Students discuss hope for the homeless

On the first night of the homeless immersion hosted by JOIN, five students from the Mental Health and Human Services (MHHS) club discussed what homelessness is and what it means to them personally.

Geri Criss, MHHS club president in her second year in the program, found out about the immersion when she was considering interning at JOIN, which is a social service day center in Northeast Portland. Although she decided to pick a different service center, she thought that this would be a good experience for the students in the MHHS program. Criss, 45, took up school again through the Transitions program offered at MHCC.

Bill Boyd and Liz Fosteer are also second-year students in the program who attended. Ashley Bright and Angela Gilleran were first-year students in the program who participated in the immersion. Bright, a 20-year-old Reynolds High School graduate, will assume presidency of the club in the winter term.

Boyd worked in construction for many years but was laid off and decided to go back to school. He said he went into the MHHS program because he had a natural knack for wanting to help people, which he noticed back when the “guys” in the construction work would talk about their problems to him.

But to this day, Boyd remembers an incident that happened about 10 years ago. He was sitting in a van eating lunch while on a construction job when two homeless men walked up to him. He told them to “get the hell away from me” and one of the men said, “You don’t even know what I want.” Boyd replied “I don’t give a shit, go away,” and they walked away.

“I still remember that and think, god, why did I do that? And now, here I am in a different position in my life and I want to help the same guy,” Boyd said.

“I wasn’t sure if old dogs could learn new tricks,” said Boyd, 59, but he got an A in the first class he took, which was psychology.

Boyd’s step-daughter is addicted to heroin, so he is no stranger to addiction and homelessness. She is not allowed to stay in the house because of her stealing habits, he said. Every few months she would tell him that she’s going to come clean but he said that he wants to see her do it, not hear about it.
Fosteer said that when she was growing up, both her parents were heroin and meth addicts and went through periods of sobriety and lapses. Her father became clean when she was in high school, but her mother still fights the addiction.

“Probably one of the hardest things I’ve had to do was tell my mom that she had to leave my house and sleep outside,” said Fosteer. “I had tried everything, all the tools that I knew. I was trying to be her little social worker — and it didn’t work.”

The JOIN worker who led the immersion was Joe Clark, a 23-year-old Vancouver native who graduated Seattle University last Spring. He started at JOIN in mid-August through the Jesuit Volunteer Corps (JVC).

“Jesuits are like the hippies of Catholicism,” said Clark, although he said he is not very religious.

Clark’s sister is a meth addict and is homeless. “All that we could do as a family is say that we support her and love her and whenever she chooses to move past that, we’ll be here still. We can’t really make somebody give up drugs.”

Gilleran said her half-sister, who had five kids, lived in extreme poverty, often taking care of the kids whenever she could before they were moved to foster homes. Bright had gone on two overseas missions to Cambodia where people in extreme poverty lived in huts without walls and have to suffer through scorching hot summers and pouring rain which often results in flooding.

Clark said, “It’s amazing to see how many different pathways there are. Just in this group you see a widely diverse experience with homelessness. One thing I’ve learned since I started working here is that there are just as many stories for how people become homeless as there are homeless people.”

Although he says he’s not the biggest fan of Dave Chappelle, a TV comedian, Clark recalls a sketch he had seen that resonated deeply about homelessness. Chapelle describes watching Sesame Street with his nephew, when he noticed “Sesame Street is a way that we teach our kids to hate homelessness because they have Oscar the Grouch, this guy that lives in a trashcan,” said Clark.

The MHCC students tried to specifically describe what homelessness is. What would you expect someone who is homeless to look like? Smell like? Clark questioned the group. Fosteer mentioned that often time homeless people have a lot of bags.

“Imagine what your entire life would look like inside of a backpack,” said Clark.

A few students said they were afraid the homeless might not be happy with having students observing them, “like we’re making a spectacle of them” said Fosteer.

Bright said, “My hope is that I get to brighten someone’s day. I don’t like seeing people upset or sad. I just want to help so bad, but I don’t know how.”

Clark said, “Sometimes it seems like the work you do will be useless, and sometimes it will be. That’s where the hope comes in, because you will be changing lives regardless of what you think.”