Interactions with Bill at the Fish Food Bank

In the last article I wrote, I spoke about my first experience at the Fish Food Bank. At the end of my article, I referred to an incident when I encountered a kind and generous man. This man appeared to be struggling financially his life. At that time I was unable to talk to him.

Fortunately, I happen to see him again, last Friday, when I went there for community service. He recognized me, since I had helped the last time. I noticed that this time he was talking and he was also a little friendlier than he was before. One of my good friends who is a social-worker suggested to me that I should not to be 'overly nice' to these people. Sometimes, they see it as condescending. So I was trying not to be super-nice and have a good conversation with him.

He told me his name was 'Bill'. He has been homeless for quit sometime. He is a regular at the fish food bank, like many others. I asked him if our society or government provides any shelters for them and if he takes advantage of them. He informed me that a few years back they used to provide tents, which according to him was very helpful to them. However, for some reason they stopped it giving out tents. The tents helped so that they didn't have to stay or sleep under the bridges in the cold rainy nights like they do now. Instead of tents, now they provide "Blankets" which do not work as well. Bill told me the tent he had, he used it for more than a month and the "Blanket" he received did not last even a week. He said, "It's Washington", blanket gets wet and then they are unusable. So, society's idea of being helpful to homeless people was more like addition to littering (since he said when the blanket got wet, he would just have to leave it, had could he carry something like that around).

In the our Soci 240 class and everywhere else, I have seen people asking "what can we do?" , "what should we do about these problems that individuals in our society face ?". There are people like Bill, who knows what can help him and others like him, yet I feel that society doesn’t take the time to listen. Instead, they are judge by their outward appearance and therefore get lost in our cities, our forced to go to the food banks and live under bridges. Would you like to live under a bridge? Or have to go to a food bank instead of a grocery store where you get a choice on what you want to buy? The answer to that is probably not and that I why when I think of the questions that were raised in class about what can we do or should do….I think we can start by listening to hear what they have to say, instead of making our own “wise” assumptions.