I woke up at my girlfriend’s apartment around 7:00 a.m. I got ready for work and left around 8:30 a.m.
I arrived at work at 9:00 a.m. I drove to the faith-based homeless day shelter to see if there were any clients there in need of service. I met with a homeless Outreach worker named Chrissy, who helps homeless people out of charity, at the faith-based homeless day shelter. Chrissy was coordinating a detox for a homeless man named Shamus who has a brown Labrador service dog 🐕🦺. I spoke with Chrissy for a while about the volunteer services she provides for homeless people in the street. What I found interesting was that when I first met Shamus He had told me that he and Chrissy had a romantic relationship at one point. Working in the charity world of human service, you come across many different ideologies and motivations. Why would Chrissy, a helper for the people in the street, take one of her clients as a lover? Chrissy works in Cyber security, and uses her own resources to help people. She is very smart and very resourceful.
Chrissy isn’t the first charitable self-funded outreach worker I have met that has taken on a homeless drug addict as a lover. Another woman I met, we will call her Heather, was with a man she had helped get off the streets. He told me as much, when we were talking. I later saw Heather’s boyfriend hanging out with a group of drug-addicted homeless people, and suspected he was smoking crack. In one sense I am grateful for these self-directed helpers of humanity. On the other side I believe it would be best if they didn’t have sex with the people they are helping.
At 11:30 a.m. I met up with Juan the CEO from Dreamland Nonprofit, that provides mobile showers for homeless people across from the harm reduction Center. Juan and I discussed the mobile shower unit that the Dreamcenter runs on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Since a good number of homeless people utilize this service Juan gave me permission to do Outreach at the mobile shower unit. Juan gave me an overview of services for the Dreamland which includes the mobile shower unit, Net of Hope women’s house, a mobile pantry that goes to Haverhill and Lawrence, and an Outreach team that visits people out in the street. I also gave Juan an overview of services provided by the Street Outreach that I do.
At 12:30 I arrived back at the shelter to write this daily log. Adam was not available to do Outreach with me so I clocked out early which was represented in my hours. Considering that my position is in limbo until the director comes back from vacation. I’m just showing face and trying to hold my spot. I don’t want to be sitting around the shelter especially if Ezekiel is there. It’s not that I care whether or not I get fired, what I do care about is that Ezekiel was the lever to unsettle my position.
I spent the rest of the afternoon in my tent ruminating about the stress of Ezekiel trying to get me fired. It’s definitely been a stressful week. The stress wasn’t too overwhelming, I slept like a baby.