Pride at the shelter

Quite often, I talk to clients at work who say that they "are not the type of person to live here." I usually take that to mean something along the lines of, "I really don't want to be living here." The truth is, a good percent of the city's population is one catastrophe away from homelessness. One thing leading to another can land just about anyone, anywhere. Yesterday, I talked to a guy who used to be the CEO of a medium-sized oil drilling company in western Oklahoma. He's been at the shelter for weeks now. As far as I can tell, cases like this are not that unusual.

One client that really stood out this past week was a 40-something year old guy who just came into the shelter from Wisconsin. He got off the Greyhound bus and accidentally found his way to the shelter, which is just a few blocks south of the bus stop. He walked in with luggage in hand asking to use the phone. The Mission actually has a no-phone-use policy when it comes to clients because the employees have enough going on to not have to worry about being messenger people for all 500 clients everyday. However, I felt bad for this client and let him use my phone. (Don't worry, I disinfected it afterward.) But before I handed the phone to him, I wanted to hear some more of his story.

He told me that he had just come off of a Native American reservation in Wisconsin. He had been in school and had a part time job but couldn't keep up with the workload. He started drinking by himself in his apartment and lost all motivation to go to work or school. He lost his job and failed his classes. He got another job cutting wood, but he said that he wasn't making enough money to live doing that. He decided to come to Oklahoma City when he heard of the lower unemployment rate. As it turned out, he actually grew up in northeast Oklahoma. He told me that he hadn't been back since he was 17. He asked me if he could call a few of his old childhood friends to "let them know that [he] was in town." (...which was a call for help.) Since this placement would qualify as "shelter diversion," a growing part of my job, I thought it would be fine to see if he could get caught up with these two guys and get some help.

The first guy he called was a radiologist in Edmond. (You could guess the class differences between the two guys.) He had gone to middle school with this guy, but hadn't talked to him since then. I had the pleasure of listening to this semi-awkward conversation. But something was different about this conversation with the radiologist. The client told this radiologist that he was almost done attending school to become a social worker, and that he had been offered jobs in Oklahoma City, which is why he moved back down. He told the radiologist that he's starting classes down here to finish his degree this week. This pretty picture that he was painting for the radiologist was far from the truth and missing a gigantic part... the whole "Oh yeah, I'm also an alcoholic" part. He wraps up his elaborate story, then asks this radiologist for help. If I were this radiologist, I'd be slightly confused, as was the case here. After being told this grand story of middle-class living, the expected follow-up would probably not consist of asking for spare garage space so he could store his clothes. The radiologist refused to the offer outright, but agreed to meet this client downtown to catch up face-to-face.

Fast forward a few days. This client came back to my office, wanting to talk to me about treatment programs. He told me that he considered himself an alcoholic by the time he was 14 years old. He got messed up with gangs in northeast OKC and ended up dropping out of high school. He told me that he moved around to just about every corner of the US, drinking himself silly throughout the entire journey. Finally, in his middle-aged wisdom, he decided that it was enough and that he wanted to do something else.

The issue of pride that some homeless deal with is astounding. People come from a variety of backgrounds and contexts, some of which instill values like "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" or "don't ask for help until you're almost dead." At first, this client was definitely operating in this mindset, even unwilling to admit to me, a Mission employee, that he was homeless and needed some stability in his life to keep himself off of whiskey. He needed some grand "10 year high school reunion" story to help associate himself with his radiologist friend. That way, the help that he was asking for didn't seem like it was a homeless man asking a well-off man for help, but rather colleagues exchanging favors.

It is both fascinating and heartbreaking to me that people are stubborn or even unwilling to ask for help even when they literally have nothing more than the clothes on their back. For me, its one more barrier unmasked in getting clients within arms reach of the help they need.