February 17
With predicted lows in the 20s, I am relieved when I find my benefactor has deposited another couple grant in my account. This means I can fill the empty propane tanks my friends use to keep warm in the high wind Columbia gorge corridor they live in. Some of the women seek indoor shelter during extreme weather but only if they have a partner willing to protect their gear while they’re away. Threat of loss is a major factor in the decision making of the homeless. I can’t imagine having nothing. I know of folks who have several times lost everything, even their ID. Can you imagine losing everything?
So, when I fill propane tanks, I have one of the men accompany me to the propane service. Yesterday it was Benny. Benny and his mother Susie live together at the delta. Benny is around 35 I’m guessing. He’s 6’5” and a gentle giant. Susie adores her son, he’s really the only reason she’s still alive. On our drive I asked Benny to tell me about his childhood. He said his mother had one man, sometimes a husband, after another. Most were abusive, a couple decent. But all tired of Susie. She can be tiresome. At 55 or so, she’s wracked with pain from rheumatoid arthritis and Hepatitis C. And she has an anxiety disorder (I’m not a psychiatrist, so just guessing here). She talks a lot. Mostly she’s either joyful about a small kindness someone has shown her (she was given laminated photos of Benny with their deceased dog this week by someone who ministers down there and she was overjoyed with their kindness to her) or worried about Benny. Most of the other campers find her tiresome, she doesn’t stop talking. Yesterday she was ill. She couldn’t eat, she was very pale and one of her hands was swollen. She wasn’t willing to seek medical help. Benny says she doesn’t like what they tell her.
So, despite Susie’s needs I find it unusual for a man to give his youth to his mother. I’m a mother and I know my children would not let me live with them in a tent. I don’t know the whole story but Benny told me yesterday that this is the first winter they’re living outdoors all year. In past winters they’ve been able to find shelter during the bad weather. He amended that, and told me, well I could find indoor housing, mom can’t. My guess is they can’t find housing that will take both of them. Benny’s not going to abandon his mom, Susie won’t leave Benny.
With a little prodding I was able to piece together more of Benny’s story. I mentioned when a step son gets to be a teenager he often runs into trouble with step dad. That’s when Benny opened up. He said he was the worst prig a son could be because when he was 14 he was sick and tired of being beat by his current step father and he ran away. He left his mother and sister behind to be beat by that man without him. He judges himself very harshly for that. I told him he was just a kid, and he shouldn’t judge himself so harshly, he said, he’d rather judge himself than have someone else judge him.
He hugged me before getting out of the truck to help the others unload the tanks.
PS. I heard there's been a charge levied against Steve Kimes for his involvement with Village of Hope.
It reminds me of this verse "A ruler who oppresses the poor is like a driving rain that leaves no crops." Proverbs 28:3
and "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us." Romans 8:35-37
If you want to succeed you'll need to switch sides. And let go of your foolish pride.
Frani G