On the final evening of our Immersion, we were all sitting around eating snacks and doing a final reflection. Kristine (my co-coordinator) and I were trying to get people to reflect on what they'd experienced and talk about what to do in the future. We had a good discussion, heard a few stories and talked about the perpetual nature of Portland's problems. We talked about volunteering in the future and donating food and clothes but perhaps the greatest part of that evening was when the discussion was over, we'd turned some music on and were making Nutella quesadillas and the groups started talking with each other about their experiences. No prompting, no discussion questions, just pure conversation driven by a lot of anger towards an unfair system and pure empathy for the people that we'd met.
Somehow this combination of waking up at 5 AM, walking 10 miles and clocking in a 19 hour day volunteering, talking, meeting people, and experiencing the city through the eyes of its lowest class had effected us all in a way we hadn't expected. There's a serious difference between serving food for an hour or two and serving food, sorting clothes, making conversation and playing games with some of the same people over the course of a few days that hugely intensified the effect this service had on all of us.
Since then, myself and a few others have been regularly volunteering with Operation Nightwatch, the place that I've met both of the gentlemen that I've introduced you to. Last week at Nightwatch I learned how to play chess from a super cool guy named Trent. I met a guy who's hitchhiking his way to Alaska, the last place on earth that he feels he can truly get connected to the land. I met a woman from Oklahoma who just arrived in Portland and tearfully told me she didn't know if she could stand the cold much longer.
The thing that I've learned from this whole experience is that all of these people I've met are hugely different from each other. There are those who are on the street because they're living a different kind of journey. The street isn't a problem for them, they're just on their way to better places. There's people who've given up everything, a life of comfort and sometimes even luxury to live on the edge of poverty because they needed to find themselves. There's people who just hit some bad luck along the way, and others who've lost the battle with drugs and let them control their lives. Some of these stories are sad and when I hear them I never know what to say, others are uplifting. I met Simon last week who just found an apartment -- it was a good day for him, a bad day for Danny who lost all the teeth on the left side of his mouth and couldn't eat anything.
It's changed the way I look at my life and especially the classes I'm taking. I'm in a class right now focusing on how schools interact with society, how they deal with racism and poverty and every time we talk about the homeless in Portland my heart hurts a little because I picture all of the individuals that I've met over the past few months. When we try to come up with solutions for even just the classroom it's hard for me because there is no one solution. Every single person is coming from a different background and for some this is the solution. Sleeping on the streets in Portland really isn't that difficult, there's meals every day at tons of different places. There's a bright orange book with lists of hundreds of community resources to help get people to where they want to go.
Of course for some it is not, and for those people Nightwatch is simply a place to go to experience community. To combat the social isolation that is being walked by on the street and ignored, or any number of other things. I hope that over these past few weeks you too have gotten to see a different side of the poverty stricken population of Portland and even of your town. That now maybe you can see a little bit of humanity in the ladies and gentlemen that you see sleeping around Old Town, and that just maybe, this will give them a little bit more dignity in one person's eyes.
