City of Brotherly Love? Part I

Over the next few weeks I'll be digging up stories from my time in Philadelphia with a group called Urban Hope. This is my way of processing everything that happened, so really you're just joining me as I try to figure out what it is that I've learned.

My drive toward Warsaw, Indiana was a bit unnerving. I knew practically nothing about the trip, other than we were going to Philly. I also had no clue who was going on the trip with me. With the exception of one informational meeting, I knew no one who climbed on that old BlueBird school bus, which motivated me to stick my nose in a book for most of the ride.

Just before leaving, Courtney had recommended The Same Kind of Different as Me, the autobiography of a man who grew up as a sharecropper in the south, hopped a train at thirty to the city, succumbed to drugs and homelessness, spent every night for over a year praying beside a dumpster for a close friend, and went almost daily to a nursing home to care for and clean up a severely racist old man who only referred to him as 'nigger.' There is more to it than all of that, and you should probably read the book, but I think it represents the tension of love and addiction that I encountered on the streets of Philadelphia.

It's easy to pretend the world is a simple place, that people are homeless because they are lazy, or do drugs because they make the choice to do so, and that all drug dealers care about is an easy dollar. This sort of oversimplification makes it easier to deal with life. If I see a man on the street with a sign it's easier to look away if I think that he should have known better, or worked harder, or paid attention in school instead of doing drugs. I can reassure myself that I am helping him by not helping. If I give him a dollar, he'll probably just buy drugs. Besides, he probably makes $30,000 a year begging. We can always find excuses. But as I learned in Philly, if we actually stop and listen we will find that there are individual people with individual problems. Who knows, they might even become a mirror.

So I will be telling a few of those stories that I was able to listen to; like Sean, who apparently did two drug deals while we talked about him, or Carl, who worshiped God over a peanut butter and jelly sandwhich before and after his heroin induced caesurae, or Gino, who had turned down a salary because he was still afraid of what money would do to him.

I have to warn you, my experiences were limited in time and scope. While I hope this serves as an inspiration to further understand the complexity of poverty, as well as people, consider this as about as comprehensive and studied as the recent Kony phenomena. There is simply no way that with my limited experience I will be able to do more than broach the subject at this point. I'm just trying to process the things I did see and hear. I hope to do some more reading on the topic myself, and I'll be sure to pass on whatever resources I come across.

May I learn to look people in the eye and listen.