Hope.

On Friday afternoon I attended the graduation of the students in the SVdP culinary program. It’s a 12-week program that teaches students to cook and hopefully prepares them for employment in other professional kitchens. The graduation was the culmination of a lot of hard work and it was clearly a very emotional and joyous occasion for the students who invited their family and friends and cooked quite a feast. The keynote speaker, Christophe Kubiak, the executive chef at La Bonne Cuisine, was especially well-chosen. He talked about moving to the U.S. from France in 1993 with only the proverbial $2 in his pocket and the idea of a better life.

On a personal note, I found out that Chef Michael, who runs the culinary program, also went to Indiana University. His time there was slightly more star-crossed than mine, swimming with Mark Spitz and also winning a gold-medal. I didn’t get the impression that he’s a die-hard Hoosier basketball fan like me, and he also wasn’t a huge fan of Bloomington with its lack of ocean and all, but the one thing we did agree upon was Nick’s English Hut. For those that don’t know, Nick’s is probably the greatest college bar in all of America, at least in my opinion. We ended up spending a few minutes talking about their Stromboli and he artfully described each ingredient from the crumbled sausage, pizza sauce, cheese and even the bun with meticulous detail in the way only a chef could. Apparently the real key to the Stromboli is the 500-degree oven that they use.

Back to things that matter--on Thursday night I watched Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. It was pretty amazing to see 75,000 people pack Invesco Field just to see a politician. It is clear that he’s a captivating figure and maybe even the “biggest celebrity on the planet,” but I think what makes him truly unique is his ability to inspire the common man. In the men’s center I talked to one guy and he told me that all week he’d been tuning into the convention on his radio. The significance of Obama’s speech forty-five years to the day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” was certainly not lost upon him—it was a promise renewed.

As Jesuit Volunteers I feel like many of us are dropped into positions we’re not prepared for, working with marginalized populations we have little experience with and facing problems that have no easy solutions. It’s easy to get discouraged and overwhelmed when dealing with poverty and homelessness, so it was especially heartening to see the tangible proof that SVdP really is making a difference in the lives of its clients. Chef Christophe Kubiak impressed upon the students that in order to become successful they must do everything in their lives, especially cooking, with passion. Not all of the students are going to become executive chefs, but the very fact that it is now a possibility to be explored is inspiring.

I think the biggest lesson I’ve learned so far is that, for staff and clients alike, the value of hope should never be discounted.

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

Hello, St. Vincent de Paul

Hi, my name is Ryan Want and I will be serving as the Homeless Court Coordinator at St. Vincent de Paul for the 2008-09 year. This is the fifth year that SVdP has hired a Jesuit Volunteer to run the program and with a little effort on my part it will also be the fifth year a JV has kept a blog.

I have a degree in journalism and English along with experience working at a newspaper, so this should be the easy part--at least compared to getting over the culture-shock of moving from Boulder, CO to downtown Oakland.

Another challenge my position presents for me is learning how to interact and gain acceptance with the guys that frequent the Champion Guidance Center for Men. I’ve spent quite a bit of time over there during my first week, the center has a place to do laundry, showers to clean up, computers to check e-mail, a phone to make local calls, tables to play games and a big-screen TV to watch movies in the afternoon, so all in all it’s a pretty nice place.

I was also pleased to see that there is a steady stream of coffee in the morning and judging from the elderly-woman who tried to force her way into the center on Wednesday while she yelled “Coffee! Coffee!”--it must be quite good. After one of the guys said, “Woman, what you think you’re doing? This is a men’s center!” and another guy gently bear-hugged her, they agreed to fix her a cup to go complete with cream and sugar.

Last year’s SVdP JV, Mike Tyler, was nice enough to stick around for my first week on the job and show me the ropes, which has been extremely helpful. Throughout the week as I talked with both staff and clients it was abundantly clear that I’ve got some clown-sized shoes to fill.

As for future posts, it’s my goal to keep the blog updated at least once a week with mostly personal reflections and musings about my job, community and experiences here in Oaktown.

I’ll end this first post with a prayer that seems appropriate for starting a new job in a city you’ve never been to before and has really inspired and comforted me over the past week:

MY LORD GOD, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

- Thomas Merton, "Thoughts in Solitude"