So I know it’s been quit a while since I last wrote…. My trip home was AMAZING. I had so much fun seeing my family and friends (most of all Amara…) and the holidays were wonderful. Now back to reality…I had one fairly uneventful week at the school. Same old same old… This week, however, Alabama was hit with a huge snow and ice storm… Huge for Alabama standards at least… I was in Tuscaloosa visiting Bobby when it started. He quickly got me on the road headed for home to try and beat the worst of it. The drive that usually takes me 45 minutes took 2 hours. I saw 73 cars off the road on the freeway. There was a huge section of road that was pure ice (incidently, the places where the cars were off the roads were not the places that were the iciest… weird). It was kind of scary for a bit but I made it home in one piece. On Monday the schools were closed. I slept most of the day which felt amazing. Tuesday the schools were still closed and I watched way too much tv. On Wednesday schools were STILL closed, but I had to go into the district office for a couple of hours. For some reason Tracy and I thought it’d be a great idea to sign up to work at the Red Cross Warming Station downtown from Midnight to 7 am Thursday morning in addition to working at our schools from 7:30-4:30. I packed a bag and headed to Tracy’s to hang out. I just absolutely adore Tracy’s family. They are all just so kind and affectionate. I love spending time with them. We put together a bag of snacks and made a thermos of coffee and headed to the Boutwell Auditorium totally not knowing what to expect at all. We walked into a huge room lined with rows and rows of cots holding sleeping or resting homeless people. Tracy, Charlie (her brother) and I spotted Daniel, another Americorps member and sat at a table with him. After a while a young woman came up to us and sat at the table with us. She sat and just started talking and told us bits and pieces of her life story. From what I could put together she was 21 years old. Ran away from a family with abusive step brothers and a mother who she fought with all the time because she’s white and likes black men. She’s dating a really nice guy right now who won’t try and choke her like the last guy she dated. She has a son who is a year old and she thinks she could possibly be pregnant again. As she was talking a man walked up to us and simply said “I just wanted to say that I’m really lonely tonight. My mother died last week and we were really close. I miss her. That’s all” and walked away. He really got to this young woman and she started to cry and said that she feels bad that her relationship with her own mother has been so destroyed. It’s getting late so she decides to go to bed.
We all sat and just processed the conversation when another man walked up and said “do you like poems?” we told him yes and he pulled out a notebook and proceeded to read us a poem that he had written while he was in jail. It was a beautifully deep poem and he proceeded to read a few more, all of them were so incredibly deep and just made you contemplate your life and the world and the universe.
A little while later another guy came and sat down across from me at the table and challenged me to a game of checkers. We played a few games and he talked and I listened. Another guy came and sat down and started talking with Daniel so the first guy left. This guy proceeded to tell us basically the story of how he survives and who he sometimes stays with. He talked and talked and talked and talked and talked and then all of a sudden just was done talking and went to bed. “I think he really just needed to say all of that to someone” said Daniel. The first guy came back and told us a little bit about his situation and how he has a car that he lives out of and he had originally been displaced by Katrina and had never really gotten his feet under him since. He’s been looking hard for a job and just that afternoon his twin brother had gotten really drunk and had been hauled off by the police. He started to cry as he told us that he had really just needed to talk to someone tonight and that we had been there for him and he thanked us and went on his way.
All of these people just needed someone to listen to them. It was such a fulfilling evening. We went back to the Warming Station that evening for a few hours and met even more amazing people. I can’t wait to go back again!
