Yesterday, we went to visit Oscar
and Sheila, two of the recyclers in Redemption
who play a somewhat smaller role. I
first met the two of them back in April, wandering around some industrial
facilities in West Oakland. At that time,
they were simply looking for a decent place to sleep. Where they might find adequate shelter and
warmth in that area, I had no idea.
For the last several months,
though, they have apparently established a “home.” Tucked at the end of Ettie
Street in West Oakland you will find a small area of huddled shopping carts,
covered in tarps, with a few blankets in between them. Scattered underneath the carts and around the
blankets caked in filth, you will find all kinds of odds and ends: a piece of
an old sofa, a plastic container with a half-eaten bagel, a suitcase filled to
the brim with Oscar’s cherished books.
In the farthest corner of their little encampment is their bathroom,
which is anything but private. The edge
of their camp is against a fence which blocks out the area beneath the freeway
to public access. This fence serves as
one of the “walls” of their bathroom, the other of which is one of the
tarp-covered shopping carts.
To use the bathroom, they squat
against this fence, and defecate into a bucket or an old Folger’s coffee
container. To keep things relatively
sanitary, this material is discarded into trash bags which are kept on the
other side of the street until the time comes to remove them. The city doesn’t service these trash bags, of
course, so they must walk a few miles to dispose of their own waste. This is sadly ironic in some ways, because
just behind their fence is a human waste treatment facility, its powerful
engines constantly purring.
In spite of all this, we arrived to
find Sheila sweeping the sidewalk surrounding her encampment. She gathers all the dust and dirt in the area
into little uniform piles, and lifts them up into one of her small trash
cans. It’s a fairly surreal experience –
nothing out of the ordinary, were it not for the extraordinary and dire living
conditions she had been placed in.
Considering her position, it’s somewhat remarkable she finds the
motivation to clean the area in the first place.
We had a fairly quick interview
with Sheila, as Oscar never showed up.
Sheila says he was out to purchase some of the medicine to help him cope
with his cancer, which includes pills that cost about 20 dollars apiece. A monumental price for almost anyone, but
especially for people who have to gather some 100 pounds of glass just to make
7 dollars. She gave us a tour of her
home, and we asked her what her most treasured possessions were and where she
kept them. “The blankets.” She responded. “Because when it gets cold out, they’re the
only things that are going to keep us alive.”
Before we left, she asked me if she
could have a little money. Though I know
Sheila is prone to cocaine use and alcohol abuse, she had been so helpful in
the interview that I felt obliged. I
gave her a mere two dollars, not necessarily a great honorarium for a
two-and-a-half hour interview. I thought
to myself that some celebrities, just as prone to self-destruction, would be
paid thousands for a similar grace of their time, and indeed might even be said
to be “winning.” I can’t justify Sheila’s
actions, and I can’t say for sure how she ended up spending that two
dollars. But isn’t her life more
valuable than that? Isn’t it obvious
that the paltry offering I gave her was far too little, that her story and her
time should be considered useful and wanted?
I hope that Sheila will be one of
the lucky ones who can get into rehab and change her story, but realistically
even that probably wouldn’t be enough.
To break the stranglehold of poverty found in this corner on Ettie
Street, there would need to be a comprehensive, creative, and patient effort on
many different fronts, an effort that I doubt many Americans are willing to
give or even pay attention to at this particular juncture.
We call ourselves the greatest
nation in the history of the earth, but how does greatness allow this? How does greatness turn a blind eye to
this? How does greatness view itself as
helpless to overcome this, or simply too busy or too indifferent to engage this? The short answer is that it doesn’t, and the long
answer needed to break this cycle of poverty and ensure our national greatness
is much more complicated. But that
answer is indeed needed – that discussion is needed. The first step is to accept that this aspect
of greatness is left wanting, and to see to it that we do our part to remedy
it.
When we left Sheila, I gave her a
hug and she kissed me on the neck – as far up as her tiny body could
reach. That expression of love and faith
alone was worth far more than the two dollars I gave her, and far more than I
can hope to achieve by having this interviews with her. Even if it’s too late for Sheila, her time
and her kiss are now her prayer – a prayer that others won’t have to live like
her. A prayer that others will have a
home, and a security, and a community to foster their spirits and salve their
wounds, and love them, and appreciate them, and confer dignity upon them.
I can only hope that I can help be
the messenger of Sheila’s prayer.
