Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice

Stories from the Street by Brita Miko

Brita Miko worked as a Women's Community Worker in the East End of Vancouver. These are a few of her reflections and impressions of people she met and those who befriended her in that community. Names have been changed for privacy reasons.

For an article that futher investigates the world of Vancouver's missing women, see http://www.missingpeople.net/the_hidden_world_of_hookers-june_8,_2002.htm

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Joe was born three blocks from where he now works. Both his parents are heroin addicts. Now at seventeen he is a male prostitute. He's been a heroin addict for a year, and sells his body for money to feed his addiction. He told me he doesn't want to be like this forever. He tried quitting once and he was able to last eight days. The drugs were out of his body, but not his mind. He couldn't get the thoughts of it out of his head, so he shot up again. Sometimes he comes down to Granville Street for a free meal before he heads off to shoot up.

Shaun's a street kid. He's lived on the street for three years. It's better than home.

Brenda is a beautiful girl about my age I think. She has two children. She worked at an agency as a prostitute for years underage, and a week ago started on the street. She hates it and wants off. She knows it's dangerous. I talked to her about God and she said she went to church until she was about twelve. She said she used to often pray to God and he never answered her prayers.

My first night out on the street I met a girl named Chris. She had no shoes. We gave her shoes and her boyfriend Bill, juice and watched him puke it all up, cup after cup. Ran into her again and she said they were trying to clean up so that they could get their daughter back. She said she was working so that they could get money to fly away to Saskatchewan. I told her about an airline that had cheap flights. Saw her again a few nights ago. She had been hit and left on the ground. By the time I saw her she was fast asleep and covered in tremendous amounts of sweat. Bill said, "Yeah, I'm the asshole." He told me she had not slept for six days... working for him. He told me he loved her and had called her mom to come get her out of here. She is dying. She is twenty-three and HIV positive. He can not stand to watch her die anymore. I told him that if her mom does not come and she wants out that she can call me. I know the way out. I told him God loves him, more than he loves Chris and God doesn't want to watch him die anymore. He nodded. I prayed over Chris.

I saw Deanna a few weeks ago. She had two black eyes. I told her I was sorry about her eyes and asked if he did it often. She said no, it was just some guy that didn't like her very much.

Jean is nineteen and has been working the street for six years. She wants out but says it is really hard because whenever she is out and gets low on money she thinks, how can I get more money? An hour later, she's two hundred dollars richer. It's so hard to get out, don't ever start, she told me.

There was a resident that never spoke much in Bible study, but when he did I always appreciated his words, for they were sincere and true. He was humble and quiet, and to me he shone like a star. When talking about how we are as people he once said his bikes always looked shiny, but needed an oil-change. I laughed and recorded his words.

Another time he said, "I kept putting prayer and meditation on the shelf, until I went through years of just not making it."

Two days before he was to graduate from the program he had to leave. He had failed a urine test. On the weekend he had gotten too high on cocaine and took heroin to bring himself back down. I pray God would be close to him wherever he is.

On the corner of Oppenheimer Park a couple weeks ago I was out with Streetlight. A prostitute saw the blue jacket and came running across the street to me and began to cry, "I'm so scared. I'm so scared." I held her as she cried and though most of her words were incoherent I understood snatches. "I don't want the devil to get hold of all of me... Thank you Jesus for sending this girl to me... I'm so scared." I prayed with her, and I told her that I knew the way out. "I can help you," I said. "I know somewhere safe we can go." She wasn't clean and she was terrified. And then another woman was there yelling at her and five or six people that had been on the hill behind me, came close. She began to run away asking for me to come with her. "I can't!" I yelled and then everyone was swearing at everyone and there was so much tension and rage. She ran crying away and I was left watching the aftermath, praying for the Spirit to come down on that comer and bring peace. And He did. I never saw that woman again.

Adrian is one of our many Granville Street regulars. Saw him yesterday and he said he had been reading the Bible that I had given him (that was so many weeks ago I had completely forgotten giving him one). He said that he sold his soul to the devil when he was in his mother's womb but he put in a clause that at twenty-five he could end the curse if he wanted to. He said that before he was born he told God that he did not want to be a human but a killer whale. He said he had millions of dollars in a bank account that he could not access until he was twenty-five. He said he hated himself. He said he wanted to save the world by going to hell. I told him Christ already did that. He said he loved Mother Earth more than God, and then he littered. He asked if I thought he was crazy. I said no, but that he had been told many lies... and he had believed them. He said he knew some of it was lies. I told him I would pray that confusion wouldn't bind him and he might know clearly what was truth and what was lies. He told me that he was praying for me too.

I met Elaine last night as I was waiting for the bus. She has AIDS and is dying. She started hooking when she was thirteen--that was seventeen years ago. She is going back to B.C.C.W. next week and is looking forward to it. But, she says I should come and play softball with them; bring some people from my church. It's lonely in there, never seeing people from the outside. People that smile, and are real, and have hope. I said I would love to come. She said just to play softball, volleyball or sing choruses, whatever… the women love visitors. She said lots of women from East Hastings are in and out there. I wonder what it would be like to be thirteen and turning tricks--or thirty and having AIDS. I asked her if she wanted out ever, and she said all the time. She said that she would be getting out soon though, by dying. She said, I know, it's the easy way out. I told her I knew another way. She knows there's God and there's heaven. She doesn't understand Jesus. She believes God can forgive us without Jesus. Just by His mercy. She needs to understand that the wages of sin is death, BUT the gift of God is eternal life. She needed to work, I needed to go home. She left and I sat there waiting for my bus. A man named Jeff began talking to me; he was a lonely bachelor looking for a date. I began praying that my bus would come soon. Jeff told me I better get--on the next bus and get out of here, because if he had his way I'd be going with him in his car. East Hastings is dangerous. I prayed the Granville bus would come soon and it did. I was wanting out so much and I had only been sitting there for three quarters of an hour. I can't imagine how much Elaine wants out but can't. It's no more dangerous for me there than it is for her. It's just Jeff had mercy on me because I was young and naive and protected by God. He might not have the same pity for Elaine. People think they get what they deserve. She doesn't think she deserves better, and he doesn't think she deserves better. That's the miracle about God. He gave us what we did not deserve. It's hard to accept because we're used to thinking all we deserve is nightmares and hell and death. And we do. And that's what Jesus got, was my nightmares, hell and death. And I got abundant life. It's not what I deserved. It was grace.

I had heard a lot about Arlene before I met her... that she was in an abusive relationship; that he was very sweet, that she did want out. And when I met her, I understood it to be true. She kept a big smile on her face for the passing cars as she answered our questions, rarely looking at us. We asked how she was doing. Smile, nod, "okay." We asked if she wanted to leave. Smile, nod. I told her that we didn't have a woman's worker at the mission right now, but until we did we would do whatever he could to get her off the street. Smile, nod. I told her she was beautiful, and she was. Smile, nod. She hugged us all and thanked us, smiled at the passing johns. Andrea told her that if she was ever awake at 9:00 Sunday morning to come down to her church, we'd love for her to come. Smile, nod... but now she was close to tears. She said she needed to be working, and so we left her. She called after us that God would bless us or be with us. And I looked back to thank her and saw her one last time, smiling for the johns.

When I met Lesha she had just found out she was HIV positive. She was in the hospital, her shrunken body was covered in scabs and scars, and she was trying to make sense of dying. She was trying to make sense also of living--when her life had gone from suffering at the hand of a gross and abusive father to years of suffering on the streets of Vancouver. She was trying to make sense of why, when she wanted to know God so badly, she could never feel His presence. Where had he gone? Then she began to get frustrated with herself, saying that she didn't know what suffering really was. She had seen a special on Mother Teresa and she was ashamed because she had never suffered as much as Mother Teresa's children in Calcutta had or as much as Jesus had, and she began speaking of the agony of Christ. She said she hated it when she became self-pitying and she began apologizing to God for not being more thankful and thanking Him for all she had. She was so grateful and thankful for her life--her pain-filled and ending life. "Thank you, God. Thank you, God. Thank you, Jesus."

I've long believed Jesus is in disguise in the homeless, the hungry, the sick, but this is the first time I felt like Isaiah, "Woe to me. I am ruined. For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty."

I received a letter from a girl who used to be down here. She had gone from prostitution (at maybe 15) to an abusive boyfriend, to an exploitive lesbian before she finally returned home, at age nineteen. She wrote from home, "I feel a very small feeling of happiness for the first time in awhile. God cares for me."

There is a common thread here among the prostitutes. They wash up on these shores after years of tragedy, poverty and abuse. Drugs are everywhere and getting high or stoned on them gives momentary freedom from their broken world. Their existence soon becomes a never ending hustle for a few bucks for more drugs to forget. They will pay for this freedom with their bodies, their dignity, their self-respect, their minds, their hearts and their lives.

I met a fellow named Larry who became a Christian in these woods. God had given me a message about the woman caught in adultery--il1egal sex, on death row, waiting to get stoned. I explained how getting stoned in those days was different from "getting stoned" nowadays and how these streets here are death row, too. I've never been around so much death in my life as I am here (suicides, murders, drug overdoses).

Afterwards Larry said to me, "People are still getting stoned to death." I had never thought of it that way before, but he is right. In the downtown eastside there are 300+ deaths a year from people getting stoned to death by overdosing.

Two thousand years later Jesus is still working with women caught in adultery--illegal sex, on death row, waiting to get stoned. Their hope remains in Jesus who is no more condemning now than he was then; Jesus who knows the cost of their sin and then takes that cost upon himself. He already paid for their freedom with his body, his dignity, his self-respect, his mind, his heart and his life. It’s real easy to throw the first stone. Oh God help me to offer them your freedom and not to cast the first stone.

Adam and Eve and Lust by Derek Weiss

This is part of a letter I wrote to a younger friend who asked me for a Biblical definition of lust. I thought it was suitable for publication here because, while there is no end to books written by and for Christian men about lust, very few approach the topic from the perspective of social justice for women. Be aware that it is written by a man for a man, though I am sure women could benefit from reading it and contextualizing it for themselves too. -- In the first chapter of Genesis, we read that God created man, who was surrounded by material things. God had taken time – more time than he needed, five whole days! – to create a world in which Adam could live. And God wanted Adam to “subdue,” or care-for-for-his-own-benefit, these things. (Genesis 1:28) God gives Adam all the vegetation, and tells him to harvest and eat it. (Genesis 1:29-30) God wanted Adam to relate to the material world, to work with it, and to benefit from it. For our purposes, it is important to note that when the story is fleshed out in the second chapter of Genesis, there is a point when God had given Adam the Garden of Eden to tend (2:15), but had not yet created Eve (which happens in 2:21-22). Let’s call this phase in Adam’s life “pre-Eve Adam.” At this point, Adam would have rightly thought that every existing thing existed for himself and for God. As long as he gave glory and time to God, Adam could be essentially selfish. With the exception of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which God had forbidden him to use, he could make use of all of the natural resources of the world. If he wanted to cut down some trees to make a house, he could. If he wanted to milk a cow for milk, he could. He did not have to ask the trees or the cows what they thought: he did not have to relate to them as persons. The only being he had to relate to as a person was God. Now, given the environmental quagmire we humans have put ourselves in, it is important to realize that he was suppose to be a gardener and not an exploiter. He was not given a mandate to destroy the earth, but to develop it for his own benefit and God’s glory. I like how Eugene Peterson paraphrases Genesis 1:28: “God blessed them: ‘Prosper! Reproduce! Fill Earth! Take charge! Be responsible for fish in the sea and birds in the air, for every living thing that moves on the face of Earth.’” We are to be responsible for the earth. I think God will hold us responsible if we choose to destroy it. But that is an aside. Let’s continue with the story. God sees that Adam is alone, and decides that this is not good. (2:18) The Biblical writer goes out of his way to mention in the next couple of verses that the animals were not suitable helpers: Adam needed more. You had asked me to write some thoughts on lust, so here is where these thoughts begin to take flesh. Lust is essentially the denial of God’s first pondered thoughts in this narrative. Lust says, “It is good for man to be alone.” Lust is, at bottom, a choice to be alone, even when in the company of another. Lust is the denial of relationship. But I am getting ahead of myself. God creates woman out of the rib of man. He does not create her out of the ground, as he has created the animals (2:19), but out of Adam himself. Adam realizes this: He exclaims, “Flesh of my flesh!” We can relate to woman differently than we relate to plants and animals because she is a part of us. She is essentially connected to us. She is not an “it” or a “thing.” She is not a plant or animal for us to use. Lust is a denial of God’s gift of woman as companion. Lust treats woman as if she is another plant or animal created for us to subdue. When we lust, we retreat to Adam’s pre-Eve state. We may think when we are looking at or touching a woman lustfully that we are appreciating her. But lust is not a matter of appreciation, but of confusion. We are confusing “woman” (literally “From-Man,” and thus “From-Us”) with “plant and animal.” We are denying the goodness – and fleeing from the risk and hard work – of genuine community. Much has been written on the evils of “consumer culture,” but I think one of its worst manifestations is in how selfish and inward-looking it can make us. Consumer culture would have the consumer, as an individual, serve only him or herself. In so doing, it purveys the lie that I can live as pre-Eve Adam, forgetting the existence of other people except in how they can serve me. But when Eve is created – and she is created in the hearts and minds of young men in playgrounds and classrooms and school dances daily - Adam is drawn outside of himself into community and relationship. Lust is the denial of true relationship and the affirmation of complete solitude. A tragically common example of this denial is the person who fantasizes excessively about sexual partners who live to please and worship the fantasizer alone, while never actually going out and having real relationships. This person needs others, but chooses to cut themselves off from real relationship. This person needs God and others to help them out of their terrible solitude. God was not content to leave Adam alone. He lovingly seeks to provide Adam a “helper.” (2:18,20) The word “helper” there is intriguing. It has been used in the past to justify exploitation of women. But the word is also used in Hebrew Scripture to refer to the way that God “helps” Israel: God is Israel’s “helper.” Implicit in the English word “helper” is a sense of lowliness and servitude, but this is not the case in the Hebrew. Eve was Adam’s helper, and, in many ways, his savior. Adam alone is not good. When Eve was created, Adam was drawn outside of himself, into relationship. When you lust, you choose to treat someone like an object to be used, instead of a person to interact with. An extreme example of this is pornography: you will probably never meet the woman on the page or screen splayed out before you. She is simply an object to you. If you actually knew her as a person – her friendship, warm love, her story and life – or if she were your kin – perhaps your sister, daughter, or wife – you would think very differently about her image. In fact, you probably couldn’t think about it lustfully, because relationship – that great destroyer of lust – would prevent it. But as things are, she is merely an object for you to subdue to your own desires. Martin Buber called this the “I/It” relationship, contrasted with the “I/Thou” relationship of two people who relate to one another well, as Adam and Eve were intended to. A similar thing can happen when you are touching a woman. You forget the relationship – you may forget the person altogether – and desire only to get what you want. Or, you remember the relationship: you touch HER, the one who is a part of you, drawn from you, the one God has given you, made in His own image, who re-minds you of Him – the one you know. You connect with your mouths, and exchange the breath of life that God gave each of you. You share intimately because you know intimately – and are known.

Detroit: City of Prayer by Mike Russell

Detroit is a deep well of American history; it is an old city, older than Chicago by fifty years, the oldest American city not found on the eastern seaboard. When the daylight shines, the colors of a ravaged avenue percolate in a visitor's mind. The way entire structures are abandoned, a whole block of storefront retail space devoured by the wake of nothingness is stunning. It goes like this along Woodward Avenue: building of dubious origin housing a beauty supply store. Fast food restaurant, a White Castle, Rally’s Burger, Churches Chicken, a gas station, an abandoned building fenced off, and then a mammoth stone House of God. A broken and burned out brick block. A Federal Office. Another stone tabernacle. A wrecked retail plaza with a shrimp shack restaurant tucked into it like a lone living rat. A house of worship. Another gas station. A cathedral to Christ the King. A video peep show theatre. A Soul food store selling banana pudding, peach cobbler, and pig's feet. Then again- Christianity's insistence. Detroit is an African-American city; the last United States census claimed the city's population to be seventy-six percent African-American. This stands starkly in comparison to Chicago, or New York City, each with about thirty percent African-American population, even cities like Memphis, and Birmingham, Alabama, fall short of Detroit's level of racial concentration. Therefore, Detroit’s reputation as a racially divided city is not mere stereotype; it is a heavily populated city of almost a million, predominantly black, surrounded by millions more of predominantly white suburbanites.

Woodward Avenue runs out of downtown Detroit past two major highways, I-75 and I-96 that are buried beneath the earth; it is quite possible to enter and leave Detroit without ever riding along a surface street. Their is a device called the Detroit People Mover that circles the city's core and helps transport people to their place of interest- the Renaissance Center, the Detroit Opera House, the Fox Theatre, Joe Louis Arena and Cobo Hall, Commerica Park, Ford Field and Greektown. The monorail device is a circuit above the city; it circles the streets and altogether eliminates the need for interaction between classes in the downtown core. In Detroit, the streets, the cracked sidewalks where city buses and bulletproof cars careen about, is a dangerous place for many persons at any time of the day or night. The streets truly are the dominion of the poor and disenfranchised because the wealthier person fears simple interaction. In winter, it amazed me my first winter there, the snow is not even cleared from major downtown streets making it almost impossible for older people or disabled persons from using them. Every winter, I witnessed people in wheelchairs get hit by passing cars as they tried to navigate the curbs.

As a newcomer to the city, I could not help think of Nietzsche- Detroit proves something, but what? Does all this pristine religiosity among poverty and disorder prove God's dead, or alive? Had Nietzsche ever been to Detroit? No. He never left European soil, but another philosopher did visit. Alexis de Tocqueville came to America to study penal institutions, for he was a lawyer in post revolutionary France and sought to understand a new democratic mode of criminal justice. Of course, anyone who has read Democracy in America knows that Tocqueville was interested in more than jails. One of Tocqueville's modern French biographers, Andre Jardin, extracted from Tocqueville's diary that while in Michigan the polite Frenchman almost drowned. A canoe guide had the physical appearance of a native person, en francais 'le savage', but to Tocqueville's amazement he spoke excellent French, like a good Parisian. This man was a Metis, the offspring of a French fur trader and a native woman. Tocqueville fell from the canoe and almost drowned from amazement. The New World was aptly named- newness and its manifestation won the Frenchman over to liberty American style. What Nietzsche would have thought is another a question?

On Sunday morning along Woodward Avenue the women come forth in elegant dresses, it becomes their street for the stone shrines blossom brightly. Up and down the church steps young ladies with long legs and old ladies with slow struts parade to the chimes and car honking of family and friends. Automobiles clog the curb, dropping off and picking up loved ones from their house of worship. Why do so many African-Americans love Jesus Christ? A Jewish Caucasian who never lived, visited, or spoke of Africa? The pimps, the prostitutes, the disgruntled groups of corn rolled men vanish- asleep or fearful. They hide in modesty as the church bells strike the faithful back and forth. Sunday is church day; even the businesses along Woodward seem to sponsor the festivities with special deals on large hot meals.

On the bus in Detroit, I once heard a man talking to two teenage girls. The man was extolling his born-again status, he was saved and had nothing to fear, he said his church was so-and-so on Grand River. The young ladies did not disrespect the intrusion into their private discussion. From the back of the bus, I saw their polite smirk, and I heard- "oh yes, I saved too, like I got no church now an’ all, but I'm saved, we's both saved, we's know that, uh-huh." In the city of Detroit, religion is indestructible. Christianity is primary; there are a few black Muslims, they are easy to pick out for they dress in black suits and white robe dresses with headscarves for women. God is highly respectable in Detroit. This is the most startling revelation a life-long Canadian can make in visiting. Like Tocqueville, I almost drowned in the omnipresent religious waters. Even the criminals, those accused of rape, robbery, murder, and drug trafficking understand their misdeeds in spiritual terms, religious terminology is everywhere. Good and Evil. Satan and God. To dispute these dichotomies, to laugh at the saying, to giggle at the volume of prayers that go up to heaven each and every hour from the small patch of soil named Detroit, is to engender deep distrust and indignant righteous hatred. Religion is laughed at in so many places in Canada, it is routinely called out to blame for child molestation, the oppression of women, mocked as cover for greediness; in total, religion, chiefly Christianity, is contemptible because it is viewed as corrupt and obsolete. Nietzsche was absolutely correct, in as far as he went; he said in The Gay Science firstly and then later, more musically in Thus Spake Zarathustra, that the European mind had murdered God. The bourgeoisie in it's acceptance of a type of reason, adopting Darwin's science as complete, and coming to value the accumulation of wherewithal as the prime objective of political existence, had killed God, made him obsolete. Ah-ha, I came to think in Detroit, He might be only hiding. While living in Detroit, it didn’t seem totally insane to believe He was exiled in the rubble of the Madison-Lenox Hotel. Where the ragged broken glass windows broadcast decay, God lives on candied yams, fried catfish, green beans, and macaroni and cheese smuggled to him by women with long, conked black hair.

Mike Russell was born, raised and educated in Toronto. As a Librarian he has worked and lived in the sister cities of Windsor/Detroit. His fiction has previously appeared in incunabula, the University of Western Ontario's Graduate Journal of Arts & Literature. He is solely responsible for the content and opinion. ©MikeRussell 2005