Settling in...

Yesterday I awoke to a knock at my bedroom door, it was my roommate telling me she was leaving for work and that there was a maintenance man fixing a leak in the kitchen ceiling. Fifteen minutes later, I managed to pull myself out of bed and headed for the kitchen to discover a ladder, a shop-vac, and a ceiling that looked completely water-logged and ready to collapse at any moment. And oh yeah, the maintenance man had slipped out the door—apparently this kind of thing was routine for him, you know, nothing a few Bounty paper towels can’t fix.

On the bright side, I’m no longer wondering why the apartment complex constantly smells of urine and “incense”—it’s the sweet smell of mold and probably Asbestos living in harmony with one another as Mother Nature intended.

On Monday I held my first Homeless Court orientation, which will be the first of many throughout the year. It was good to finally get some time to interact with clients and get a get a better understanding of who the program serves. Everyone I’ve talked to so far has been extremely appreciative, with only the occasional complaint that we don’t handle parking tickets, felonies or D.U.I.’s. One woman said to me, “Why don’t you care about the D.U.I. people?” I told her that we do, but that our program doesn’t address that particular legal issue. She wasn’t buying it.

I’ve still been spending time in the men’s center which has been eye-opening in many ways. Things such as checking e-mail and using Mapquest to get directions to a job interview, which many of us now take for granted, can prove to be monumental tasks for some of the men. Also, it can be somewhat startling to see the differences in drop-in clients from day-to-day who drink or use drugs. I’m not completely naïve and it was something that I fully-expected, but never the less, it’s a different experience to have a coherent conversation with a man on Monday and then on Tuesday the same guy’s eyes are glazed over, he’s wearing a sweatshirt un-zipped with no undershirt and he’s talking non-sense and singing love songs.

And now a thought for the week:

Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible. -Dalai Lama