It’s a long story, how it happened (I’ll spare you), but I was hired recently as interim Congregational Pastor at The Mustard Seed Street Church and Food Bank in downtown Victoria. It’s a Baptist-run organization that serves the urban poor, of which there are many in Victoria. Despite many attempts at solving the “homelessness problem”, many still live on the streets: some in tents, and some barely covered in a blanket.
The Mustard Seed is on Queen Avenue, in a light-industrial area with warehouses and a bottle-collection depot next door. Last Sunday was my first Sunday on the job, and with the church itself closed and services pre-recorded and online, there was not much to do except get to know the ‘hood.
Some people were hanging out around the Mustard Seed property, and after exchanging some greetings with those people, I wandered around the block to Princess Avenue. There were more tents, and a couple of people in makeshift shelters of shopping carts and nylon tarps. One fellow was sacked-out on a grassy patch behind the sidewalk, covered in a blanket.
Just as I arrived, three pickup trucks from the bylaw enforcement office pulled up, along with a police car and a trash-hauling truck. The bylaw enforcement people — three men and two women — rousted the people out of bed and told them it was time to pack up their tents.
The people being awakened were a bit groggy, possibly from just waking up and probably because they were already into the drugs. One man, who had been sleeping on a grassy patch by the sidewalk, calmly fired up a crack pipe while the others decamped.
“They’re allowed to camp here from 7 to 7,” one of the police officers told me. “If they’re here later than that (it was 8:30 at the time), we just come by and help them move along.”
The first thing that impressed me was the compassion the by-law people showed. The street folk were generally compliant, although one fellow threw a spaz and flung a hubcap at no one in particular. I was reminded of the 1956 docufiction film, “On the Bowery“, which showed life on New York City’s Skid Row*: the contrast was in the way the police would rouse the “bums” sleeping on the sidewalk or a park bench with a sharp kick in the ribs and a “move along, buddy!”.
Some of the junk the people had accumulated was loaded onto the hauling truck and taken away; one woman, named Crystal, had difficulty taking down her tent, and she and the others laughed at the impromptu slapstick act as she fumbled with the connecting rods and the fabric.
As I say, there have been attempts at housing or otherwise accommodating the homeless. A couple of hotels were taken over by government agencies; a tent city was allowed to develop in Beacon Hill Park, but a friend of mine who lives in the area told me he couldn’t walk to work because it was too dangerous. The people who were sleeping on Princess Avenue were there, because none of the shelters would take them due to behaviour issues. “When it becomes a problem for the other people in the shelter,” the cop told me, “they have to go.”
That was in the morning. In the afternoon, I went back to Princess Avenue, and there I saw a completely different scene.
Where do we start? The best place, probably, is with the three guys, passed out on the sidewalk, one of them partly babbling and partly whining. But they only served as a direction sign towards the young woman who was sound asleep in the middle of the road.
She was breathing. And twitching. As I tried to rouse her, another fellow came over.
“She’s OK. She’s got people who love her and are watching out for her.”
“She’s in the roadway!”
“Cars can get by.”
I learned that her name was Brittany, and I went back to trying to get her up. Another shadow appeared behind me and a woman’s voice spoke.
“Come on, Brittany! Let’s get you up.”
Brittany started to move. The woman seemed reasonably lucid, so I introduced myself, then started the job of lifting Brittany and moving her onto the sidewalk.
“Come on, Brittany,” the woman, whose name is Olivia, went on. “This guy’s a pastor at the Mustard Seed and he works his ass off for us. Help him out, OK?”
By then, Brittany was sort-of holding onto me, but her leg was asleep, so we waited until some feeling came back and then walked her to the sidewalk and laid her back down again. The others had hardly moved during all of this.
“They all got some bad stuff,” Olivia explained, “and just dropped — like I did the other night. Some of them got some fenty.”
That would be fentanyl, which is sometimes added to heroin, and has caused countless deaths.
Olivia then spotted some of the little pieces of tin foil on the ground — addicts will heat up the heroin in foil to liquify it so they can inject it — and picked them up. “I might be able to get a bit out of these for myself.”
(Another contrast with “On the Bowery”: there, the men’s addiction is to alcohol, and there’s a scene where they satisfy it by nicking a can of Sterno — jellied alcohol for heating up dishes of food — and squeezing the alcohol out of it into a paper cup. Then they’d share it around. Now, they pick up scraps of tin foil ….)
==
As a wake-up call as to the job at hand with the Mustard Seed, that might have been enough, but there was a second part.
A couple of days later, one of the other pastors came into my office and plopped what looked like a case for eyeglasses on my desk.
“Here’s yours. You might need it.”
It was a Naloxone kit.
Naloxone is the antidote for fentanyl poisoning, if you can get to the person in time. The kit contains two vials of Naloxone and two hypodermic needles. If someone is in danger from the poison, fill one needle and jam it into a muscle area — usually the thigh. If the first one doesn’t work, use the second. Call 9-1-1, of course.
This was something we never even thought of on the Downtown East Side: that danger hadn’t become apparent until after I left.
Welcome to the New World.
*”On the Bowery” shows a scene in the Bowery Mission, where the idea of building The Lord’s Rain — the showers facility at Gospel Mission — was first planted when I visited the place in 2007.
Two Minutes for Cross-Checking! 