Downtown Diary - Friday, October 28 Pilot Run

I hope you all enjoyed Alan’s first post. As you probably could tell though from his post, it made less and less sense as you read it. That’s ok, I thought so too when I read it. I told him, and then he laughed.

So a group of us went downtown this Friday night to do a distribution run. We wanted to see how everything looked before the rest of you start heading down next Wednesday since the last time we had done a distribution run was back at the beginning of June. So we grabbed some granola bars, some Twizzlers…some Taro wafers Christine Lowe stuck in my bag when we went skiing last winter (which I offered to Alan to try and they turned out to be stale…they had a nice purple wrapping though) and off we went downtown. So we go downtown. First of all, parking sucks. Second, I don’t like the B-line…even though it’s a bit better at night. Third, parking sucked. All of you carpool if you have the chance when you go downtown.

Anyways, so we started down Davie Street. For the first 20 minutes or so we didn’t see a single person that looked like he or she needed food. We started wondering what we were going to do if it was going to be like this for the rest of the run. Later we realized that the lack of people was probably due to it being the end of the month, the time when welfare cheques are handed out. We reached the Safeway on Davie St. and lo and behold the first person we saw there was a very familiar face to us. His name is James, one of the friendliest faces you’ll ever see. When we first started volunteering with Mom about 4 years ago, he was there as her main volunteer back then. Anyways, we were blown away that of all the people we’d see the first night out would be him and that was a HUGE encouragement to us. It turned out that he was out with his son and another volunteer from his church offering some basic first aid to whoever needed it on the streets. He had started this a while ago with a volunteer registered nurse. They offered to go along with us for the rest of the run and we were more than happy to oblige.

All in all it turned out to be a pretty good night. I believe our count of homeless people we touched base with was somewhere around 30. A number of them we simply gave some food to, but we were able to have a decent talk with a number of others.

For myself, three incidences stood out aside from running into James. First, was a man we met outside Safeway whom we served. After talking with him for a while, he offered me $5 to contribute to our group. I’m sure he himself didn’t have much but he still offered what he had. Wow?

Second, was a woman I met on Robson, I’ll call her M. I found out that M had just gotten out of a very negative relationship. She showed us a box and said that that was all she owned. Everything else she had was with her ex and she couldn’t get any of it back. James spent a bit of time talking with her and you know, I’m always amazed at the sincerity and warmth that James possesses. Furthermore, I could tell just how much the sincerity and warmth meant to M at that moment and how thankful she was just to receive that.

Third, was a man we saw on Granville. I’ll call him P. P was someone that we saw many times in the past when we used to volunteer with Mom. We never actually talked to him back then as he never seemed to want to talk and he almost never accepted our food. This time, we found him sitting by one of the light posts. He looked up at us and it was pretty interesting to see his expression change. Apparently he recognized some of us. Serious…if I could describe how his eyes changed I would. But I can’t so too bad, suffice to say that it was one of the more interesting expressions I’ve seen. He said, “I know you!” and I said “Yeah, I remember you too.” He said, “Do you remember my name?” I think to myself, damn, no I don’t and say, “Sorry, it’s been a while.” He smiles and says, “It’s ok! I don’t remember yours either!” I laugh and say, “Good! We’re square!” Then we reintroduced and offered him some food and talked briefly with him. Meeting him this time around was quite different from all the other times we saw him. For me, it was a strong reminder of the difference between just doing a good thing and showing commitment.

Ok this post was really long. If you’re still reading, thanks! If you’re not still reading, then you don’t see this thanks and therefore don’t get this thanks. Not that you would care or know anyways since you’re not still reading. Ok. Bye!