of nasty derelicts, so I felt sure all homeless people were cut from the same ragged cloth and would probably rob me too.
Deborah and Denver changed that thinking though it took a while. They taught me not to ask myself what would happen to me if I stopped to help someone in the street but to ask myself what will happen to them if I don’t?
24
Denver
This fella I know that had done been in the military once told me that when a soldier or sailor gets kicked out of the military for bad behavior, they call it a BCD.
“What that really means is Bad Conduct Discharge,” this fella told me. “But what we call it is getting the Big Chicken Dinner.”
Well, over in Seattle, one of them folks that Mr. Ron calls a “ground-zero reader” gave a big chicken dinner to a homeless fella like me, and it changed his life forever. I don’t know how, but somehow a copy of our book worked its way across Washington state from Pastor Dave’s church in Pasco to a little town near Seattle. The woman that got it had a eight-year-old son. She wadn’t no religious woman. But after she read our book, she told her boy, said, “The next homeless person we see, we’re going to help them.”
Of course, she didn’t know there’s a difference between helpin and blessin—that blessin means you give a person a little gift to show ’em you think they matters on this earth, and helpin is when you stoop down with a person and stay there till they can climb on your shoulders to get up. Didn’t matter ’cause the important thing was, this lady’s heart had been touched.
The very next day, she and her boy were comin back home from the grocery store with one of them chicken dinners that’s already done cooked. When they pulled into the alley next to their house, the boy seen two homeless fellas diggin in the trash. Now, I’m pretty sure they wadn’t pullin the hamburger drop ’cause ain’t no sense in that if you doin it where nobody can see you and give you a dollar.
The little boy, he says to his mama, “Let’s give them the chicken dinner we just bought at the store!”
So they did, and they watched as them two fellas sat down in the alleyway and had themselves a feast—a Big Chicken Dinner of a different kind.
A few minutes later, back at their home, that woman began to experience what she calls a strong “impression.” Now, like I said, she believed in God in a real general way, but she was not a religious woman. But she said she felt something inside her heart leadin her the way Christian folks might describe being led by the Holy Ghost. Whatever it was, she began diggin in her purse for some cash to give to them fellas that was still outside enjoyin their Big Chicken Dinner.
She came up with forty dollars, and she couldn’t even believe she was about to give it over to a pair of raggedy-lookin hobos. But like she told us, she couldn’t help it. So she and her son went back out to the alley and handed each one of them fellas a twenty-dollar bill.
Now, I is a expert, and I can tell you that there ain’t hardly no homeless folks that ever has nobody hand ’em no twenty-dollar bill. Them fellas must a’ thought they won the lottery that day.
But listen at what happened a few months after that. The woman and the little boy was at home, and here come a knock on the door. The woman put her eye up to the peephole and seen this nice-lookin, clean-cut gentleman standin on her front porch.
“Hello, ma’am,” the man said when she opened the door. “Do you know who I am?”
“No sir,” the woman said.
“I’m one of the two homeless men you gave a chicken dinner and twenty dollars to awhile back. Can I come in and tell you how you changed my life?”
The woman was purty nervous about lettin a stranger in, and to tell you the truth, she prob’ly shouldn’ta done it. But she was thinkin to herself how different he looked, and besides, how in the world could he know about the Big Chicken Dinner and the lottery money if he wadn’t who he said he was?
The woman decided to welcome him into her home; then she called her son into the livin room to hear what this fella had to say.
“You know what I did with that twenty dollars?” he began.
She smiled, expectin him to say that maybe he’d bought the nice clothes he was wearin. “No, what?”
“I took it straight to the closest bar and got drunker than Cooter Brown!”
That’s exactly why I don’t give money to the homeless! the woman thought. But after she got over her shock, she remembered th
at this fella looked a whole lot different than what he had that day in the alley, so she decided to listen to the rest of his story.
“While I was at the bar, I met a woman that worked there,” he told her. “No one in as bad shape as me had ever been in that place before. Well, her curiosity got the best of her, and she asked to hear my life story. I told her I’d been homeless on the streets for more than twenty years.”
The woman in the bar asked this fella about his family.
“They think I’m dead!” he said.
The bar woman was shocked. “That’s not fair to your family,” she said. “You have to let them know you’re still alive!”
“You don’t understand, ma’am. I’ve done so many bad things, they’d never want to see me again. In their minds, I’m better off dead.”
See, that’s the thing about doin all them bad things. After you done ’em, you pretty sure you done used up all your chances with anyone that ever loved you. But that ain’t always true.
That night, the woman at the bar talked that fella into goin back to his family to see if maybe it wadn’t too late. At midnight, she put him in her own car, drove him down to the bus station, and with her own money, bought him a one-way ticket and put him on the next bus home.
Reminded me of the good Samaritan, using his own money to help out a poor fella he ain’t never seen before while everbody else—includin the religious folks—was satisfied to pass on by.
The Seattle woman and her little boy listened to the man they had blessed with twenty dollars finish tellin his story.
“My family treated me like the prodigal son!” he said. “They were so happy to see me. I spent three months at home, and they forgave me and loved me sober. I’m still in recovery, but I’ve got a job and a future. And I just came back to thank everyone who helped change my life.
“Your twenty-dollar blessing was the seed money God used to turn me around,” he said. “I was going to use it to drink and forget my troubles, but God used it to help me remember He still changes lives, even the lives of drunks in bars.”
