Summer 2011
The summer days are racing by for many of us. OCUUC Religious Educaiton has had some great moments for our Going Green Summer. Water day, recycling sorting, and mask making have been just a few activities our children and youth have participated in over the past month.
Some of us are able to travel and get away for a time. My husband and I were visiting Oslo about two weeks before the tragedies there began, and we were very saddened by the news of the bombings and shootings. Fun and tragedy, laughter and tears. Our lives are often made up of dualities.
As I work with our youth to create this week’s service, Faithful Fools: Standing On The Side of Love for the Homeless, some of those dualities from the trip I took with our youth come into focus. Four OCUUC youth, one youth from Fullerton UU Church, two Directors’ of Religious Education and two chaperons set out on a rainy April day in a rented van. Rain turned to light snow as we traveled over the Grapevine, but we were warm and comfortable in our van, able to stop for dinner along the way.
The next morning we went out on our Street Retreat. This was my second retreat, and I had a completely different experience than the first time, which I wrote about in a previous column. Our youth were in groups of two, with an adult chaperon close by at all times. I was a woman alone, not pretending to be homeless, but hanging out at the park and outwardly not doing much. I was approached by a man for sex while I was sitting by myself in the park (hey, I’m old, what’s going on here, I thought to myself!), which I declined. At that point, he opened up his coat, took out a glass pipe, lit it up and inhaled deeply. He then told me I looked like the type that ‘never got high.’ We were told by Rev. Denis Paul, the Faithful Fools coordinator, to say ‘no, thank you’ when presented with illegal or inappropriate requests on the street, so I was using my ‘no, thank yous’ quite a bit that day. I never felt unsafe, many people were close by including one of our small groups and a male chaperon, but the experience was an eye opener for me in terms of safety for homeless women.
Later in the day I was sitting in a different area and started talking to a homeless woman named Cami. She described her life to me. She could stay at friend’s house one or two nights a week. The other nights she tried to scrape up enough money to ride the rapid transit or the bus all night so she could safely sleep. She couldn’t sleep on the street alone, day or night, it was too dangerous. She said it was safer for a woman if she joined up with a mixed-gender group. Cami had lived with relatives her entire life until they all passed away, was sweet but was obviously not educated, and she had some physical problems. I bought her lunch, gave her $20, made sure she was plugged into a social service agency (she had an appointment the next day) and then had to leave her to return to the Faithful Fools office. My feeling of abandoning her was overwhelming as I walked away. A deep sadness for her and for an economic system that fails so many so regularly.
As a society, I know we have failed these people. A free lunch will not fix this problem; it runs so much deeper and is so much more complex. I was faced with the figure of a person who is realistically not employable in today’s economy. How many more Cami’s are there in the first world; how many are trying to function in the poverty and despair of third world countries? Far, far too many.
Our UU faith provides us with ways to help out in those deeper ways. Please take a moment and review information on our UU Legislative Ministry for California, and our UU Service Committee. Immediate needs are so important, but also we need to look for the root causes of social problems and work for long-term solutions, not quick fixes. The duality of rich and poor is fixable. It’s up to us to become educated and to work for social justice.
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