Hello World. It's very late and we walked a lot today, so Semme and I are sitting side by side, doing our posts separately, on two computers. Saving the world requires sleep.
Today, ASB Chicago took the rather lengthy trip from downtown Chicago to downtown Evanston, the campus of Northwestern. After being rudely roused at 6:30 by the Great Chicago Fire Alarm of 2010, much of the group had trouble sleeping in until 10 as planned. Nonetheless, our ever expanding knowledge of the Chicago area safely guided us to Evanston.
The most immediately striking part of Evanston was the obvious prosperity that was evident as soon as we exited the subway train. After two days working in rather low income areas of the city, walking into the storefront laden downtown of Evanston was surprising. Even more shocking was that as we neared Connections, the location of today's service, the neighborhood's average income did not seem to drop off. It wasn't until we reached the basement door of Connections that the presence of homelessness in this college town was even remotely visible.
Inside the homeless shelter at Connections, we were given a small tour of the facilities and were given a rundown of the services offered by one of the program's directors. Although it has come up rather frequently on this trip, it’s always amazing to see how many different types of people devote their time to helping the homeless. Sue, the woman showing us around, had a sincere dedication to her work, and seemed to have legitimate pride in the range of services offered by Connections.
After our brief tour, we folded fliers, ate lunch, and headed out in small groups to deliver the fliers door to door. This gave me a chance to see a lot of different neighborhoods in
Evanston. As our group walked around, I couldn’t help but observe the vast swings in wealth that would occur within a few city blocks; from the lakeside mansions to the crowded apartment blocks, it was obvious that everything was not equal in Evanston. In our day to day lives, it seems as if everyone is very quick to let themselves get down about small inconveniences; whether people have a bad day at work, are stuck in traffic, or have to wait too long for dinner to be served, there are endless ways that people find to pity themselves. This tour-de-wealth in Evanston put things into perspective. For people living in lakeside mansions, things will likely always be easier than for those barely scraping it by around the corner. While this doesn’t necessarily translate to happiness (which should likely be the focus of a different, much longer, unrelated blog post), many things will naturally come easier for them. In other words, in the grand scheme of things, someone always has it worse, and pitying ourselves is petty.
On another note, before we left the shelter to pass out fliers, Sue told us about the amount of money it had cost to print the fliers. At $250, many group members, including myself, were skeptical of whether Connections would even recoup the cost of printing the fliers. This ratcheted up some guilt that I had already been feelings. Over the past few days, we’ve had the chance to see homelessness across the city, both on our service trips and on our sightseeing. While so many people literally have nothing, I’m going on a $450 trip halfway across the country, to observe a problem that is rampant 10 minutes from my apartment. After some serious thinking, I think that the main purpose of the trip isn’t necessarily to help out through service trips or to merely witness homelessness. Instead, seeing homelessness in different settings and seeing how different groups combat it is a real eye-opener. It’s almost as if I’ve seen so much homelessness in DC that it doesn’t faze me. Embedding myself in a trip, away from home, for over a week, will hopefully serve to engrain the seriousness of the issue so far into my psyche that when I am out in the real world, making a living, I never forget to stay grounded and help out.
I think that’s all for today. In conclusion: homelessness is all around, Northwestern has a nice campus, St. Patrick’s Day is something I never really celebrate, and walking makes me tired.
Love,
Chris
Today we were awoken by a fire alarm around 6:30am, which turned out that someone has pulled down the fire alarm intentionally. It was interesting to see everyone’s faces still half asleep and especially since this was the day we were supposed to sleep in until 9 am. After we collected ourselves, we gathered around 10am we went to Evanston to Connections (formerly Connections of the Homeless).
We got there about 11:15am and met with Sue who is the site coordinator. She gave us a tour of the place, which was located at a basement of a church kind of hidden from the street. The place had refrigerators, washing machines, showers, sleeping beds, etc for people who require its services and can house about 20 people at a time. According to her, they have the capacity to service more people but they found out that it is more individual if they limit the number of people. Wednesday was the day when only females are allowed to use the common area (which has TV, books, computers) and we hardly saw anybody using it. She also said that only 1/3 of the people they serve are women. Sarah (our staff advisor) thought that this is because Connections does not service children at the site, but give them housing at apartments. What was really great about this place was that they require their clients to take essential courses like landlord-tenant relationship, stress management, etc in addition to other courses like yoga and creative art.
Our task was to distribute brochures that have information on Homelessness in Evanston, Connections and how people can help thorough out the neighborhoods of Evanston. We spent like 40 minutes folding them, ate lunch in a park in front of the church, divided ourselves into 4 different groups and set off to our designated territories by 1pm.
Evanston houses Northwestern University (along with several other universities) and is located north of Chicago. It is more or less a residential area for the middle and upper class. Based on the area each group was assigned, we interacted differently with the residents. In the area of the lower and middle class, we had more positive interaction with people and in the more upper class areas there was less interaction. We were very surprised and encouraged with the reaction of the people we got. We heard that the people of Evanston were very involved with the community and are willing to help, which kind of struck us because they could have a bigger and better center like the Merillac house we saw on Monday. We were able to distribute about 80% of the brochures. By the end of the day we were all hoping that these brochures help increase the income of the shelter.
Towards the end of the day we met with the ASB from Northwestern and had very interesting conversations with them about their experiences and ours. They might do things a little bit differently, but it is all for the same purpose.
Today was a very ‘interesting’ day because it was the day we saw everybody open up more during reflection time about their own personal feelings on the whole trip and homelessness. We questioned ourselves more about our every day choices and how we react to homeless people whenever we are walking around. Today definitely challenged us to do some soul searching and forced us to face our reactions to certain situations.
Love,
Semme Y.
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