Eye contact

We were greasy, cold, wet, tired and quite thankful for a patch of carpeted ground. Each night when we returned to the church after a fifteen-hour day on the street, my fellow Urban Plunge participants and I wanted nothing more than to sleep. I’m pretty sure each one of us had blisters on our feet by the end of the first day and I am absolutely sure that we were all very sore. Despite the discomfort however, each of us ended our time thankful for the experience.

Each of the five days of Plunge my fellow SPU students and I would spend wandering the streets of Seattle looking for homeless people whom we could ask about life on the street and how they ended up there. After that our only real concern was to find opportunities to eat and occasionally to rest and stay dry. Each day consisted of a fair amount of boredom and a fair amount of deciding where to go and what to do. The interactions we did have though were the real gold of the whole experience.

One of the more memorable interactions we had was with the street youth around Westlake Center. They were just like us in so many ways. They had their own outcasts, their own popular kids, many had cellphones, many had no desire to go to school or to work and each one had their own ways of finding, or at least needing, acceptance. One in being the guy who is a “lucrative business man” another in being the craziest guy on the street and still another in being the one who always does well with the ladies. It would be cliché to say that I saw something deeper missing in each one of them. However, I did see that there was so much acting on going and I just wanted it to stop. I understand that when most people in a society don’t want to interact with you at all it’s hard to be proud of who you are. I was just hoping that one day they would understand what their worth is. Last weekend, while doing some homeless outreach on Capitol Hill, I saw one of the kids I met in Westlake. He introduced himself as Garbage. It broke my heart because on the Plunge he had offered me his last cigarette and found cardboard for me to help me keep my stuff dry. Garbage is hardly a name fitting for someone so kind.

The natural extension of thought from the whole experience was to ask how we could help these people. Humans like us. Many of them had been dealt a poor hand and plenty others had just decided not to use their hand well. The question I tried to always ask of people who we met that had been able to leave the streets or who were in the process of leaving the streets was what had given them the motivation to get off. For most it was people they cared about or who cared about them. One gal said she had younger sisters who looked up to her and she wanted to set a good example for them. A married couple said they had two sons, who were then living with friends, and had lost their house so they were just looking for work to help them get back into a life. Another lady said she was tired of using drugs to get her through each day. Most revealing was what one woman at Mary’s Place shared with us. She said that for those who claimed they were fine with living on the street it wasn’t so much that they were ok with the street but that they didn’t believe anything better would ever exist for them.

In Seattle it’s not hard to survive on the street. Breakfast, lunch and dinner are available from shelters, soups kitchens, and the occasional do-gooder passing by. What’s hard is finding hope. Hope that if you pull yourself up from the bottom you won’t slip right back down. Hope that there’s someone who cares. Hope that there’s even a reason to get off in the first place. Due to its abundant resources for the homeless, Seattle is said to be the nation’s best place to be homeless. My prayer is that it can be the nation’s best place to quit being homeless too.

The hardest part about Plunge was partly the people that weren’t on the street who wouldn’t even look at you when you spoke to them. What was even harder were the ones who would look you in the eye when you spoke to them and say nothing, as if to communicate, “I know you were speaking to me, but you’re just not worth stopping for.” It serves to take away your humanity when someone won’t acknowledge you simply because your clothes aren’t quite as clean as they ought to be. For those who would at least say, “Sorry, I don’t have any change” we were very thankful.

With all of this in mind about giving hope and acknowledging humanity I would like to take the time to emphasize two services that seem to me to be especially effective, Mary’s Place and New Horizons. Both of these ministries make a point of being relational in their outreach and having people around who will talk with the homeless that come through not just serve them and get them on their way. New Horizons even owns a coffee shop across the street called “Street Bean” where people have made their way off the street through New Horizons can be trained to work as baristas, an exceedingly useful skill to have in Seattle.

My hope for all the “average people” who read this that may never want to live in a city let alone do outreach to the homeless is this: show them someone cares. If you can, stop for sixty seconds, ask them their name, and show them that there are people in the world who don’t just want to ignore them and who want to see them able to do something with their lives. If you want to be specific and talk about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, they have food and some sort of shelter and safety, what they need next is love and belonging and that will ONLY come through human contact, eye contact being the simplest way to allow that to happen.