An umbrella. Six dollars. Dry shoes. These are items that middle class people don’t think very much about, that we can easily take for granted. After spending a day in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco on a Faithful Fools Street Retreat, I now see them very differently. The Faithful Fools Street Retreat program is designed for participants to step out of their everyday world and to directly experience the world of the homeless. I had the privilege of participating in a Street Retreat one Friday in March 2011 in preparation for our OCUUC youth to attend Street Retreat in April.
I arrived at the First UU Society of San Francisco at 9:00 a.m. I had made the decision not to chase down my car, which had been valet parked somewhere in the city by the downtown hotel I was staying at, to get my umbrella. There was just a slight drizzle, I had my coat, and figured I would be fine. I met with Rev. Denis Paul and the FF volunteers and we waited for the arrival of the group that I would be going on the retreat with that day. The rain began to pour down in sheets. By the time the group had walked from the UU Society to the Faithful Fools office on Hyde Street, I was soaked to the skin with the very cold rain.
At the FF office the high school students were assigned adult “shadowers” to follow them on their day-long retreat, three to a group. As an adult, I went by myself on my own retreat. We were given the boundaries of the Tenderloin, some information about the local services for the homeless, and then turned out to experience the day. Luckily the FF office had a spare umbrella to loan to me.
Where do homeless people go when it rains? I saw groups of people huddled in the entryways of little markets on corners. For a while I walked around, but even with my umbrella I was soaked and really cold. I felt a little uncomfortable walking into the stores, and there was no place to sit in them. I realized it was my own discomfort that was keeping me out in the cold and wet, so after mildly berating myself I resolved to go into the first coffee shop I ran into. It happened to be a Vietnamese owned coffee shop. The owner was very nice, but I was the only Anglo in the room, and the owner started to talk to me about where I was from, everyone seemed more than a little curious about me. We chatted just a bit, I was able to drink a cup of hot coffee and dry off for a little while. I spent one dollar for the luxury of sitting down in a dry room with a warm drink.
I then returned to the streets and walked around for a while. I knew there were two places that served lunch, and Rev. Denis had urged us to check them out and see how the social services side of homelessness plays out. I asked directions and found my way to St. Anthony’s church. In addition to lunch, there were restrooms available. Yay! The toilet paper was padlocked down, but there were restrooms. I then got in the free lunch line in back of a person who seemed to be mentally ill. He was turning around and speaking in repetitive statements to me while we waited. One of the things I noticed throughout the day was the prevalence of untreated mental illness in the homeless community.
The lunch was very filling, heavy on carbs. I had planned to talk to people during lunch, but the people around me did not make eye contact and seemed a bit shut down. I felt like I would be intruding on their privacy to just strike up a conversation with them, so I kept to myself. Food was traded around, and some people were stocking up on the leftovers and taking tangerines with them from the trays. It was very uncomfortable to just sit at the table, so as soon as I was done I left. There were occasional outbursts in the room, and many of the people at other tables seemed to know each other and be more gregarious than the people at my table, so the room had a lot of noise and bustle, not unpleasant.
I went back outside and continued to walk around on the streets, and realized I had a lot of time to kill before I went back to the FF office. I walked by the Salvation Army Recreation Center and tried to ask about services. At this point I looked pretty wet and bedraggled and not much different from many of the people on the street. The staff was not very helpful to me and seemed to be making derogatory remarks about the clients right in front of them. I finally figured out that you could purchase a day pass. So, that was where I spent a full five dollars. I hung out at the Rec Center for a while. It was dry and warm, and also had a restroom. After drinking coffee to stay warm, restrooms became very important. There are no gas stations or McDonald’s or any other obvious places with public restrooms in the Tenderloin, so you have to figure that piece out, too, on your FF Street Retreat.
After I left the Rec Center, I happened across the other church that offers lunch to the homeless. I went downstairs into the Glide Evangelical church kitchen. At this time I saw a woman in the corner, who looked exhausted. A staff member came over and told her she couldn’t sleep there. She kept saying she wasn’t sleeping, but she and her friends stayed put in the corner the entire time I was there. It looked like a cat-and-mouse game to try and get some rest without getting kicked out of the cafeteria by the staff. I could see both sides of the problem, the staff was trying to move huge numbers of people in and out for meals, but the woman looked completely exhausted.
The second thing that I noticed on my Street Retreat was that most of the homeless were people of color. I checked my observations against census data on poverty levels, and the anecdotal evidence is correct: While most of the people I saw on my retreat were men, the census data also shows that women are more likely to be living in poverty, as are young people.
After visiting the churches and the Rec Center, it was time for me to return to the FF office and reflect on my experience with the other participants. Our re-entry back into the middle class world was aided by a hot cup of tea and a chance to share with each other what we saw and how we felt. What I came away with, I realized once I was back in my cozy, clean hotel, dressed in dry clothes and warm socks, was how tough and resilient the homeless are just to make it through the day. I was exhausted spending one day in their world, dealing with the wet and the cold, navigating meal programs, trying to find a place to be, to just to sit or stand, that was dry.
The Faithful Fools Street Retreat gave me a whole new appreciation for owning an umbrella, having six dollars in my pocket, and being able to slip on a pair of dry shoes at the end of the day.
In Gratitude-
Rayna Hamre
Director of Religious Education
Orange Coast Unitarian Universalist Church