By Adam Dziewiontkoski
Confronting a homeless person for the first time takes courage and an open mind.
We’re taught from youth it’s socially taboo. But sometimes, we just have to step out of our comfort zone to do it right.
After our experiences Wednesday night, it is with a solemn sense of humility that we can report each of us has, in just one night, learned a great deal about these people and ourselves that we have never known before.
Here at the Fr. McKenna Center last night were stories of true hardships.
These are the stories that are real.
They are sad. They are true. And they are heartbreaking.
In America, there is a void between the homeless and the better-off. We’re often told these people — the panhandlers, the people sleeping on the street — should be avoided in passing. They are low-lifes, we’re told, the plight of our existence.
But given a chance, most of the 270 people we met at the Peace Meal, the kings of Washington’s surface streets, were genuinely caring, kind, sincere and even humorous.
They were like everyday folks, many of them more polite and compassionate than a passerby stranger we come across any other day.
For our group leader, Kati, it was about hearing a man’s story who dropped out of school to help his parents pay the bills. That ultimately led to him living on the streets, he told her, but one day, he’d go back to college and learn to become a dancer — his dream.
For Akina, it was about shedding an old stereotype. As an exchange student, no one would care about her home or family back in Japan, she thought. But surprisingly, the people she met quizzed her a great deal. “They were really interested in what I had to say,” she told us later.
For Agaila, originally from Algeria, it was about realizing her fortunes in surviving from a country steeped in endless war. These homeless people she met, however unclean or unshaven, were really no different from her own. As someone who wants to give back to the community, Agaila said she had found her true calling.
For Monica, it was about realizing that like any good person, these people cared about what she had to say. They asked and asked about life in her home country of South Korea. “They had more interest in my home country of Korea than they do on campus,” she said. In a humbling moment, they held hands in prayer.
And so, for many of us, we discovered that serving these people was not just about the volunteer experience. It was, for a series of fleeting but defining moments, about letting our guard down and extending a welcome and receiving warm kindness in return — something that, maybe, we did not expect.
And at times, it was about seeing another side of the world in all its brutal, unadulterated hardship. Many of these folks have had it rough.
Maybe these people aren’t so ordinary after all. Day after day, they keep going, week after week. They persevere. They find the will to survive.
“I tell ya, these are some real folks,” one man I met said last night. “These are the Lord’s children!” he exclaimed, gesturing with open arms.
These are some extra ordinary people.
Read Full Post »
Alternative Spring Break 2010 