Sarah White: On smallness*

The act and practice of friendship is immense and transformative.

Non-profit director and advocate for the unhoused, pursuing justice with those at the margins. She lives in Silverton with her family and critters.

Don’t judge a book by its cover.

And, more importantly, never judge a human by their appearance, odor, and misfortune.

Image via https://oakstreetsilverton.com/

When I first met Harry, I was called to the small sanctuary of Oak Street Church. Every Monday night this church in Silverton serves up a free community dinner for all comers. This particular Monday night, I found Harry folded over at the waist, sobbing, shuddering, and hardly able to speak. I can’t reflect on the depth of this sweet man’s despair without mentioning the smell. The miasma of neglect, poverty, and incontinence created a circle of apartness around Harry. It was hard for even the most stalwart of us to get past the odor. Recently put out on the street in the middle of a winter, Harry appeared too frail to survive another wet night outside. Over time I learned his story.

His childhood was dominated by horrific physical and sexual abuse. He left school for the military unable to read. His brief service ended when he was physically assaulted by a supervisor to the point of lifelong disability. For the next several decades, Harry tried to make a home and a life for himself; but physical and psychological setbacks continued to unravel the tattered safety net that kept him off the ground. In these years, he suffered serious injuries from the odd jobs he took to get by: breaking his back, severing the top of a finger that was never properly treated, and racking up a debt of ailments that would eventually overtake him.

It’s not that the safety net failed to catch Harry, it simply failed him. When he went to the VA hospital to have his finger sewn back on, he was turned away. His trust in that system was completely broken. Some bureaucratic glitch with the VA and an unhelpful payee left him without the full benefits to which he was entitled. Even with these benefits, Harry made just too much to qualify for many services, but not enough to live with any semblance of stability.

The so-called safety net continued to fall short. Temporary housing was offered and then lost, again and again. Harry moved from squalor to squalor. His body and his life were a testament to the failure of systems which, while established to help folks, often lack the desire, training, and means to meet them where they are. Harry’s plight was sadly not unique. So often, folks are frightened, disheveled, unclean, and barely able to show up, let alone make appointments and meet complex bureaucratic demands for paperwork.

Harry was failed first by his family, then by a school system willing to accept staggering rates of illiteracy among poor students, then by a toxic military culture, then by an apathetic VA bureaucracy. He was let down by medical providers unable to see his poor physical and mental health as the logical result of abject poverty and social isolation. And, finally, he was dis-served by a homelessness and housing system that too often approaches chronic homelessness as if some folks are simply just “supposed to” live beyond the reach of our collective care.

Where systems fail, individuals can make all the difference.

"Main Street Silverton Oregon" by Edmund Garman is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Enter my good friend Rob. I first met Rob in 2017 when he showed up at a community meeting centered around the ecumenical response to homelessness in our under-served rural community. I was immediately intrigued by Rob’s earnest, loving, and relentlessly hopeful application of his faith to daily living. He and his gentle wife Trish became powerful advocates for our homeless neighbors over the next several years. As volunteers they continue to this day to spend their time helping our unhoused neighbors navigate complicated systems, leveraging institutional resources with local care and support. This bottom up/top down approach is incredibly effective in ensuring our neighbors get back into housing and restore wellness to their own lives.

When Rob first started working with Harry, he, like me, was affronted by the cloud of overwhelming unmet needs. Where to begin?

Rob helped Harry connect to a rented room, and visited him there often. He submitted dozens of applications to low income housing programs, helped him purchase a phone and clothing items when he had none, and listened for hours while Harry recounted his childhood abuse and his feelings of betrayal by the systems intended to help him.

Rob did much more than listen to Harry. They weathered struggles together. By the time Harry’s rented room was sold out from under him, and he ended up back on the street, Rob was his most trusted friend and champion. They had spent many hours together, building a relationship grounded in radical, enduring, fraternal love. In my conversations with Rob, he often asked: “How can I be a better friend to Harry? How can I help him feel heard? How can I help him to trust again?”

In the meantime, waiting in the wings and just outside of Harry’s sphere of trust, a myriad of helpful and well-resourced veterans’ services advocates stood waiting. When Rob first met Harry, he was too scarred by a lifetime of abuse and disinterest from these systems to even access the care to which he was entitled. Through Rob’s relationship-building and well-earned trust, Harry was eventually willing to meet with a partner organization serving veterans. Rob sat with him through their initial interview and every follow up meeting. This skilled organization then moved swiftly to put him up in a hotel while they secured him a permanent home in a beautiful apartment with all of the furnishings and goods he needed to begin again.

Even when the system succeeds, a friend is still paramount.

Once safely housed, Harry experienced something we see often among folks who have lived without safety for a long time. He was overwhelmed with depression, discomfort, and anxiety. Sorrow washed over him like a tsunami, as he finally had the space and comfort to reimagine a new life, and grieve his past. It became too much, and he considered walking away from his apartment.

Rob was there again to stay with him, to point him toward a future that had previously seemed completely out of reach. Together, they came through that hard place. Harry continued to turn corners. He asked Rob to help him find a tutor so that he could finally learn to read. When Rob did so, Harry was delighted and astonished by his friend. With growing confidence, Harry took another turn: he made the decision to deal with this absurd wire that held his finger together and poked out of his skin. The progress continues today: just this afternoon Rob was preparing to take Harry to an appointment with a cataract surgeon.

What began as a commitment to help this cast-aside person find shelter or housing turned into a rich kinship among two people who might never have crossed paths. Rob is not a professional social worker, but he actively studies the crisis of homelessness, and educates himself through experience. He receives no compensation for his work and has very few resources to help Harry. What resources he does have—a car, a small amount of time to spare, a relentlessly loving heart—he has selflessly used to help his friend.

What the State can learn from Rob

As I reflect back on the Harry I met two years ago in a church sanctuary, folded up, filthy, and sobbing, it’s almost hard to reconcile with the man we see today.

On the statewide scale, Rob’s focused attention on one traumatized man may seem small or even inefficient. And in a numbers sense, it is small. But we know at a core level that the act and practice of friendship is immense and transformative. Thanks to folks like Rob, our community has rallied to help 60 individuals in our small town find stable housing in the past twelve months alone.

This is a time for returning to the exquisite clarity of smallness. In the last days before the most disturbing election of my lifetime, I have to zoom in on the hyper-local, something akin to the intensity of focus women experience during childbirth—this breath, this moment.

Smallness saves us. Kinship saves us. It is not enough to be focused on the individual forever, but when the problems we face overwhelm, it is a solid place to stand.

*Some names have been changed in this story to protect the privacy of individuals.

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