Waking Up in LA

Last week a team of us - four middle-aged, mid-western and Southern white women who talk way too much about menopause - gathered to serve in some dark corners of East LA.

We walked slowly, deliberately through trash and needle-strewn streets, delivered food in LA’s largest housing project, and talked to people living in the sidewalk complexes built from pallets, bike parts, cardboard and tents. With us were the blue shirts - the staff and volunteers of the Los Angeles Dream Center, which for the last 30 years has been feeding, clothing and helping into recovery the residents of Los Angeles’ dirty underbelly.

Doing this the week before Thanksgiving seemed sketchy and necessary.

All the things we do not know. 

On Skid Row, the streets smell of urine and a chemical smoke I can’t identify but can guess at. Everyone has a dog, often pit bulls, which makes sense when people steal your stuff all the time, but it also keeps people from accepting housing when it’s offered because they have to leave their dogs - their family - behind.

These are the homeless, the addicted, the sick, the psychotic, the victimized and the criminal; the dispensable residents of Los Angeles. One of the thousand tent cities across the nation past which we drive and tsk, saying “the city should really do something.”

“Why don’t they just get jobs.”

“Crackheads.”

The four of us went to LA to wake up from that matrix. To challenge a narrative that allows us ignore what we want to believe is a monolith of people who just don’t want to work and make good life choices.

That’s incredibly naive and reductive.

Hotdogs.

When I use the word monolith I mean a large and impersonal social structure regarded as intractably indivisible and uniform. It’s a convenient way to look at things we don’t plan to engage.

But when you follow a bunch of 20-something Dream Center students down to Skid Row (the 54-block section of Los Angeles that’s home to some 34,000 people, many in tents, struggling with mental health, housing and addiction) the theory doesn’t hold.

Because you meet guys like Thomas, lying in his green pup tent with a story so long and looping you finally sit down on a cooler to listen, as you dare not sit on the sidewalk.

Thomas is 67. He hasn’t seen his kids in decades. He had a Mercedes recently but does not now. He’s an ordained minister and a union pipe layer. It looks like he’s developing cataracts. He lives in a tent on a dirty sidewalk on Skid Row.

I asked if he wanted a hot dog, and later, if I could pray - one minister to another. He said yes and thanked me. We talked about Jesus and recovery but after a good bit, I had to go because Kwavi who’s been ministering on Skid Road every week for four years, smartly, keeps things tight.

An hour later I heard someone yell “Erin!”

I turned around to see Thomas running up to us, saying a few other folks could use hotdogs, but we were all out. I reminded him he’s a man of God and a leader.

“So are you,” he said trotting off. “You’re a queen.”

Thomas isn’t an indivisible part of a faceless uniform “problem.” He’s a person and that is the exact point the Dream Center volunteers have been driving home for 30 years.

Care, not cure.

Jesus said Judge not, lest ye be judged and with the measure you deal it out, it will be dealt back to you.

Jesus, through whom all things were made, seems to be saying that judgment coming from us is not just toxic but ridiculous. But I think there’s another reason he said not to do it.

When I judge instead of love, I get in the way of what Jesus has in mind for Thomas. I block the love and mercy of God, rather than dispense it.

Did a few people tell us to F-off? Yes. Were all the stories people told me true? I don’t know. Who cares?

We’re messengers.

Noelle, a 20-something blond woman, has been serving with the DC at MacArthur Park for the last two years. In the 1940’s MacArthur was a gorgeous Los Angeles landmark with a spring-fed lake and a lovely view of the downtown skyline.

Now it’s a center for homelessness, gangs and addiction.

After a few years of coming to MacArthur and seeing the same people, doing the same things, Noelle said she got discouraged that her efforts never seemed to matter. Like there was no fruit from her labor.

Of course, I replied. Anybody would feel that way.

But then she said the Lord showed her that she’s in MacArthur Park because He’s called her to be there, whether people decide to get help or not. It’s not her job to fix people, it’s her job to obey God.

That, she said, was freeing.

Kindness.

The day we visited MacArthur Park it was raining and a dozen or so of its residents were huddled under the dirty amphitheater trying to stay dry.

LA’s not cold really, but rain makes things miserable.

There I met Troy and Sara, a married couple in their 50’s who came to LA a few weeks before to stay with a friend, but she later kicked them out. They told me they have some income, but not enough to get a room and they don’t know anybody in LA. So they’ve been stuck in the park for two weeks. Troy was offered a job on Monday, but he turned it down because he can’t leave Sara alone in the park, and they have no where else to go.

They called the Dream Center, but it’s not equipped for couples. Just families. Other affordable housing options have a huge wait list.

As much as I wanted to fix Troy and Sara’s situation, I knew I couldn’t. I prayed for them and Troy thanked me for the kindness.

Others.

Then there was Jacqueline - incredibly agitated, asking for extra hotdogs for her three kids who were nowhere in sight. I asked if she knew of the Dream Center and it’s year-long recovery program. She said she did and told me to say hi to one of its staffers. She knows, but she must not be ready.

A nurse on our team called the paramedics on an unresponsive guy laying on the ground in the rain.

A young man on a bicycle was eyeing the food but didn’t come up and ask. So I wandered over and asked in Spanish if he needed a hot dog.

He said yes and told me he’d come from El Salvador eight months ago. He seemed embarrassed or maybe my Spanish is just bad, so we stopped talking. I prayed for him later.

I told you all that to tell you this:

These are people, with stories, and we just don’t know. Because homeless people tend to congregate around services or public spaces or drugs, it’s easy to assume they are all the same, totally other, and separate from us.

But they’re not. That’s the matrix. There are reasons for all of this.

Not excuses. Reasons.

The Structure

It would also be wrong to assume that everybody on Skid Row is desperate.

No, for many that’s their home. They were born and raised in the neighborhood and they’re loyal. We met a couple of fellas sitting outside their bike shop and we talked electric bikes. I wondered if guys like them provide some structure in the chaos, governance maybe. It seemed possible. Same with the fellas who pulled up on us in the Escalade and leaned out the window to thank us for helping their community.

Then there’s Pastor Blue.

He occupies the sidewalk on half a city block. Using pop up tents, astroturf, chairs and flags from around the world, he’s created a sidewalk sanctuary where folks can come and relax a minute. He does what the DC does, just full time on Skid Row. He sits with people, prays with them and hooks them up with resources.

We prayed for him and he returned the favor. Beautiful.

Listen, I know this is complicated.

I know tent cities trash cities and not everybody wants the church passing out food in the park, because the wrappers wind up in the trees and there’s poo in the gutter. Nobody wants that.

But I don’t know what else to do except put myself out there in it, because as one DC volunteer told me a decade ago,

“Erin to catch fish you have to go fishing.”

Honestly, I’m not sure I’m fishing as much as I’m just one beggar showing another beggar where the bread is.

And yes it’s wonderful to know the full heft and weight of the Dream Center is just up the hill, with it’s 30 year track record of effective urban ministry, but maybe I don’t need it.

Maybe what I need to bring home from LA is the courage to start a conversation with someone who doesn’t look or live like me, someone whom God loves very much.

Maybe I’ll bring hot dogs just to be safe.

ps. The Dream Center is volunteer driven and privately funded. They raise $1.1 million PER MONTH to keep the whole thing running. Want to help? Click here.