SLC Recovery and Support

StreetLife Communities- August 14-15, 2024

There aren’t words for all that is wrong out here. Rising numbers of homeless people coincide with rapidly rising rent. That’s the surface. A man walking on a shattered ankle, his tibia completely out of the joint and nearly rubbing on the ground when he limps.

“You want somebody to look at that, buddy,” a volunteer asked. “Nah, it’s been like that for a long time,” came his reply.

“How long is a long time?” the volunteer asked. “I don’t know. A couple months, maybe.” The longer i looked at it, the more a I realized how badly misshapen and injured the ankle was. My mind flashed back to places far away without medical care or running water, where people died every day from treatable things simply for lack of sanitation and a medical delivery system. I had to shake off the memories. “This is freaking Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the 21st Century,” I wanted to scream out. Well, it is for some I guess.

His situation is complicated. Untreated mental illness. Substance Use Disorder. Crushing poverty. Despair.

Stories from women who’d been beaten and worse. Too many infected wounds to count. And the midst of that first scene and others nearly as bad throughout the night, there were what I’ve come to call “Behold” moments.

A homeless child, a boy not more than seven or eight being looked after out here by his grandfather. Even out here, he was being coached by his granddad to shake a hand firmly and to look me in the eye when we shook hands. The lesson was being taught in a garbage-strewn parking lot surrounded by twenty or thirty tents in differing degrees of disrepair. The child gleefully ran lunches over to people who couldn’t come to get one, so proud to be of service to others. We asked him his name. He told us proudly. I won’t forget it.

How does something so normal, so hopeful, so beautiful happen in the midst of this sea of brokenness? There was something completely right, something completely holy in the encounter. Something not of this world broke into the fester and agony of this city. How is that possible? I don’t know. Behold!

This is our community.