No Where To Lay His Head Podcast

Ravenwolf Phoenix Sch.... something, something, something

Well, it took a long time, but we have the first episode of a new podcast finished!  It is called "Nowhere To Lay His Head" and it is a collection of conversations with people affected by poverty and homelessness and how they use their spirituality to make it through their lives.

RavenWolf Phoneix Schmick-Justice has struggled the majority of his life to hold onto who he is. On today's podcast, Raven talks about: how he became homeless; his multiple personality disorder; his adoption into a white Russian Jewish family in New Jersey; the struggles and racism he faced  from his adoptive family and the community he was raised in; the years of sexual abuse he faced as a child from his adoptive father, his need to reconnect with his Native American birth family and how, how his life changed after he did and what he is learning now about the ways of his ancestors.




He's articulate and has a unique point of view, as well as a unique life.  We hope you enjoy the conversation!

Check out the latest episode of our podcast, Nowhere To Lay His Head!

The Homeless Problem

An excellent post from Survival Guide to Homelessness:


It has been said before, but it is worth repeating: the homeless problem is the problem the housed have with the homeless.

I was just reading a terrific little blog item about a kid in Washington that had managed to set himself up as a computer consultant using a Starbucks wifi network while homeless. When Starbucks was closed, he spent the night at Kinko's. He scrounged for food and computer equipment. He worked for tips. He kept himself very clean. He surfed the internet for girls. In short, he had created a lifestyle. The blogger who was writing about him gave him a substantial amount of money hoping he would change his life. Of course, he couldn't understand why the wifi kid spent it on computer equipment.

The blogger couldn't understand it because he refused to acknowledge that this man had a legitimate and sustainable lifestyle. When given money, he reinvested it in that lifestyle, as any responsible, reasonable person does. The blogger was angry at him. Why, oh why, didn't he struggle to get a home? The man was already home.

Homelessness changes you. So does having a house. Your priorities become the priorities of the extant lifestyle. What you do with money has much to do with how you are living. All lifestyles are investments, and we continue to add resources in an effort to improve their performance. Abandoning a lifestyle is something we never do without a serious push. Once a lifestyle is comfortable, why should it be abandoned?

This is another reason that charity is so unsavory. It comes from a position of superiority. The charitable feel they have a right to determine the goals, purposes, and uses of their charity. It lacks dignity. I don't mean for the recipient. I mean it is not dignified to try to direct the lives of others, to be so involved in the details of other lives. It's a failure to understand boundaries.

Homelessness in Oregon 2010

This is a summary given by Deborah Kafoury, County Commissioner here in Multnomah County:

"Last month the Oregon Housing and Community Services reported that homelessness in Oregon is still on the rise. Most notable is the increase (33%) of homeless families with children. One out of every three homeless individuals in Oregon is a child.

"For the first time, community partners collected information about the length of time that individuals experience homelessness.
· 66 percent of the people counted had been homeless for six months or less.
· 77 percent of children have been homeless for six months or less.
· 14 percent of children have been homeless for more than a year.
· 4 percent of children have been homeless for more than two years.
· Seniors (70+) have been homeless on average for 41 months."

What I Feel About the Homeless

One of my daughter's teachers asked all the parents in her class to write a three paragraph essay on the topic of "What I Feel About The Homeless". This is my essay. Of course, I couldn't keep it to only three paragraphs.

A number of years ago, I was having lunch with an acquaintance from my church and he said to me, “I don’t know how you work with those people—the homeless. I understand drunks and drug addicts, but I can’t get my mind around people who end up sleeping outside. They just don’t make sense to me.” From my perspective, this is mysterious. The homeless are people. They have the same kinds of desires and hopes and needs that everyone else has. What is to understand?

But perhaps this is my 16 years of spending every day with the homeless. I do have a particular perspective.

First of all, people who are homeless have a huge amount of variety. Almost all people who are homeless come out of the lowest income brackets, but most don’t spend more than a few weeks or months on the street. Soon, their families and friends get them help and they are back on their feet again. They are families, singles, women, men, children and youth, most of whom live in cars and are culturally part of the mainstream society.

My friends, however, are the folks who have been on the street for two years or more. They are the chronically homeless, the “bums”, the bottom of society, those whom even our generous government refuse to help. These are folks who have been on the street long enough to have formed their own culture, and so they truly ARE different. They have different attitudes and different ethics. For instance, most of them would give up their last resource to help another person in need. They take no concern about the future, but live completely in the present. When you live on the street, this kind of attitude is a necessity, and it becomes a lifestyle. But it makes it difficult to re-enter a “normal” life of paying rent and bills.

But my friends understand living in community better than most other people I know. They are deeply involved in each other’s problems and joys and survival. If one is too weak to make it to the hospital, rather than call an ambulance, another will put the sick one on a makeshift cart and take them miles by foot. If one of the community is missing, they will spend an hour on the phone to find out if he or she is in jail. The love they show is a practical, everyday kind of care that our society of “busy” people can’t match.

And in the end, I am not one of them. I am one of those “busy” people. Yes, I am busy with a lot of good things, but I’m not there every day, helping and loving and caring. I spend one or two days a week with each of my communities. But in a sense, I wish all of our society could learn something from the homeless. I wish we could all be truly present with those we are in the presence of. I wish that our daily commitments weren’t just made over the internet, with people who are miles away.

What else do I feel about the homeless? I feel that the homeless are people and that they deserve to have the rights that any human being has. They deserve to make a living, if they can. They deserve to have a place to sit, stand, lie, sleep and go to the bathroom and until we give them a place to do that, we shouldn’t tell them where not to. They deserve places to rest and to worship and to have community, just like everyone else does. They deserve to go through a night of sleep without worrying that they will be woken up by the police or well meaning social workers. And they deserve to not be insulted publically—being called “lazy” (or worse) or being told to “get a job”—by those who don’t understand their story or their efforts.

I also feel that every judge, police officer, governor, bishop, pastor and lawmaker should spend at least a month on the street, in a jail or in a mental institution. No one should attempt to make decisions for all the people until they understand what all the people live like. Until they understand what their decisions do to people, they shouldn’t be making those decisions.

Life is hard enough. No one should make life harder for another person unless it is out of love.

Homeless Now or In Eternity-- Ron Rohman

This is a response from Ron Rohman, a minister in Portland for many decades, both on the street and off to my open letter to church in East Multnomah County:

Greetings:

We do indeed live in a fallen world. All of these things do occur between those who have houses and those who do not.

And for those who are captives of such behavior there is the cross -- the death burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And there is the power of the Holy Spirit.

So there are those who are homeless in eternity and those who are not.

So for those who are houseless in this present life but not homeless in eternity there is the community of believers called the church which is on the earth.

May we each keep our eyes and ears open for our brother and sister in these difficult times. May we each be sensitive to the Holy Spirit and not be in such a hurry in this culture that we miss out on an opportunity to minister to Jesus as we remember His words in Matthew 25.

Mercy, grace, and peace be with us all during these dark and difficult days.

~ Ron R.

An Open Letter To Churches in East Multnomah County

I am sure that many of you, in your congregations prayed for the homeless this last weekend. As I sit here, writing this, it is 24 degrees in Gresham and the wind cuts the chill onto one’s skin to 9 degrees. Often, as we step out of our houses or offices we consider the homeless and their plight and wonder what they do in such weather.

I can tell you what they do. Some of them sit in coffee shops or the library during the day. Some sit in their cars with the engine running. Many of them stay in tents, just barely keeping the wind out, reserving energy for when they really need it. Some of these folks will go to the local soup kitchens to sit for an hour and get a hot meal and coffee. Others would rather not eat for the day because it is too difficult to get ready to face the cold to get the meal.

So we are right to pray for the homeless. But we would be more right to do something about it.

Right now, in Gresham, Fairview, Wood Village, and Troutdale there are no emergency warming shelters open for the majority of the homeless. There is no place for them to go even during the day that they might not get kicked out of. Just this last week, a few of Gresham’s homeless were kicked out of their camp, and in this weather they had to find and create a new camp.

Some folks would say that the homeless are somebody else’s problem. That they did this to themselves, and so they deserve what they get. Although the causes of homelessness are complex and can’t be determined by a simple sentence, or by a single finger pointing blame, the solution to the worst of this dilemma is easy: churches can open their doors. The homeless are our children, our brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, our fellow believers, fellow church members and most of all, they are people in need. Now. In this cold.

To house the homeless in Gresham—perhaps some 100 whose needs are not currently met by the current system—would be too much for one congregation. But if we worked together, the project would not be too difficult. If some churches opened their doors once or twice a week to allow 50 people to have a place inside during the day, then other churches could provided volunteers to staff that place, and other churches could provide coffee and blankets and socks. If a few churches would be willing to open their doors in the worst weather to allow the homeless to bring sleeping bags in and sleep overnight, then other churches could provide volunteers to watch over the facilities and to provide some blankets and a little bit of food.

If you or some of your church think you might be interested in helping in this project, then I would like to help us work together. I am Steve Kimes, pastor of Anawim Christian Community, a community church for the homeless and mentally ill in Gresham and Portland for 10 years. I have been working with the KEY Conversation on Poverty to try to provide temporary shelter for the homeless, while other groups have been working on more permanent solutions.

We’d like to ask you to be part of the answer to your own prayers.

Anawim will provide the training for volunteers and will provide some organization. Anawim has already provided a model for a day shelter in churches in Gresham for 10 years. But we are now asking all of us to participate. Let us be a model of church cooperation and networking to help a vulnerable part of our community.

If you are interested in helping, please contact me at stevekimes@aol.com or call me at 503-888-4453.

Please feel free to send this email on to anyone else who you think might be interested in helping or supporting.

Steve Kimes
Pastor of Anawim Christian Community

Homelessness and AIDS

Homelessness is a social disease like AIDS is a physical one.

To prevent each requires a love that is not intuitive.

To even treat the symptoms is complex and cannot be resolved by simplistic, naive solutions.

Living with it is difficult and effects every area of your life.

Just like a person with AIDS, the society that continues to live with homelessness will die. They may not know it ahead of time, but it will happen.

Wendy and Lucy: A Movie Review

Wendy and Lucy is an independent movie, without a music score, filled with wind and wandering and a woman just barely hanging on to hope. It is about a woman who is homeless, hopefully temporarily, looking to go from Indiana to Alaska for work, only to get stuck in Portland when her car doesn’t start, and then her troubles begin.

Where has this movie been all my life? Although this is fictional, I swear I know this woman and her situation with her dog, Lucy, has been repeated many times with people I know.

Below is a full synopsis of the movie. If you are planning on seeing it (and haven't yet), please skip the next two paragraphs:

Wendy enters “Willamette” (really Portland) at night and gets information from some young hobos which confirms her thoughts about going to Alaska for work. She spends the night in a Walgreen’s parking lot, and the security guard tells her she can’t sleep there in the morning. At that time, she finds that her car won’t start, and the garage down the street isn’t open. She counts her money to find that she has barely enough to fix the car, but none for food. She goes into a local store and tries to shoplift some dog food for Lucy, her companion, only to be caught. She is arrested, and Lucy is left tied up in front of the store. Wendy spends half the day at the police station, and when she returns Lucy is gone. She is frantic and begins to call for Lucy around the neighborhood. The security guard tells her about the pound a fair walk away. The next morning Wendy goes to the pound, but no Lucy—they tell her to keep calling. Wendy is told then that the repair of the car would be at least 250 dollars, including towing the car for 50 dollars down a couple blocks.

After using the security guard’s cell phone to call the pound, Wendy spends the night in a nearby woods. In the middle of the night, an older crazy man goes through her pack and begins talking to her. He goes away, but her fear of being attacked causes her to run off and stay awake the rest of the night. The next morning, in front of Walgreen’s the security guard tells her that the pound called. She checks, and the pound says that someone called with a description of a dog that matches hers. They give her the address. The security guard insists upon giving her money and puts it in her hand—it is seven dollars. She stops by the garage and they tell her that her engine is shot, it would cost $2000 dollars to repair. Then she goes to see Lucy, who is overjoyed to see her. Wendy plays catch with her for a bit and she says, “This is a nice yard. I’m sorry, Lucy, but I can’t fix the car!” Wendy leaves Lucy and hops a train to Alaska.

This is a very personal movie. Not only was much of this movie filmed in places where I have lived, but it is a story that I have experienced through others many times. My family and I have been homeless, “couchsurfing”, in the past, but we have been serving and helping the homeless in Portland for 15 years. I have met many people just like Wendy, in even worse situations—no car, no money, looking for work, but stuck in a strange town that has no work for them.

And I know of many people on the street who are deeply attached to their dogs, only to lose them. People on the street, for the most part, are lonely people, bereft of deep relationship. Family has rejected them, like Wendy’s, if only because the family thinks they are asking for something more than they can give. A dog can provide an excellent companion. They are with you, and can literally be your best friend, keeping you company during the day and warm at night. But others, like the grocery clerk in the movie, think that people on the street aren’t deserving of such companionship: “If you can’t feed a dog, you don’t deserve to keep a dog.” And so, if one is struggling, they feel they have the right to take an animal away. I know of three people on the street who have had their dogs stolen from them while they were going to the bathroom, or eating in a soup kitchen. I have had our dog stolen from us, when he jumped our fence and we went after her only a few minutes later. No one seems to understand the depression and grieving that follows such a loss. Perhaps they understand, but they don’t really care. Rather than helping, they would rather pour on sorrow on top of sorrow.

But what is most poignant in the movie is the second-class citizenship of homelessness. The “crazy man” hit the theme of the movie perfectly, as well as the theme of homeless life: “They are after us. They can smell the weakness.”

People sense the weakness of being homeless, the vulnerable position—and while some have compassion, most just have contempt. Wendy kept running into people who demanded money from her, and even the breaks she got were too small to help. The store required her to lose money and her dog, for the sake of a couple dollars of food she was taking. The sheriff’s department told her that if she didn’t pay the 50 dollars she would just have to pay more later, and if she ran away, they would transport her back to face the consequences (although this is what a sheriff’s department might say, it isn’t actually true. She’d only have to pay court fees if she were declared guilty, and a state wouldn’t request transport for a 50 dollar fine). The garage was willing to give her a break, given that she’s strapped-- $230 instead of $250.

Everywhere Wendy turned, there was no one who would really help. Even the security guard only gave Wendy the use of his cell phone and a few bucks—that’s as far as his compassion could reach. Not far enough to save the only friend who truly loved to see her, who truly loved her completely for who she was.

Don’t let anyone fool you. The sorrow of homelessness is not being without a home. It is being without a friend. And sad is the one whose friend is stolen from her by desperate poverty.

Just looking at this film objectively, I should give it four out of five stars. But this is MY movie. It is about my city, my people, my life. It is certainly reflects my experience. I don’t care, objectively, how great this movie is. It is most important to me. 5 out of 5 stars.