By Dr. George Berrigan
Published in June 2019
Editor’s Note: On March 30, 2019 Dr. George Berrigan officially retired from St. John’s Clinic after serving 10 years. The Mayors’ Dinner was a wonderful opportunity to thank George Berrigan and Evelyn Gurney for their commitment. The following is George’s Mayors’ Dinner speech
We were asked to tell you why we decided to work at St John’s Kitchen back in 2009. The honest answer is we saw back then there clearly was such a drastic need to improve medical care for the homeless in our city that we felt we should at least make the effort to do something in spite of our total lack of experience in this field. We discovered that the Working Centre and St John’s Kitchen (SJK) had already created a functional venue with a staff of nurses, a social worker and a team of 9 outreach workers. We had no bureaucratically designed program or procedural guidelines to work under. In effect, what we did was use the approach of the famous professional tennis player, Arthur Ashe, who tackled his problems using the SUD method: START where you are! USE what you have! DO what you can! Our first barrier was gaining trust. This took a lot of listening, attention, being adaptable, open-minded and especially non-judgemental. We worked hard at keeping our promises. We realized our care had to be backed by consistency, respect and kindness. We accepted that even if we couldn’t solve complex addiction, mental health and medical problems, we could lessen the harm, at least enough to keep them alive. At SJK, survival is our most immediate concern; the rest of the work is mostly finding ways to progressively lessen suffering one on one, one day at a time.
I would like to tell you about one of the over 2000 patients I encountered over the last 10 years. I’ll call this patient Ray though that’s not his real name. Ray is 66 years old and has been a chronic alcoholic for much of his adult life. Early last summer he lost his housing because he failed to pay his rent. He lived on the streets all summer and into mid-October mostly living under an overpass. One year previous to this he suffered a small stroke that left him with a weak arm and hand. Worse still, he was beginning to show signs of dementia with significant memory loss and confusion. He was frequently picked up by the police wandering aimlessly around the city. One of our staff nurses was assigned to his case. She quickly went to work mostly trying to get an urgent placement in safe housing. After a couple of weeks of many phone calls and numerous forms being completed he had a room in a local senior residence. When the nurse brought him to his new place in late October he walked around his nice clean room with a big smile on his face and sat on his nice comfortable bed. He looked all around his room and then did something very telling: he began crying so hard he was shaking the bed. This lasted many minutes. This sudden release of pent up tension and stress indicates to me just how extremely difficult living on the street really is. Ray couldn’t solve his problems by himself, but we could make the difference by reaching out and working together with others to get him into safety. Happily, Ray is now permanently housed and he has his alcohol abuse under control. Sadly, too few of our cases have the same outcome as Ray.
While working with the homeless you start to appreciate that the most common factor in their background is a traumatic childhood of abuse and neglect. During their childhood development they often lacked a reliable stable adult to love them and provide them with the basic needs of acceptance, belonging and caring. This deprivation consistently has disastrous life-long consequences for their mental health and predisposes them to addictions. Moreover, they continually have to contend with the marginalization and stigma their mental health and addictions bring them. We at SJK see their broken lives as a consequence of their circumstances rather than of their character! Make no mistake! Marginalized people are marginalized by people! The homeless don’t self-marginalize, they don’t choose poverty. Marginalization requires “marginalizers” who actually have their own vulnerabilities one being their tunnel vision preventing them from seeing the whole picture. The homeless are no less human than the rest of us. They have the same hopes, worries and needs as any other segment of society. Their personalities and talents vary just as much as any other social class. Prolonged stress harms them just like it harms us. Their very survival depends on their human rights being treated absolutely equal to everyone else.
Here are three lessons I have learned working at St. John’s Kitchen:
Lesson 1
One of the great rewards of working with the homeless is acquiring all the wonderful friends you work with and work for. We work not just for the love of it, but for the love that’s in it. If we give the marginalized attention, caring and love when they desperately need it, we will get it back eventually, not tit for tat, but exponentially.
Lesson 2
Those who work with the poor are frequently amazed by the depth of character and personal strength of spirit many homeless people have. I believe this spirit is a product of the intensity and duration of their own personal suffering. Resilience isn’t just a gift; resilience is a tough hard-earned skill.
Lesson 3
The homeless population need more than just sufficient funds to survive, they also need to keep their hope alive. The good example and humane behaviour of the SJK staff helps the homeless stay hopeful. The staff and volunteers at SJK share a special gift that doesn’t cost any money and indeed is worth far more than money. It is more essential and accessible than cleverness, creativity or courage. It’s the basic human gift of COMPASSION. Compassion is at the heart and core of every healthy functioning family and every proficient healthy community. Compassion is also at the heart and core of all that is good, effective and meaningful at SJK. If we are to solve our marginalization problem we need to stop focussing solely on the homeless and also deal with what causes our society to marginalize. SJK is living proof that the primary answer to poverty is not just money, but sharing more of our compassion and our humanity.
