I've been trying to write a post about three clients who showed up at the Berkeley Food Pantry on Monday. This has not gone well, but somehow I can't not mention these people, so here it goes.
All three were from the homeless encampment at the Albany Bulb, a peninsula of landfill that pushes out into the Bay near I-80. It used to belong to the Santa Fe Railroad, then it was a dump, and then it became part of Eastshore State Park. If you go there for a walk, you'll find rebar, grafitti, urban art, exotic plants, dogwalkers, and clusters of homeless people whom the City of Albany occasionally tries to evict.
This trio came as a group, two men and a woman. They smelled bad, and they were loud. One of the men stopped dead at the doorway and glared at us for some minutes, which was so unnerving that Judy went and got a fellow volunteer, a sturdy young man, to stay in the room with us until we realized that the this client was so stoned he couldn't put a sentence together.
They took forever to get organized. They unpacked and randomly re-packed their groceries. They gossiped about other homeless people at the Bulb and whether the drinking water was any good. The woman was especially loud and angry-sounding. I just wanted them to go, and finally they did.
Every draft of this post included comments about how inexcusably unfair life is, how their condition has nothing to do with being lazy or getting too many government entitlements (that's for you, Mitt, et al.), how I feel guilty about having booked a cruise that day and for that matter having a much more comfortable life. But it boils down to this: I don't know where to begin to help them and I just wanted them to go.
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