Two Hats

I was walking home from work on a Friday with one of the volunteers from the Free Dining Room. A woman on the other side of the street threw up her arms, waving and yelling my name. Recognizing her as one of my homeless court clients, I waved back and said hi from the opposite curb. I could tell that she wanted to talk to me. She ran through the street, weaving between rush hour traffic.

She asked me a couple of questions about her case… and then she just broke down. She cried about her money, her kids, her family. Again and again she bellowed, “They’re killing my children, I need to get out of there.” She told me her family was taking her money and she was about to lose her housing. I went from that helpful resourceful case manager—“Yes, as soon as I get a photocopy of your SSI check I will be able to fax your case into the public defender and she will put you on the calendar for December” to a set of ears “wow, that’s horrible.”

This is something that I go through almost every day. One moment I am able to help people to lift hundreds of dollars of legal fines off of their fiscal shoulders. And the next moment, I am helpless but present. It is hard to know which of these roles is more important. This woman needed to talk to someone, and I just happened to be there.

The interesting thing is the relationship between the case manager and the listener. The Homeless Court program opened the door for me to connect with someone who I probably never would have met otherwise. Because she had worked with me before, she felt comfortable waving to a young white guy on the other side of the street, who she probably never would have come into contact with outside of Saint Vincent de Paul.

This service through presence is the hardest type of work to define, describe, and quantify. Unlike homeless court, I don’t have any clean numbers of how many clients I helped by standing there and conversing. There is no success or failure in these exchanges. I don’t even know what impact I have on their lives—if any. At the same time, there are days when I feel as though these personal exchanges are the most important part of my work.