HOME VAN NEWSLETTER 5/25/12

A BIG HOME VAN HOWDY TO SPRINGHILL MISSIONARY BAPTIST CHURCH

Springhill MBC, a church located on Hawthorne Road near Tent City, has created a church in the portion of Tent City that is near the bike trail and the downtown bus depot. We are just thrilled about it, and the homeless people in the area couldn’t be more pleased. They have erected a large tent with benches inside, and put up a ten-foot tall white wooden cross that is cemented into the earth and lit up. They are doing both food and spiritual outreach. This is wonderful! Most of the homeless folks are of the Protestant and evangelical faith, so it’s an excellent fit. They are enjoying the presence of a church and also hope that the ‘bad apples’ amongst them will decide to move elsewhere. I also feel that this is exactly the kind of outreach from the mainstream community that is needed for Tent City to win the respect and support of the larger, housed community.

Springhill MBC also has a long practice of allowing homeless people to fill their water jugs at their outside faucet. In honor of our friends at Springhill I am posting the following poem, written by St. Theresa of Avila, a 15th Century nun:

Christ has no body now on earth but yours,

no hands but yours,

no feet but yours,

yours are the eyes through which Christ's compassion

is to look out to the earth,

yours are the feet by which He is to go about doing good

and yours are the hands by which He is to bless us now.

St Teresa of Avila

AN ICE CREAM PARTY HAPPENS!

Liz, Diane and I were standing at the second stop, where we serve between 10 and 15 people on a typical driveout, discussing the possibility of having ice cream downtown on Tuesday nights. At that moment an old fashioned Good Humor Truck comes driving by, playing it’s song, the first one I have seen in many years. I reach out my arm and flag it down. There is zero communication between my arm and my brain, because when it pulls over I realize that I probably don’t have enough money to buy ice cream for everyone. I go skulking around to the side window, to see how far I can get. Then our Civil Indigent pulls out his wallet and marches over proclaiming, “Ice cream treats for everyone!” It was so much fun.

WATER

Thank you so much, all of you who brought us water, and please keep it coming. We gave out almost all we had last night. We are already in a serious ‘water stress’ situation.

Love and peace to everyone,

arupa

The Home Van needs tents, tarps, bottled water, bug spray,Vienna sausages, creamy peanut butter, jelly, candles, white tube socks, batteries, and games. Call 352-372-4825 to arrange for drop off. Financial donations to the Home Van should be in the form of checks made out to Citizens for Social Justice, Inc., earmarked for the Home Van, and mailed to 307 SE 6th Street, Gainesville, FL 32601, or can be made online at http://homevan.blogspot.com/

HOME VAN NEWSLETTER 5/4/12

ONE AT A TIME....

There hasn’t been a lot of news on the Home Van front. We’re mainly hauling water and dealing with individual crises. Some months back “Curt” at the Williston Road Camp was turned down for hernia surgery. A few weeks ago we arrived out there and Curt stumbled down the fire trail and almost fell into me, whispering, “Help me!” The hernia had ruptured. Standing next to me was Joe Jackson, who was named Homeless Advocate of the Year by the Florida Bar Association a few years back. I asked Joe to take Curt to the ER and advocate for him. By the time we got downtown the word had spread that it was Joe Jackson himself who took Curt to the hospital this time! He was in surgery in less than two hours. Curt and his friends are devout Christians and saw this timing - the presence of Joe to help Curt - as God reaching down to help one of his children. There was much rejoicing. Then last week one of our homeless helpers came to us downtown and said there was a woman with two children and a newborn baby sitting on the sidewalk in front of St. Francis House. Liz immediately went down there and found two mothers and eight children on the sidewalk. She and Nancy took the whole lot of them to a motel and booked them in. The next morning they were able to get a room at St. Francis House and are on the waiting list for the Interfaith Hospitality Network.

What we see and are able to deal with is the tip of the iceberg, at most. I have often pondered a statement I read once in The Talmud: “If you save one person, you save humanity.” In what sense is this true? I think maybe I was assigning the wrong meaning to the word ‘humanity.’ What you save is the quality of humanity, as in compassion. I lost faith in our local leadership when they were shown a video clip of a pregnant woman being turned away from St. Francis House and did not suspend the meal limit. (I believe Commissioner Sherwin Henry asked for a 90-day-suspension but his suggestion died for lack of a second.) That is why we need to keep working with one person and one person and one person, even as we hope that times in general will get better. If we can’t respond to that one person we have lost our humanity. Now, I am no Talmudic scholar, but I think maybe that’s what it means. We must keep on saving humanity, and we can.

WATER!

We are accepting water donations. I hope as the summer wears on, other drop-off places will be named, but we are it for now, and glad to get the water. We need lots and lots and lots of bottled water if we are to keep people alive over the summer.

peace and blessings to all of you,

arupa

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The Home Van needs tents, tarps, bottled water, bug spray,Vienna sausages, creamy peanut butter, jelly, candles, white tube socks, batteries, and games. Call 352-372-4825 to arrange for drop off. Financial donations to the Home Van should be in the form of checks made out to Citizens for Social Justice, Inc., earmarked for the Home Van, and mailed to 307 SE 6th Street, Gainesville, FL 32601, or can be made online at http://homevan.blogspot.com/