Ashleigh Hill's Blog
That Have Happened This Week. / 03.05.10, 09:04 PM
A lot of things happen in a Mission Year week. Here is an example:
Early this week I drove one of the women living at our shelter, who has become a good friend to us, to her storage unit so she could store a lot of her stuff that we don’t have room for at the Joshua Center. We lugged several boxes and trash bags full of her stuff up to the 3rd floor of a cold, clinical Public Storage space where a timer controls the hall lights. I was thinking about all those stories I’ve read in the paper about people who live in their units to prevent homelessness and how scary that must be. On our way back to the Center our friend had me pull into a grocery store and she bought us papayas, mangos, pears, bananas, snow peas, strawberries, and a few things to drink. She used her Link card (the new version of food stamps) to pay for everything and then pressed $10 into my hand. We love fruits and vegetables and our budget doesn’t allow for as may of them as we’d like, and she knows that. On one hand, it’s somehow freeing to be in a place where you don’t feel like you need to turn down a friend buying you mangos with her food stamps. On the other hand, I think she is an example of loving your neighbor as yourself.
A few days later I read a story in The RedEye, Chicago’s daily paper, about the huge heroin problem in East Garfield Park and North Lawndale, another west side neighborhood. The article showed pictures of the dead row houses on W. Wilcox, the street behind ours that our church sits on. Our blocks are basically struggling drug hideaways and the only thing the authorities have done is to put up blue police lights and cameras on corners. This only sends sellers and buyers into homes and alleys. Then they feel like prisoners on their own street, before any type of real, helpful crackdown on drugs can even be started. I talked with a friend about how she doesn’t know why people talk up heroin so much because it’s awful. Taking it is like drinking a little too much and getting tired, except one hundred times worse. So, now I know what shooting heroin is like.
A few minutes later, I answered Breakthrough’s doorbell and let in a frazzled, soggy woman who blurted, “I’m here to talk to someone about being homeless.” I sat down with her to fill out an intake form, which lets us know about all her past and present issues, contact information, and how Breakthrough can help her. Three questions in she started crying uncontrollably. She told me that she has no one to trust. She is ashamed because her shoes don’t fit and she’s a mess and she does a lot of drugs – even though she doesn’t want to – and she’s supposed to have a visit, allowed by the Dept. of Human Services (DHS) with her beautiful 6-month-old daughter in an hour. I feel incompetent to give any advice to this much pain. I listened for a few minutes and then got her some breakfast and suggested that we should focus on one thing at a time. She settled down a little bit, and we finished her intake. She ate and met with our manager, Sarah, who helped her get some new clothes and shower. She thanked me several times and I mopped up the mess her snowy black tennis shoes made on the floor. All I know is this: if I believe God is bigger than the pain and humiliation of being too high to see the baby that you carried and the state took away, then He is surely bigger than my incompetence.
Later that day I helped move another women’s belongings to a housing program she recently moved into. Another one of our previous guests lives there too and I took some of her stuff with me to drop off. The basic rule at Breakthrough, pertaining to stuff, is that you have a month to claim your belongings after you move and then we give them away or throw them out. We, unfortunately, don’t have room to store things for women who do not currently live with us. This particular women has been a little bit of a pain, calling and begging us not to throw her stuff out and saying she’s going to come pick it up, and then never showing. I tried to take it to her and the other shelter wouldn’t take it because she wasn’t there. I had to throw it out. I just had to throw someone else’s personal belongings out and I hate that decisions like this have to be made.
I stayed late to work to do that so I took the L home by myself instead of the bus with my roommates. On the platform I saw one of our guests and we rode together. She was on her way to the methadone clinic and then going to see her grandkids. Last week I had to wake her up from the facedown, opiate-induced stupor I found her in on the back couch. But this week she is doing better.
On the walk home from the L I noticed that one of the local dealers, who has either been in hiding or in jail for the past few weeks was back at his house.
That night Meredith and I went back to Breakthrough to help out and watch the children’s Black History Month program. Breakthrough’s children’s staff invited all the parents and brought in the principle of a new area school, East Garfield Prep, to speak to parents. It’s encouraging to work for a program that truly cares about the education of the children they serve. Most of the children attending our after-school-program read at a low level and get little educational help outside of Breakthrough. The principle got up and started talking about all the ideals we believe in for the inner city and it made me tear up.
While we were cleaning up and parents were talking to the principle about enrollment, one of Meredith’s favorite 1st graders came up to me, grabbed my hand and told me he didn’t want me to leave. I asked him if he was confusing me with Meredith. He assured me that he wasn’t and when I asked him why he didn’t want me to leave he said, “because I get sad when the white people leave. Sometimes I go home and don’t like it very much.” It breaks my heart and simultaneously makes me happy that he associates the children’s staff at Breakthrough (about 80% of them are white) with fun, love, and attention, and his house with the opposite. There are so many positive, loving African Americans in our neighborhood but sometimes it seems like there still aren’t enough. That’s one of the ideals that the principle was preaching – the importance of children having adults of the same ethnicity to look up to in their neighborhoods.
Every other week all the Chicago teams meet together for training. This Friday we went to the DeSable Museum of African American History. I was excited to go because this month I’ve been constantly reminded that African American history is not only beautiful and full of love, but it is American history. On the flipside I’m constantly reminded that I don’t know near enough information about African Americans who have shaped the freedoms all of us enjoy and those who are still fighting for freedoms we do not all share. In addition, all the hasty information I learned in school was absolutely not good enough. It angers me that I was taught a little bit about a few, specific, important, black Americans and there are so many I’ve never heard of that I now want to look up to.
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principle = PRINCIPAL.
Wow.
By Ashleigh / Mar 5, 11:19 PM / #
Wow!! What extreme love and extreme sadness, such hope and such obstacles.
Thanks for this further look into your life in Chicago, with Mission Year, and the people God is bringing into your path and vice versa, Ashleigh.
Love,
Hawley
By Hawley Schneider / Mar 5, 11:26 PM / #