This Job is Weird
“It’s not even 12 o’clock, and I have already almost been run over twice.”
“A couple more nights of lying on this cold cement, and I will be back in a hotel for a little while. I will be able to take myself a nice hot shower!”
“I’m sorry I am not feeling so good. I am coming off drugs right now because I am fixing to get a job at Volkswagen. I’m not going to let anything stop me from getting that job.”
“They say we have to move from here, but I don’t know of any good places to go to next.”
“Wow! What a blessing! I don’t know what possessed y’all to do this! We were just needing all of this! It was so cold last night! I was getting so down and depressed about it!”
Client: “I can start a job once I can get my ID! I just have to come up with money to pay for it!”
ROC Member: “Go to Homeless Healthcare, and see a case manager. They can get and pay for your ID. Here is a bus pass to get there.”
“When I have gone in to Wal-Mart, they have had some pretty nice Christmas decorations this year….. One of these days I hope we can have a home and a place to put up a Christmas tree of our own.”
Client: “Hey, could I please sit in your van for a few minutes so I can warm up? My body is starting to lock up from being so cold for so long.”
ROC Member: “Of course. Let me get you some hand warmers and a blanket too. Hope you don’t mind the Christmas music.”
Client: “Wow, y’all are right on time!”
ROC Member: “Well, that is good to hear, because we always feel like we are running behind. So thank you!”
“You all have an interesting job.”
“Your all’s job is so different and rare that it is tricky to explain to other people.”
ROC Member: “Our jobs are weird. But I feel I can’t stop doing it.”
Homeless outreach is such an odd thing. From the things you do, the things you see, the things you hear, the things you feel, and the things you say. It can all be weird. This work doesn’t feel natural in many ways, and yet at the same time, in so many other ways, this work can be seen as the most natural thing to do. Loving and caring for one’s neighbors. How much more natural of a human act could there be? Many times it is how unbelievable our jobs are that makes things weird, because people have a difficult time believing and trusting that our intentions are that pure and simple. We even struggle to believe we actually get paid to do what we do every day.
We get paid to trespass. It is required for us to do this in order to make it to the locations where folks are staying. We jokingly say all the time that we are professional trespassers. When we see a “No Trespassing” sign, we often translate that as a welcome sign for us to look for people who may be experiencing homelessness there. We get reports from community members saying they saw people experiencing homelessness near a particular bridge or walking in a particular section of woods. We wonder sometimes if they may have seen us instead, and they are calling or emailing about us. This feeling of being a trespasser extends into our interactions with clients within their encampments. Often we come across threatening signs to intruders along the trails leading to encampments. You always question, “Well, that doesn’t mean us, right?” After doing this work for a while, you can also pick up on the intuitive feeling that your presence within an encampment is putting residents there on edge. There is a weird balance of spending enough time with someone to establish that you care and spending too much time and overstepping your welcome.
You never know what you will encounter from day to day, from interaction to interaction. One moment you could be sharing a laugh about how someone you both know joined the circus. The next moment you could be shedding tears with someone who you both know died of an overdose recently. One moment you could be praying on a street corner with someone. The next moment you could be loading someone into your vehicle to escape a domestic violence situation. One moment you are pouring a hot cup of coffee for someone who was freezing the whole night before. The next thing you know, you are stuck in a 30-minute lecture about someone’s past life adventures, half of which make sense, and half of which make no logical sense at all. One moment you’re walking down a trail, and you hear two people in a heated argument, so you make the safest choice to turn around and not engage them. The next moment you are seeing someone you haven’t seen for months. They begin asking you how your family is doing while they have a massive butcher’s knife in the back pocket, but you don’t feel in danger at all. One moment you’re helping someone hurriedly set up a tent to get out of the rain. The next moment you are at a recently housed client’s new apartment excitedly giving them a microwave that someone donated for them to have.
You feel all the feelings almost every day, and you should because it isn’t healthy not to. You feel anger that people have to live and suffer like they do. You feel disappointment when people don’t follow through with plans you worked hard to arrange for them. Plans that they agreed to, and you have been talking to them about for 2 straight months, to have a hernia surgery that took overcoming so many barriers to set up. Then the day before and the morning of, they are nowhereto be found, but the day after, they are so easily found again. You feel grief with every loss. You feel guilt for always wanting and wishing you could do more. You feel joy and pride when you hear people making healthier decisions for themselves. You feel saddened, confused, strangely honored, misplaced, and helpless when you get a call from the medical examiner’s office saying they found your business card in someone who has passed’s wallet. When they ask you if you know if they had any next of kin? And all you can say is that you only met the person twice for a few minutes at a time, so there is nothing else you can tell them. It is weird when you feel love and deep care for people that you barely know, but being known even just a little bit is enough for love and care to exist. And this is even more true amongst all of us who do homeless outreach. The bonds that exist between homeless outreach workers are so weird but are so genuine. These bonds can’t be explained but only experienced through carrying supply bags together through the woods in the scorching heat or under a bridge in the freezing cold or along a creek in the pouring rain.
Homeless outreach is a weird job where the ultimate goal being achieved leads to the job no longer existing. That’s what we want. We want everyone to experience the human right of having safe, stable, and permanent housing. With everything we do, we want to eliminate the dichotomy of us, the housed, and them, the unhoused.
The Work is Weird, but Weird Works. The Outreach Worker Connection. We’ve heard it too many times to ignore it. It's something that we are supposed to be.
(Below is a picture of an example of all the weird things we see. Oh, Kermit!
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#ThisJobIsWeird
