Leaving Camden

Just as I had to dedicate a little piece to my leaving Bellingham for Camden, so I have to dedicate a little piece to my exit from JVC and the journey home. Here is a short series about the past couple of weeks and the events that came to pass.

My exit from Camden felt like a long fall from a cliff into deep water; that is, once my time there began to wind down (roughly around the time I packed up most of my belongings and shipped them home), it felt like I was slowly moving toward an end that took forever to come.

The goodbying began over two weeks before we were to actually leave town. This is because because there are so many people involved with the JVs who wanted to take us to dinner or something for a proper goodbye. To allow myself a moment of perfect honesty, by the end of those two weeks it was getting kind of hard to access any real emotion about leaving. In the first place, very many of the people who wanted to tell us goodbye were people that I didn’t know very well; I felt like I was getting to know them for the first time at my own goodbye party. Being fully present at those sorts of events was exhausting for me—I felt like I was trying to feign a lot of enthusiasm that I just didn’t have in me. This was hard for me to come to accept, because when I left a year ago I felt as though I was bleeding love and sadness, longing for a place I could return to and a time that I couldn’t return to. While intense, it was also great. I felt alive and in love with my family and friends.

Don’t take this to mean I wasn’t sad to leave; I certainly had to sort through a lot of emotional laundry about it all. But, while I can be quite sociable and enthusiastic at times, the fact is that I needed a lot of private, quiet time to process things that I just wasn’t getting. The end result was my feeling more or less numb about many things, when I should have felt some deeper feeling of warm sadness or bittersweetness. All the feeling within me for the bigger moments dried up as I tried to be present at events that didn’t mean as much to me. One can only have so many emotional evenings in a row before she shuts down. It was self-preservation.

There are two notable exceptions to feeling this way: my last day at Northgate, and the last time I saw my cousin, Nick.

On my final day at Northgate, I spent the bulk of the morning preparing cards and notes for my coworkers and some of the tenants (there are over four hundred tenants, total, so don’t think too lowly of me that I only wrote to a few!). Irma, the entire social services office, the management office, and the maintenance workers all threw me a little goodbye party. In a cute nod to my habitual grammar policing, they intentionally misspelled the writing on my cake. (Back story: every single cake we ever ordered for a social services or staff event has had a misspelled word—not because the baker messed up, but because whoever had ordered the cake had misspelled it on the form. I only ever pointed it out one time, but since then everyone derived a perverse joy from watching me read the misspelled cake and bite my tongue.) The cake read, “Fairwell, Molly!” Smart-asses…

It was very sweet of everyone to stop everything to see me off. I will be the first one to tell you that in that building, nothing ever stops moving. There is always an emergency to take care of, whether it’s a maintenance problem or a tenant’s physical or emotional health gives out, and the few of us on staff are constantly on the move, putting out fires as fast as we can. So a little cake, a little song, and a little prayer meant the world to me on my last day in the most intense environment I have ever worked in.

After I’d gone door-to-door in the apartment building to tell a few of my favorite tenants goodbye (word got around—it took me a good hour and plenty of running up and down stairs to get out of there. So many people wanted me to stop by, and because I have fewer mobility issues than most of the tenants, it was easier to just pass the word along that I should stop by!), turned in my keys, and hugged the social services ladies goodbye, I walked out of the building for the last time. I headed straight for the subway to Philadelphia to meet up with Nick.

For those of you who don’t know, Nick is my cousin. He served in JVC from 2000 to 2002, first in Camden, then in Brooklyn. (He lived in Brooklyn on September 11th, 2001. He was unharmed, but my whole family was terrified until we got a phone call from him.) Nick is also the reason I became a JV. He planted that seed in my heart when I was fourteen. Yes, many people and experiences watered that seed between then and the day I applied to the program, but he was the initial reason I wanted to serve with the Jesuits. It was great to live so close to him this year, especially because he has lived on the East Coast since his JVC service began.

Nick and I hung out in a bar for a few hours that Friday and just talked about my volunteer year. We talked about the best and worst moments, what I will miss, what I couldn’t wait to leave behind, how our volunteer service shaped us. Just before I left, Nick gave me a little post-JV-year pep talk. I swear, I would have given a whole year of service all over again, bearing every single burden I had to bear, just to hear that pep talk. It meant the world to me.

Because the truth is, (allowing myself another moment of honesty and vulnerability) this past year was unimaginably hard for me. I faced incredible difficulties in all facets of my life there—my work, my community, my city—and I confess, I have never felt so uncomfortable with myself or my surroundings in my life. Worse, as my entire life in Camden was defined in terms of either my community or my work, I had no outlet for my feelings. I missed home far more than I anticipated I would—even in late July, I would tear up from homesickness. I was fairly traumatized and hugely saddened by my work, and I never really felt as though I could discuss those feelings at home. In terms of close friendships and relationships, in the worst moments I felt that I had lost far more than I gained. Often I felt there was no one to talk to who made me feel understood, appreciated or loved. Although these feelings prove that I need to spend much more time on the Litany of Humility, the fact is that it is very hard to function emotionally and spiritually without feeling understood or appreciated. (In fairness to everyone in Camden, I always knew, even if I didn’t feel, that I was loved.)

So to hear such a sweet compliment from a family member, one that I have looked up to for as long as I can remember, and the only person in our family who can truly appreciate what I’ve been through (because we both went through it!), it validated and healed so much of what I was struggling with. It was the most understood I’ve felt in a long time.

The following day, I left Camden for the last time. All of my community members were returning to the house after Dis-Orientation except for myself, so I was the only one leaving for good. (On the way out of the city, I happily narrated a la Good Night, Moon: “Goodnight, row house!” “Good night, corner store!” “Good night, crackheads on the corner!” “Good night, Ben Franklin Bridge!”)

We drove south to Pine Grove Furnace State Park in Pennsylvania (where the hike was to begin), about 30 miles north of the Maryland border (where the hike was to end). We attended Mass as a group, drove to the campsite, pitched our tents, and crawled in for the night. The Hike to Dis-O would begin in the morning.

Motherhood

(This comes a few days early, because I will be away on silent retreat on Mother's Day.)

I love Mother's Day.

This is a time in my life when many of my friends and my own generation of my family are becoming mothers. My family members are a bit older than me, but many of my friends are just my age, or a few years older, and many are married with children.

Somehow, this didn't hit me last year, probably because I was a student and not thinking about my life very far beyond graduation or JVC. But I look at myself and the way I live my life, and then I think about my girlfriends who have children, I realize how dramatically having a baby changes your life. Most of my daily concerns (often high-maintenance, superfluous concerns that don't mean anything at the end of the day) would never crop up in my mind if I were a mother. Or if they did, they would be quickly shooed away by something that my baby needs!

The other thought that occurred to me, especially as a family member is struggling through a difficult pregnancy (though mom and baby are both still well, thank God!), is how much my own mom went through when she carried me and my brother. Now that I'm actually experiencing the worry and concern that my parents and family went through when Mom's first pregnancy went awry, I am only just now grasping how terrified everyone must have been. More than anyone else's, my mother's anxiety must have been absolutely agonizing. (I am all the more thankful that she did everything she could, especially petitioning our Blessed Mother incessantly, to make sure we were OK, because all disasters were averted and Joe and I are fine!)

Which leads me to realize how much mothers give! If the acts of carrying and delivering a child aren't enough, the acts of parenting, protecting, forming, molding, teaching, nurturing, disciplining, feeding, bathing, educating, rocking, comforting, clothing, nursing, playing with, arguing with, dealing with tantrums of, checking homework for, cooking for, singing lullabies to, attending all recitals and ballgames and pageants and parent-teacher conferences of a child certainly are! Many in the world at large seem to disagree, but I can't think of anyone more important in a person's life than a mother.


I am also coming to see what happens when a mother does not step up to raise her children the way I have just described, especially as I've worked with Camden's youth and disadvantaged adults. So many of the children in my ministry have home lives that are in absolute shambles, and the adults in my ministry wouldn't have half of the problems they have now if their parents had given them the love and care they deserved when they were young. I remain convinced that if the families in this area were to concentrate all of their energy on setting positive examples for their children and doing everything in their power to love and discipline them, this city would be well on its way to complete renewal in ten years. As it is now, this city stands on the brink of hell, which is most apparent in how broken its families are.


So this is my salute to all of the amazing mothers in my life: Athena, Lindsey, Lauren, Meli, Heather, Courtney, Katie, Jessica, Aunt Maryl, Aunt Julie, Aunt Paula, Aunt Steph, Aunt Debbie (my godmother!), Laurie... and all the amazing moms I've missed. I hope God blesses you immensely on this Mother's Day!


But most especially, this is my salute to my mother. She's the best mom a girl could ask for. If I become even half the mother that she is to me, I will consider myself most blessed.

I love you, Mom.

Summertime, and the living is HUMID!

If today is any indication of the kind of heat and humidity I can expect this summer, I may be in for a long haul…

Actually, I quite like the summery weather. New Jersey summer weather patterns are strange—it’s always humid, but very often a humid little rainstorm will roll in, rage for a while, and then blow away. For example, when I looked out my window this morning before I got dressed for work, it was really cloudy and big raindrops were falling. So I put on slacks and a sweater and went to work. It was humid, but I chalked it up to the rainstorm. Imagine my surprise when I walked home for lunch and found that it was broiling outside! The clouds had blown away, but the humid air and heat remained. I changed into sandals and a skirt before coming back to the office! Last August, during hurricane season, we had at least one thunderstorm per day the entire first month of living here. I have a feeling this morning was just the beginning of storm season. I’m going to have to learn to gauge the temperature despite what the sky looks like in the morning!

It’s going to be interesting at lunchtime from now until August because I’m used to cooking my lunch—that is, I’m used to eating hot food. It’s getting too hot to stand over a stove or eat a hot lunch. Today I had a nice surprise waiting for me in the fridge—Jenna and her boyfriend made devilled eggs out of a few Easter eggs, and they were nice and chilled and ready to eat when I got there! I’m going to have to start planning ahead if I want to eat a cold lunch.

One thing I’ve realized about summer is how much I love cold drinks, especially iced coffee (a la Starbucks) and smoothies (a la Jamba Juice). And before I became a JV and started watching where every cent of my budget is being spent, it was so easy to just step into a little bistro or smoothie place and spend four dollars on a cold drink. If I did that now, my whole monthly stipend would be gone in three weeks.

Consider this: a 12-ounce drip coffee from Starbucks costs $1.50 (and that’s the smallest option you can buy). If you bought one every work day for year (taking two weeks off for vacation), that’s $375 per year on corporate coffee. If you’re into fancier things like lattes or mochas (ahem… guilty…), it can cost at least $940 per year!

As a result, I’ve been making those kinds of drinks at home! It’s nothing revolutionary or spectacular, but it is simple and inexpensive (as opposed to Starbucks and Jamba Juice—which are both deceptively simple, and expensive!)

It’s simple: make a pot of coffee in the evening and pour it into a pitcher. Chill it overnight. Whenever you want it (I like to drink mine right before I walk back to work after lunch. It gives me a little treat to look forward to), pour a glass, add milk, ice and a little sugar, and enjoy! There is a deep satisfaction in having a little coffee treat that doesn’t break the bank.

We just use a 39oz can of coffee (to my palette, poor quality coffee tastes the same as the good stuff when it’s chilled, but I’m sure there are those who can tell better than I can), which procures about 120 twelve-ounce servings (according to the label, anyway). A 39oz can costs about $10, so each serving evens out to about $.08. (Factoring in the cost of filters, milk, and sugar, it’s more like $.10 per serving). If you drank that every work day for a year (same formula as above), it costs $25 per year. You can save $350 per year!

The same thing can be done with smoothies. Investing in a couple of bags of frozen fruit (a big bag of store brand or, better yet, wholesale is the most bang for your buck), a bunch of bananas, and a carton of milk. We usually use strawberries, peaches, one whole banana, and a little splash of milk, but you can use any kind of fruit or berries, or yogurt instead of milk. Blend it up, pour it in a glass, and drink your daily servings of fruit! It’s a lot cheaper than the Starbucks smoothies or Jamba Juice. Some people even like to hit Super Supplements and throw a scoop of protein powder into the mix, so it’s an even healthier snack!

I never really had a problem spending money on blended drinks until a few years ago, but I certainly allowed it to become a habit. I don’t want to look back on my life at the end of my days and realize that I literally spent thousands of dollars on little treats for myself. Especially if I’m able to make them at home!

Anyway, I hope everyone else has the chance some time this summer to enjoy the sunshine and economically-savvy summer drinks!

An open letter to everyone in the ghetto

Please stop yelling at me.

Thank you.

You don’t have to live like a refuge… except on Mischief Night

Has anyone ever heard of Mischief Night?

Apparently on the night before Halloween, inner cities batten down the hatches for a night of vandalism, or worse, evidently in anticipation of Halloween night the following evening.

One of the maintenance workers in my office told me that “mischief night used to be fun. A little graffiti, a few eggs here and there, and we’d all go home, drink soda, and watch movies all night.”

He told me all this by way of lamenting what Mischief Night has become since then—houses and car get lit on fire, cars are destroyed when people bash in the windows, and passers-by get mugged or kidnapped.

The principal of the San Miguel school (where two of my roommates work) told his students at assembly that he did not want any of them to even leave their houses that evening because in the past, some students have not returned to school for several days following mischief night. When Mark asked one of his colleagues what happens on mischief night, the very well-mannered man answered, “They burn the f***ing city down.”

So, what does a group of white, new-to-the-inner-city volunteers do? Pack our bags and sleep somewhere else.

While I’m sure those who work with immigrants and refugees would object to my use of the term (which I use loosely), we were actually refugees for the night. We were displaced from our home because of a well-founded fear that we might come to harm if we remained there.

We went to the Philadelphia JV house, where we were warmly received by our friends with beds to sleep in and homemade Filipino food. Really, it was a pleasant gathering of friends, but for the fact that we couldn’t go home.

This is horrifying.

For those of you who don't know, I work in Northgate II. This happened across the street last night.

Camden in the NY Times

I was checking the Times online when I saw that the New York Times Magazine this week focuses on Jon Corzine and the New Jersey gubernatorial race. As with all things concerning New Jersey politics, Camden comes up in the first few paragraphs.

The magazine feature on Corzine is quite long, so I'll post the link to it here and let you read it on your own time if you want to. But just so you know, it's a big deal the the Times even describes Camden. Look at the first paragraph (the emphasis is mine):

In early September, for instance, on the day that President
Obama delivered his heralded (and controversial) televised pep talk to
public-school students, Corzine traveled to Camden, one of the country’s poorest
cities, his government-issue black S.U.V. weaving through a postapocalyptic
landscape of overgrown fields and shuttered row houses. The neighborhood was
celebrating the opening of the sparkling new H. B. Wilson Elementary School, one
of 45 new schools that Corzine’s administration has constructed and opened,
despite the state’s acute economic troubles, and Corzine, who displays an
obvious passion for all things educational, had arrived to bask in the
achievement and to join a class of fourth graders in watching President Obama’s
speech. The students, dressed in their crisp yellow uniforms, seemed buoyant as
they filed in, eyeing a small mountain of brand-new backpacks donated by the
local bar association. Not much that’s new and shiny turns up in Camden, whose
broken city government has been taken over by the state and whose choicest piece
of waterfront property is blighted by a state prison.

This is how the world at large sees this city. What's more, it's only a visual description. In case people ever think I'm being dramatic or exaggerating about this place, remember that the Times descibed Camden as postapocalyptic. And they're not being dramatic.

When your best isn't enough

It’s been a while since I posted anything—probably because of my birthday, a JV retreat, and getting my usual early autumn cold/cough/upper respiratory tract infection. Where in the world did I last leave off?

I’ll blog about my birthday and the retreat in a separate post. I needed to tell this story, if only to demonstrate that horrible things like this happen, even in a country a developed as the US.

There was an incident at work over a week ago now that put life in Camden into rather harsh perspective. Someone impaled his leg on the fence around our property, and it fell to our security staff and the social services office to help him until EMS got there. I was going to write a post about it the following day, because I thought it illustrated how absurd and random life around here can be in an episodic, but harmless manner. But before I finished writing the post, one of the guards came and told me that the man we had helped had died in the hospital.

This is what I wrote before I found out what happened to him at the hospital:

Mental image of the day: as I was leaving work yesterday I got a radio call that someone had “hurt himself on the fence around the building.” The fence is iron, and the points of it come up to about my eye-level in little spikes that look like arrows. I couldn’t imagine how someone would get hurt on it, unless he tried to jump over and fell on the spikes. Sure enough…

The guy was running full speed, jumped up on a fire hydrant in one stride and tried to launch himself over the fence (which, if he had made it all the way over, would have been damn impressive). But he didn’t make it, so he impaled his leg on a spike of the fence and hung there by the hole in his calf. Some of the tenants lifted him down while one of them ran for help. By the time I got there, he was on the ground. The only reason *I* didn’t faint at the sight of it was that I was trying to keep *him* from fainting at the sight of it. Which seemed to work, until the paramedics got there and made him stand up and try to walk. The poor guy went out like a light.

If you can’t tell, I thought he was going to be fine. Injured, yes, but ultimately fine. The guards and I did our best—holding his head in my lap, trying to keep him conscious, elevating the leg, getting him to talk, etc—and he seemed OK. Looking back, there were little things—his lips were turning white, his stomach kept twitching (he wasn’t wearing a shirt), and he told me he was dizzy. I tried to coach him to breathe so that he wouldn’t faint, which was really all that kept me from retching at the sight of the wound.

The next day, the guard who had been on point during the situation came in and told me and Maria, the other case manager who had been there, that he had died in the hospital. The man was strung out on cocaine. When a person has cocaine in their system, the shock of a paper cut would be enough to make your heart stop. An iron rod through his leg can certainly do it, too.

It made me much more upset than I thought it would. To begin with, it’s always a shock when someone you tried to help doesn’t make it, especially when the injury didn’t appear to be life-threatening. Secondly, the way the paramedics treated him was appalling. I was shocked at the time at how callous they were at the time; I was furious about it when I found out he had died. These were the final few hours of the man’s life, and the people who were supposed to care for him treated him like dirt. My only (limited) consolation was that some people, like the tenants who got him off of the fence, the security guards, and our staff treated him with the dignity he deserved at the moment, which turned out to be one of his last.

Anyway, I was pretty upset about the whole situation. It was my turn to cook dinner that night, and my lovely roomies took over for me because I kept crying into the tomato soup. They finished up and let me go to my room to cry, calm down, and pray. The whole thing made me so sad. Who prays for people like that when they die? Did they find any family to bury him? Was there a priest or chaplain on hand in case he needed or wanted to talk?

I called my family and a few friends to try and order my thoughts and feelings before writing this down for the blogging world. Pray for Camden, if you need an extra intention. It’s a broken, sad place a lot of the time.

Ennui and emergencies

I had started a post last Friday to let everyone know that I was settling into work to the point where everything felt like a routine. It was so calm at some points that one could even have said that a few of my days were boring. I actually looked up the word “ennui” one day, just to see how aptly it fit the string of quiet days.

But before I had finished a paragraph of that post on Friday, the day became a piping hot bowl of insanity. Before my morning coffee was even cooled down enough to sip without burning my tongue, security radioed that we had a situation in the back parking lot. I went outside with the social services and management teams to have a look. A guard had found a girl, perhaps twenty years old, unconscious and slumped over in the driver’s seat of a car that was still running. There was a hypodermic needle in her hand.

I won’t lie—I thought she was dead. Her skin was so pale it was gray, and her lips and hands were turning purple. Before I noticed that her chest was rising and falling slightly, my first thought was shock at how calmly I was processing my first dead body. At least, one that wasn’t already inside a coffin.

One of the hardest parts of this job for me is that we cannot, legally, touch a person who needs medical attention. (For example, if a frail tenant falls down, I can’t help her up. I have to wait with her until a guard or EMT comes around.) So we stood and watched, unable to help the girl, until EMS arrived. Those guys are really good at what they do—before her coworkers pulled up in an ambulance, the first EMT who arrived stuck something up the girl’s nose, pulled it out through her mouth, and the girl finally stirred and woke up. She was stoned out of her mind, but at least able to walk to the ambulance that drove her away.

The day went back to normal, and that familiar, sometimes suffocating ennui began to creep in again until I was handed a big pile of paperwork. (I’m told it’s practice for the winter months, when I will have a LOT of paperwork to do, pretty much all day long, to help the tenants with energy bills.)

The day plodded along, with Pandora and the occasional office gossip to keep me from going crazy from boredom. But around four o’clock, the second wave of madness hit. We got a call that a tenant was having trouble breathing, and an ambulance was en route. That’s nothing out of the ordinary around here, so when the plant manager radioed for a social services escort to the tenant’s room I just grabbed the file and ran upstairs (the rest of the SS team was handling another situation.)

But when we got there, the routine call seemed a lot less routine. The tenant in question has asthma, so I think I just expected to witness an asthma attack. It turned out she was in anaphylactic shock—she had a food allergy that none of us knew about. (Which made me feel dumb; I was flipping through her file specifically to find out if she had any allergies. The line read, “Allergies: None.” Go figure.) She was refusing her oxygen mask and gasping out the words me muero (Spanish for I’m dying) over and over again. Right after EMS walked in, she stopped breathing, fell unconscious, and flopped backward onto her bed. For the second time in one day, I thought the poor woman was dead.

This resuscitation was a lot more violent than the one I’d witnessed in the morning. The paramedics shoved a tube up her nose because her throat was clenched and our guards had to hold her down on her bed when she began to fight (tubes in your nose really hurt, and she was really out of it for lack of oxygen anyway). They had to move her to a gurney using the comforter on her bed, and I was terrified that they would drop her. She was still gasping and flailing around when they took her away.

The most interesting realization for me as I witnessed both of these events (and that’s about all I do during them: I witness. I'm professional moral support) was that, while I could certainly feel my body reacting to the situation—tense shoulders, a furrowed brow, and an eventual headache—I did not get emotional or upset. I think that’s part of learning to do the emergency part of this job. But it certainly is different from the way I thought I’d handle emergencies. As recently as senior year of college, high-stress situations made me cry. The difference now is that even after everything was resolved, I don’t get upset. I went home, lifted weights until my arms shook, did yoga, and the workout made me sleep for thirteen hours the following night. But I never became emotional. I think it would be too exhausting.

Lockdown

Today we locked down our building for two hours while the police and a SWAT team had a standoff with one of our residents. Nobody was killed or injured, so I promise that this story has a happy ending.

We had known that the tenant in question was mentally ill, and he’d become increasingly unstable in the past two weeks. Reports were piling up. Our staff felt threatened. We tried to file police reports, but for some reason there was never anything that they could do about him. We were becoming increasingly alarmed and wary of him, especially when we found out that he has weapons charges against him, and claimed to have a gun in his apartment.

Then this morning, he called the crisis hotline for himself. Because he made the call himself, the police and EMS responded. And because he, not our staff, phoned them we had no idea what he had said or threatened to do. But whatever it was, it must have been very serious. Our first inclination that anything was wrong came when two police officers entered our lobby with assault rifles.

Upon hearing about the incident, our security and maintenance staff sealed off that (the twelfth) floor of the building. We secured one elevator for the exclusive use of emergency personnel—the other was operated by one of our janitors, who escorted people up and down in order to make sure that no one got off on the twelfth floor. Those in their apartments on the twelfth floor couldn’t leave for those two hours.

At first, there were only those few officers upstairs, and an ambulance waited outside. But as we watched on the security cameras (they wouldn’t let social services staff anywhere near the actual apartment), more and more officers went upstairs to the scene as the first hour ticked by. I counted thirteen police officers, but I wasn’t that alarmed until a homicide detective walked in and requested an escort to the apartment.

Then, at almost the one-hour mark, the lead SWAT officer walked into the lobby and told us to secure the whole front of the building. That is, get all the tenants out of the lobby and front parking lot, and nobody other than our staff and emergency personnel were allowed to enter through the front door.

This is more difficult than it sounds, because the tenants really didn’t want to be told that they couldn’t go in and out as they pleased. It took a lot of polite (and a few not-so-polite) suggestions/commands on our part to divert people walking around to the back of the building. The other problem was that many of our frail tenants were stuck outside, unable to come in and with no place to sit down and rest. I ran in and out quite a few times, trying to get people with canes and walkers into wheelchairs or onto benches. We also had to keep all of the tenants who were inside their rooms when the incident began from leaving—by then both elevators were off limits, and so was the stairwell.

Once we made sure that the lobby was secure, the SWAT team itself went upstairs. Rifles, shields, helmets, body armor—these guys were prepared for whatever was going to come out of that apartment.

But still, nothing happened quickly. The officer who was on the phone negotiating with the tenant said that they wanted to get him out of there as quietly as possible. Whatever the tenant was telling the police, it was serious enough to warrant moving slowly.

My supervisor wasn’t here when this all started—she wasn’t feeling well and had gone to the doctor. She got the phone call to come in before she could even go get a prescription filled. When she showed up, we started calling everyone else on the twelfth floor to see if they were all right. Most of them were just annoyed because they couldn’t leave their apartments.

At some point, one of our managers came to ask me to help clear the people who had gathered around the grounds. Apparently, the cops were afraid that if the tenant was armed, he would start shooting out his window. We nudged the people as well as we could, but beyond the borders of our property, there wasn’t a whole lot we could do—we have no authority over anybody who is not a tenant. The officers took over for us.

Then, when we were waiting to go back inside the front doors, the officer at the door asked us to please not stand on the edge of the curb, just in case the tenant decided to jump out of his window.

We watched on the security cameras right into lunchtime—by then, we were tired and hungry, and most of us had to go to the bathroom. But no one wanted to leave.

At almost 1pm, they finally radioed that he was out.

I didn’t see it—I had been sent to the office to fetch a file for my supervisor. I’m told that he wasn’t wearing shoes or a shirt. His hands were bound behind him with a zip tie. Each arm was held by an officer. He was limp, like a ragdoll. Three officers followed him. They walked him out the door and put him in the back of a police car.

As the dénouement began, I was pushing our wheelchair-bound tenants back into the lobby to go up to their rooms. Walking past the police cruiser, I saw him, the tenant. He was lying on his back in the back of the cruiser. We locked eyes for a second, and then I went back to helping the other tenants.

He looked a lot more peaceful than I thought he would—maybe it was just a look of defeat. They took him to the hospital, where hopefully he’ll get the help he needs.

The SWAT team was clearing out and the cops were searching the apartment when my supervisor told me to take my lunch break.

We’re all coming down from the adrenaline, still. The rest of the day went on as normal, though I must say that I don’t remember a lot of it.

The day I interviewed for this job, my supervisor told me that I’d never experience the same day twice. I sincerely hope she’s right.

But the good news is that we all kept our heads, from the police, and SWAT team to the security officers and the social services and management staff. None of the tenants got hurt, not even the one who was at the greatest risk—the tenant in the apartment, himself. This story very well could have had an unhappy ending. Instead, we just have a really crazy story to tell.

A day in the life...

To give you, my loyal readers (all 2.7 of you), an idea of what a day in the life of a JV is like, here is a typical synopsis of my day.

Every other day, I get up around 6:30 to go for a run with Amber and Jenna, my roommates. On the days that I don’t run, I wake up around 7:30 (don’t worry—I lift weights after work on those days). We get moving around 6:45, and typically get back between 7:15 and 7:30. The three of us share a bathroom, so we have to get back in time to get cleaned up before work.

We normally eat breakfast on a rotating basis in the kitchen. I put on coffee and get to work on eating because I only have to walk two blocks to get to work. We see very little of each other in the mornings because there are six of us going in five different directions (Jenna and Mark work at the same school, so they have to leave together). I make it out the door by 8:50 every morning and walk to work.

Once I get to my office, I read the reports that our security guards write up from the day before. They typically deal with 911 calls (as this is a building for elderly and disabled people, many of them are frail or in poor health. Since we have over three hundred tenants, the odds are pretty high that someone’s going the hospital), harassment issues, fires, noise complaints, and illegal guests. Then, when it’s warranted, my office (usually me) writes cease notices (As in, “We demand that you cease this behavior, or your lease will be terminated.”). I only recently learned to write them, but I’ll be doing that on a daily basis this year.

The social services office concerns itself mostly with getting tenants to and from the doctor, getting their prescriptions filled and delivered to them, helping pay the bills (it’s their money—we just fill out the forms. Many of the tenants never learned to read, so we do a lot of that stuff for them), and making sure that everyone is generally healthy, well-fed taking their medicine, etc. It’s sort of like being a professional mom. :)

We also handle a lot of emergencies in conjunction with the security officers and medical personnel. Since I’ve been in this office, there have been three emergencies situations that I’ve been part of. One turned out to be a false alarm, but we couldn’t find a tenant and had to go into his apartment—in case he had died. Evidently, that happens a lot around here. But he wasn’t there, dead or alive, so it turned out to be a mere blip on the radar. I won’t lie, though—my heart was pounding pretty hard when we first walked in that door. The other two involved getting a lady to go to the hospital because she was quite ill but refusing treatment; the other involved protecting one of my coworkers from someone who was threatening her. I can’t really tell any more about those situations, for obvious reasons.

But, though exciting (if not fun) little crises like that pop up on a regular basis, it’s pretty standard office work.

I walk home at 5pm and meet up with the other Camden JVs, my housemates. We make a point to eat dinner together every night, which is really wonderful for all of us. We take turns cooking, though for a while we just let Mark, the only man in the house, do it because he’s a REALLY talented cook. After dinner there’s usually tea, and often a game or discussion. We like each other a lot, so this is quite a balm for our weary minds after a day of work..

Then we get up and do it all over again in the morning. :)

This has been A Day in the Life of a Camden JV… tune in next time!

I'm here: A Camden update

Hey, everyone!
As you may or may not have surmised from my long (or so it feels) absence from the Internet, I a) have been very busy since I left the Wednesday, and b) have been without Internet that entire time. Look for updates here and there, but don’t be surprised if it takes me a day of two to respond if you email or Facebook me; I’ll only have access to the web at work.

So, we (the Camden JVs) have arrived! The reception in the community so far has been very positive, and very overwhelming. Former Jesuit Volunteers (hereafter referred to as FJVs) came to visit us within hours of our arrival, most (thankfully) bearing food or beverages for us. I don’t think we’ve touched any of the food we picked up at the grocery store yet, and this is our fifth day here!

But before I get too far into our time in Camden, I should start with the journey out of Seattle to Baltimore.

"The moment or hour of leave-taking is one of the pleasantest times in human
experience, for it has in it a warm sadness without loss. People who don't
ordinarily like you very well are overcome with affection at leave-taking... It
would be good to live in a perpetual state of leave-taking, never to go nor to
stay, but to remain suspended in that golden emotion of love and longing; to be
missed without being gone; to be loved without satiety. How beautiful one is and
how desirable; for in a few moments one will have ceased to exist."
- from the book "Sea of Cortez" by John Steinbeck and E. F. Ricketts

My last few days out west were full of that “warm sadness without loss.” I hugged goodbye most of the people that I meant to see before taking off, especially at the lovely shindig my family threw for me before going. Thanks to all the Bellingham people who make the drive to Everett to see me off! Love you!

I visited some good friends before going, too. When I walked away from a few homes that held the people I love, it felt like my heart was ripping through the muscles of my back. But even in those moments, I feel absolutely certain that this (Camden, and more broadly, JVC) is exactly where I am supposed to be.

I flew out of Seattle around midnight on Wednesday night/ Thursday morning. Since it was a red-eye flight and I was flying toward the sunrise, I basically skipped Wednesday night. So it felt like Wednesday and Thursday were all one, long day. At the airport in Baltimore, I managed to grab a latte and some breakfast before taking a cat nap by the baggage claim. Eventually I found my community hanging out near where the bus was supposed to pick us up, and after the standard confusion of moving sixty people to one location on a bus, we got on a charter bus and drove to Blue Ridge Summit in Pennsylvania.

Blue Ridge is simply gorgeous. It’s owned by the Jesuits in the area, and frequently is used for retreats like the one we were on. We had a lot of talks, small groups and presentations on the core JVC values: community, spirituality, simple living, and social justice. We had Mass three times: once to kick off the retreat, one for the feast of the Assumption, and one we call the missioning liturgy, when we are all blessed and sent forth to our cities. At that Mass we each received our Jerusalem cross, which is a traditional symbol of missionaries. It’s one large cross, representing Jerusalem, and four little ones around it, representing the four corners of the earth. In JVC, the four crosses stand for the four values.

We got to Camden without incident and found our little house, which is downright luxurious by JVC standards. Carpeting, two stories plus a basement, laundry machines, a dishwasher, 2.5 baths, 4 bedrooms. The dining room table is a big, beautiful, sturdy thing that just screams for people to sit around it and be a community every night. We are VERY well taken care of around here.

The only drag, and certainly what will become the cross that I bear in terms of staying connected with my family and friends, is that we have very limited access to the Internet. I do have a computer at work, but I can't use Facebook or anything like that there. This is all part of learning to live simply, which is one of the main reasons I became a JV; I wanted to purify my faith and life by rooting it in the Gospel, and part of that is giving up worldly goods. Having such a great house makes that a little more difficult, but we're at least going to try going without internet. I don't know if it will last; we plan to revisit the issue in about a month and make a decision as a community. Until then, my apologies if I'm slow to get back to you!

We visited each other's placements the last two days (after a lovely tour d'Camden led by Nick, an FJV, and my amazing cousin), and I have to say that I think we were all placed really well. I like my supervisor, Irma. She's a cool lady, and I look forward to working with her.

Also (I don't have photos of it yet, but believe me), I got a pleasent surprise: I get my own office!!! I am officially a grown up, with a job and an office! Granted, my computer there leaves something to be desired, but I'll take what I can get.

Last night marked our first trip to Philadelphia, so we hopped a PATCO subway to the big(ger) city. We had a great time with some Philly FJVs at a bar called Noche, and then headed back to the Philly JV house. It was a good time. Those of us who headed back last night got caught in a truly diluvian rainstorm last night. I actually took out my contact lenses and carried them in my hand because the rain kept washing them out! Some of my clothes (the ones that can't be dried in the drier) are STILL not dry yet! It was quite the adventure.

I'll write more later about our neighborhood and work-- I start at my job on Monday.

If you want to reach me, PLEASE email me instead of using Facebook (call me for the address; I don't want to put in on a public blog.). It will be easier for me to respond to you. Or you can send me snail mail (like my lovely friend Sara did-- I got a letter this morning!)-- call, text, or email for the address. :)

Take care, everyone!

Molly