S2:E24: trials and tribulations
Thursday, March 11, 2021
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Episode description: Once upon a time, it was unthinkable to turn away a stranger in need. Today, Sarai Waters talks about being homeless, and brings to light a sector of society in need of hospitality.
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This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about coming together in a world that pulls us apart. From Oakland California to Hamilton Massachusetts, I’m Laura Joyce Davis.
Sarai:
Homelessness is dry hands and cracked lips
and prayers for hot showers at Lava mae on Tuesdays.
It’s 5 different outfits in one bag:
5 tops, 4 bottoms, and a jumpsuit with 2 pairs of shoes.
Homelessness is being a quick change artist in the McDonald’s restroom at 6 AM.
The water is cold and so are the stares,
But your pity isn’t needed here.
There are enough parties of one to go around and I seem to have misplaced my invite
I refuse to smell like the fire I’ve walked through
Or the human scat I almost stepped in.
I am the product of my environment.
Of vigilant nights and studious days.
Of nights cloaked in newspapers that cover exposed joints like fresh pastries;
Fragile and warm.
Homelessness is dehumanizing.
And there’s always room here,
Because homelessness doesn’t discriminate.
Laura: Not far from our house in Oakland, Rick hangs out by the offramp to the highway. Rick’s face looks like the map of a hard life. There are deep lines etched on his forehead and cheeks, and his blue eyes are bloodshot and teary. His speech is slurred and scratchy, and he always looks startled when we remember his name. Over the years we’ve handed Rick food and socks and water bottles out our car window in the space between when the stop light turns from red to green. Our kids have made him care packages and included him in their bedtime prayers. Occasionally I’ve found Rick waiting outside the nearby grocery store, and have bought him orange juice or a sandwich or offered him whatever else I had in my sack of groceries that he could eat without cooking. Rick is among the over 28,000 homeless people in the San Francisco Bay Area. As far as I can tell, he sleeps in a tent in the thicket of trees just beside the highway.
In the sixteen years that I’ve lived in Oakland, I’ve watched the homeless population grow. Encampments have sprung up all over the city; entire blocks or parking lots of tents with makeshift shelters and sometimes even solar panels.
Even before the pandemic, the San Francisco Bay Area had the third largest homeless population in the nation, second only to New York and L.A. According to San Francisco city data, for every one person who escapes homelessness, three more people take their place. Unlike other tech hubs like Seattle and Austin, San Francisco’s urban development is extremely regulated, which means that there are tighter restrictions on how much can be built. More restrictions means less housing. And less housing means more homelessness.
Until recently, homelessness was considered a problem for individual cities and counties to solve. But since the Bay Area includes regionally mobile homeless populations that span nine counties and 101 cities--among them San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, and Berkeley--those county and city lines can get fuzzy fast.
The Bay Area is not alone in these challenges. Other U.S. cities like New York and L.A. are dealing with their own homelessness challenges; nearly a quarter of the United States’ homeless population resides in those two cities.
Most of my experiences with homeless people have looked a lot like my interactions with Rick. But recently I spoke with someone who challenged every assumption I had about homelessness.
Sarai: Hi, my name is Sarai Waters and I'm an apprentice with the Shelter in Place podcast.
Laura: Sarai was among the first to join the apprenticeship program that we launched a few months ago to train and mentor women podcasters and creative entrepreneurs. She came to us from Karma Compass, a blog founded by Edissa Nicolás Huntsman, who reached out to me to recommend Sarai.
I could immediately tell in our interview that Sarai was smart and curious--but she was also grounded in a way that suggested experience beyond her years. She told me calmly about how she went to grad school as a film student in L.A. but these days was more interested in becoming a business owner and audio editor. And then just as calmly she told me about the time in her life when she was homeless.
Sarai: I was homeless for six months. We were homeless in LA for 20 days, and I was homeless again in San Francisco--on the streets specifically--for 45 days.
Laura: Sarai didn’t fit any of the stereotypes. Sarai's experience reminded me of a phenomenon I read about recently called “hidden homelessness.”
“Hidden homelessness” is when people have temporary solutions to shelter--maybe couch surfing, staying with friends or family, sleeping in cars, or even in abandoned buildings or parks. But because they’re able to present well during the day, it’s not obvious that they’re homeless.
Women and youth are more likely to be among the hidden homeless; they’re also less likely to seek help from shelters or social services. The first time Sarai was homeless, her mom was homeless with her, and she was attending grad school.
Sara: I was homeless for a total of 20 days in Los Angeles in grad school. My mom was my rock during that time. We didn't have any money to sleep anywhere because my FAFSA hadn't kicked in.
So my days were like any other day. It was almost like I wasn't homeless. I went to class from 9:00 AM to 10:00 PM. Having to get up early, being in class all day, it didn't hit me until night. But around 10 o'clock on the dot, it would hit me that I had no idea if I was sleeping at a park bench at night. There'd be nights where she'd be like, “well, we're sleeping in the baseball park.” And I'd be like, “okay.”
The baseball park lights did not go off until 11 o'clock, so it'd be super bright out there, and we'd have to wait until the field closed, and then we’d sleep wrapped up in every single item of clothing that we brought to LA. All we had was our jackets. We were on the metal park bench. I couldn't sleep beyond two o'clock in the morning because that's when the cold would set into the bowl of the valley where we were. I'd be so cold, and I'd be up until six, when we could go to McDonald's, get washed off, and change clothes.
Some days it was easier to accept than others. Sometimes I separate myself from my emotions to help me get through traumatic events. That's not necessarily the best, but that has been my coping mechanism for as long as I can remember. And during that time it was my go-to, because that was the only way I was going to make it through class. I'd have to step out of what I just endured the night before, go to school, get all of that done, be around my classmates who have perfectly normal lives, and then I'd have to go back to sleeping at a park bench at night. It was kind of like I had to step in and out of myself.
None of my teachers knew what was going on. My classmates, however--they knew that I was struggling with my living situation, and some of them asked where I was staying. Some of them would have given me space if they had space in their apartment. But one of them in particular put my mom and I up in a hotel for about four or five days, and that shocked the heck out of us because we were like, “you don't even know me! Like we just have classes together.” He was one of the most wonderful humans I've ever met in my life. (I’m) really grateful that he did that for us and gave us a reprieve, because that's really what it felt like.
Laura: We’ve titled this second season of Shelter in Place Pandemic Odyssey, because as we’ve grappled with what it means to be human in our world right now, my family and I have also been on a journey that has taken us from California to Massachusetts, and called into question just about everything we’ve encountered along the way. We’ve had some tough times on that journey, and there’s been a lot of loss--but we’ve also been the recipients of hospitality and kindness that has pushed us to consider that maybe it’s not such a bad thing to let go of some of our former ways of living.
Early on in the original Odyssey, Odysseus runs into some tough luck when he angers the god Poseidon, who stirs up a storm that leaves Odysseus shipwrecked. His life is only spared because the goddess Athena puts a protective veil over him to save him from the crashing waves and jagged rocks. At last Odysseus washes up in a river inlet. He’s lost everything--even his clothes--so he sleeps naked in the forest under a pile of dead lives. Things look pretty grim, but once again Athena comes to the rescue. She appears to the Phaeacian princess Nausicaa in a dream and convinces her to do her laundry in the river where Odysseus is sleeping. The next day, Nausicaa does her laundry as suggested . . . and finds Odysseus. Thanks to Athena’s magic, his shabby appearance only makes him more appealing to the princess. Nausicaa gives him directions to her palace, where he is restored thanks to the Phaeacians’ incomparable hospitality.
This hospitality to strangers isn’t unique to The Odyssey. It was such an important cultural value in ancient Greece that there was a word for it. That word was “xenia,” translated as “guest friendship.” It’s where we get our word “xenophobia,” as in “fear of strangers.” Xenia wasn’t just a synonym for hospitality; it was a concept that conjured up the expectation that strangers and foreigners would receive shelter and hospitality--at times even when they belonged to rival or enemy cities. The god who cared most about xenia was Zeus, god of sky and thunder, king of the gods of Mount Olympus. The Odyssey is full of accounts of xenia being honored or ignored, always with notable consequences. Mistreatment of strangers wasn’t just a failure of xenia; it was an affront to Zeus.
Sarai knows a thing or two about xenia. She’s experienced both the kindness and disregard of strangers. But to really understand how she became homeless--first in L.A. and then later in San Francisco, we have to go back further in Sarai’s story.
Sarai says that she had a happy childhood. She’s from Newark, New Jersey, but her family moved around a lot. She’s lived in Pennsylvania, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, California, New York, and North Carolina. When Sarai was eleven, her parents got divorced--but even her memory of this event is surprisingly positive.
Sarai: They're beautiful people--separately.
Laura: She and brother still saw their dad, and when he remarried, they gained a half-sister. Fast forward to 2015, when Sarai’s brother was off at the Naval Academy and Sarai and her mom were living in Miami. Sarai didn’t know it then, but she was about to embark on her own Odyssey.
Sarai: Our journey of leaving Miami and going to LA--it was a journey of its own. Around 2015, there were a lot of changes going on in my spiritual life, which is really what kept me rooted through all of this. That started with my church. We felt like we needed to leave because there were a lot of things going on that we didn't agree with. And shortly before leaving, I kept getting people coming up to me, and I was like, “okay, I guess I'll listen.”
Laura: The changes in Sarai’s spiritual life were complicated. Sarai says she’s had faith in God all her life, but she started to question that faith when the people at her church became controlling. Sarai and her mom were struggling to pay their bills, but when Sarai’s mom asked for help, they turned her away.
In the midst of all of this, strangers kept approaching Sarai and telling her that they thought that God was calling her to grad school in L.A. The only problem was that Sarai didn’t want to go.
When the messages kept coming, she tried to be open. She applied for a program and turned in her financial aid application. Still, life felt too unstable to make a move across the country without a place to land. And then life made that decision for her.
Sarai: My mom had recently lost her job because her car got repossessed and she wasn't able to go to work. We were running low on funds. We were living with a friend. They literally bought our plane ticket, gave us cab fare and drove us to the airport the day before registration closed for me to enroll. In those few weeks before we left for LA, I knew that God was leading me to go back to school. My mom and I, we're those type of people who are very much prepared for crazy things to happen. I have crazy faith where doing stuff like that doesn't phase me at all. I knew everything would be okay--even though I had no clue that things were not in fact going to be okay.
When we got to LA, we used all the money for the cab fare. We enrolled me in school and we had to call my grandma to get us a hotel for the night. And we were like, okay, we're okay. For two days. By this time classes had started. After those two days were over, we were like, okay, what do we do now? We waited. We listened. We prayed, we sat silently. Nothing. And we knew that we were going to be sleeping outside that night. And so we walked down the hill toward this baseball park and it's like 10 o'clock at night because my film classes were getting out super late. so we were like, all right, we can do this.
We were not prepared at all. We thought California was sunny. It's sunny during the day. Not at night, it's completely a desert. We were the only people that would sleep in the park at night. And I'm really thankful for that because during that time, my faith was not there to see a way out. I knew that my FAFSA would eventually kick in. I knew that I would eventually find a roommate who I could live with, but in my heart, I was freaking out. I was upset with God. And my mom and I would switch being upset with God
When you read the Bible, David was the most real person I've ever heard of because he'd have his joyful moments and he'd have his moments where he's like, do you see this? They're trying to kill me. And in this instance, it was like, God was trying to kill me.
Laura: I want to stop here and acknowledge that Sarai’s tolerance for adventure and risk is high; she was ready to move across the country without being sure where she’d land. I know that feeling, because while my family and I knew that we had family waiting for us in Massachusetts when we set out across the country, we didn’t exactly know how we were going to make ends meet. The whole thing felt a little crazy--but it also felt exactly like what we needed to do.
Sarai says that while she spent plenty of time being angry with God, she wasn’t scared.
Sarai: My relationship with God. It definitely got a little bit complicated and simplified at the same time. I was no longer reading the Bible, but there were things that were still in my heart that I knew to be true. I would still talk to him every day. I always tell people, I found God when I left the church because I had to learn who God was for myself through experience. And I really think that's why he took us through that process of homelessness so that we could truly rely on him.
And nobody else, because we didn't know anybody on the West coast. My mom went through all of that with me. It was literally just me and her out there on faith. And every single day, we had no clue what was going to happen, but we knew that we were going to be okay. As long as we had each other and as long as one of us was balanced enough emotionally to still be talking to God
At some point during the 20 days, I figured if God has me out here, he's got to protect me. I definitely knew it was going to be a long haul. How I did it. I can't ascribe it to anything, but God.
I was like, I didn't put myself out here. You did, which means there's a purpose for this that I do not see at all, but that means I have to get to the other side of it so I can tell other people. My story isn't helpful if it reaches no one. So I just kinda knew that he had me, and he did.
Laura: Sarai mentioned King David from the Bible, and I’ve mentioned Odysseus, but those old stories aren’t the only ones that come to mind when I hear about those early weeks in L.A. before her financial aid kicked in. The Hebrew Bible is full of stories about prophets that were called to live radically. These stories don’t get a lot of play because they are admittedly weird. God asks Ezekiel to lie down on his left side for 390 days. He tells Hosea to marry a prostitute. Jonah gets swallowed by a big fish when he ignores God’s command to go to Nineveh. We often think about prophecy as telling the future, but the Hebrew prophets were often doing something even bigger: they were providing a tangible example for society to see how things could be different, or a warning of what life could look like if nothing changed.
Growing up in the church, Sarai was familiar with these stories. And she says that she does think that her time being homeless was a kind of prophetic act, that as much as she didn’t want to be there, for a season, she did sense God calling her to this very countercultural way of living. But that realization came later, after she’d completed grad school and had moved up to San Francisco. Once again, she made a move on faith--this time believing that a friend in the area would be able to take her in. But when that arrangement didn’t work out, she found herself back on the streets.
Sarai: The first 20 days of homelessness in LA, I wasn't thinking in Biblical terms at all. I was thinking, “what the heck?” It wasn't until my experience in San Francisco, where I actually had the time to sit down because it was a less stressful situation where I was allowed time to meditate and think on what exactly was it that I was going through . . . that helped me link it to those Old Testament moments.
God has always been a source of peace for me. I knew God all of my life. My mom tells me I came into this world knowing God. I grew up hearing Him. God talks to me in my dreams. We both felt like it was something that we had to go through. I knew that whatever I was supposed to be learning--humility, not caring about what other people think, or worrying about how many clothes I have, if I'm wearing the exact same outfit that I wore for the past five days--it was a really humbling and beautiful experience. That was a much better experience actually. Because I knew what to expect. I knew God had me. I was like, “okay, God's going to provide for my food. He's going to provide for shelter.”
I would say I had enough faith to start the journey. I was like, “Oh, this is part two. Okay. Got it. Got it.” And by that point I was like, “well, we know what to do.” We had sweat pants and long Johns sweaters, coats. When it rained, we would sleep in bus depots. And he allowed us to be practical. We used food stamps, which some people are ashamed to do, but when you need to use food stamps, you use food stamps. They were our bread and butter.
We would meet random other homeless people.
Homeless people do not usually talk to housed people. It's less intimidating to talk to someone who actually understands what you're going through versus someone who looks at you and pities you.
We were able to have open and honest conversations with strangers, (like) other youth that I was in the shelter with. I actually became like the shelter mom. And I would make sure that everybody was okay and they knew not to play games with me because I am not the one, don't step on my wet floors. Cause I like to mop. That was my peace and quiet time.
But I made sure that things were running smoothly. They would talk to me about what they were going through, why they ended up there. Some of them just had disagreements with their parents. Some of them were kicked out of the house because they were gay, and that was really hard to listen to. But actually what's really crazy is going to San Francisco was the first time that I was really put in the world of the gay community. Like it was the first time where I was able to have an open and honest conversation with them to understand them. Like I've always had a heart for the community because I'm in it and was in denial at the time.
I met some really wonderful people out in San Francisco. Being out there is what taught me what community was. I've never felt community, like community, you know, like “I've got your back, you got my back,” with people outside of the homeless community.
Laura: Sarai’s story makes me realize how many assumptions I’ve had about the homeless population even as I’ve tried to be compassionate toward them. I never would have imagined that Sarai would find the best community of her life in a homeless youth shelter. But from another angle it makes sense. So much of what we think will make us happy--wealth, possessions, status, power--just sends us along on the hamster wheel of striving. With all of those things stripped away, she was more able to see the xenia in the people she met at the homeless shelter--that “guest friendship” that welcomed in strangers at their most difficult hour.
Sarai did mention that some of her friends at the homeless shelter had come from other cities where their experience had been a lot more difficult. San Francisco has more supportive housing per resident than any other U.S. city, but as the city’s homeless population continues to grow, social services can’t come close to keeping up with the needs of that population. New programs addressing homelessness in the Bay Area have made permanent housing solutions a priority, but in those efforts, temporary shelters and other emergency options for sheltering the homeless have fallen by the wayside. Bay Area shelters are maxed out, able to offer assistance to only a third of the homeless population, leaving the other two thirds to seek shelter on the streets. If Sarai were homeless in San Francisco today instead of four years ago, her experience might be very different.
She still believes that there was purpose to her time being homeless, that it’s something God was calling her to for a season. But she said that the experience also showed her that she couldn’t just be passive and wait for God to do something; she needed to take action.
Sarai:I had super unrealistic beliefs about getting out of that situation. I've learned to ground myself since then, but at the time I was like, “okay, God got me in this. He'll get me out some super crazy way.” And that is not what happened at all. God was like, “you have resources, go to the youth shelter, talk to the people there, see a counselor, talk to them about housing options. Talk to them about getting a job.”
Homeless people can not successfully have a job if they do not have a mailing address to send their insurance information and all the things that businesses and corporations require to be sent to your house. Thankfully at the time when I was in San Francisco, I was still young enough to enter into a youth/young adult homeless shelter. There I had to enter a raffle for bedding each night. There's like an emergency bed that you can stay in one night and you have to come back the next day and try to get the bed. And then there's also a list that you put your name on. And when people move out, you move up on the list to get a bed. So that gives you a place of residence. So you can have an address so you can get a job.
But a lot of people don't go to shelters because shelters are not always safe. They have rats. There are other people there who deal with pests, ticks. That's why they require you to have TB shots when you go into shelters. If you're like staying there as a resident, it's really not a safe or clean environment to live in. So it's not that they don't want to get a job. They just don't have the right circumstances to get a job.
And thankfully, I was afforded the opportunity in the young adult shelter. It was a lot cleaner. They're much more willing to work with you when you're a young adult to get you out there to get you housing, with subsidized payments. There's still politics there, but it's less than what you're dealing with in an adult shelter. So that really helped me get my footing out the door. And then it was actually the day of my birthday, where I finally turned the age where you're no longer allowed to be in the shelter--I believe it's either 24, 25--and I had just turned that age. And so I was no longer allowed to stay there, and at the time I didn't have enough money for subsidized housing. But thankfully my friend already had a job that was able to get her a foothold in the door for subsidized housing.She was able to save money so that we could get an apartment together and then move out.
It's not impossible, but it's very hard to get out of homelessness without knowing the right people and having the right community around you.
Most homeless people do not have the right community around them to help them get out of the situation that they’re in.
Laura: Sarai said she was lucky to have a friend who could help her get out of that situation. But even once she had housing--even with a graduate degree--getting a job turned out to be a lot harder than she’d imagined.
Sarai: I couldn't find work. I would apply, and apply, and apply, and nothing. Nothing came through. I was newly off the streets, had no car. I was like, okay, where can I get to easily and quickly? I was applying to the mall and the library. It's just a short walk away from the apartment. And I applied to so many stores no doors would open for me. I had to go back to New Jersey. I was finally able to get a job when I got back to New Jersey. I was working at a pretzel bakery. Lots of pretzels, great energy from teenagers. What's not to love?
Laura: I have to confess that even as a person of faith who has a pretty high risk tolerance and sense of adventure, it’s still hard for me to understand how Sarai was able to embrace being homeless. I asked Sarai if she feels any differently about that experience several years later, if she’s ever doubted that what she was doing was not only purposeful, but prophetic.
Sarai: There were definitely moments of doubt, but not at that time. I don't know how to describe it, but I never questioned his realness to me during that time of homelessness. I had no choice. Like he was my only lifeline and I held on for dear life. And honestly, I'm glad I had that experience because had I not, I would not have realized just how much I need God in my life. As my center.
Laura: Life hasn’t turned out the way Sarai thought it would, but she’s embraced it anyway. She’s still doing creative work and she doesn’t regret going to grad school--but at least for now, she’s not using her degree in film. She’s more interested in investing in the relationships around her, in extending xenia to her boyfriend and her family and her dog. She hopes that someday she can have a family of her own.
I’ve been ending these episodes with an invitation, and so I asked Sarai what she would like us to know. She said to remember that our homeless populations have stories we’ll never know unless we take the time to seek them out.
In researching this episode, we learned that San Francisco has the second-highest level of household income inequality in the country. Our homeless population isn’t only the unemployed and the mentally ill; they're also people with jobs, who work full-time and still can't afford to live in the city.
Legend has it that in ancient times, the god Zeus would disguise himself as an ordinary human in ragged clothes just to make sure that people still knew how to practice hospitality, that they hadn’t forgotten the importance of xenia. In the book of Hebrews in the Bible, one verse reads, “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”
For those inclined to view our homeless populations as people not pulling their weight in society, maybe we’d do well to imagine them instead as the divine disguised.
We talk a lot at Shelter in Place about transforming communities by first transforming ourselves. In this case, we can do both. We can recognize the humanity in the homeless people in our lives, maybe start by just introducing ourselves and asking their name. We can resist the urge to think we know their stories, and instead investigate what our cities are doing to support them.
Each year the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development awards Homeless Assistance Grants to communities that provide housing and services at the local level, including street outreach, emergency shelters, and rapid re-housing. The current COVID Relief Bill in Congress would provide multiple methods of assistance to low-income renters, to those recovering from homelessness, and people who are currently homeless.
Sarai said that she hopes her story humanizes homelessness for those who hear it, that it inspires others to ask what we can do to help our homeless populations.
Last week Sarai became the first to complete our apprenticeship program here at Shelter in Place. In that time she’s learned about everything from audio editing to pitching her ideas to interviewing with compassion. But she’s also taught our team a lot in that process. She’s reminded us that at the end of the day, all of our hustling and striving matters a lot less than we think it does. That xenia is still an important cultural value, even if we don’t have to worry about Zeus striking us down. Even in a pandemic, she’s helped this metaphorical shelter to feel a little more like a home.
If you’d like to learn more about how to support the homeless population in this country, we’ve included some links for you in our show notes. This episode is dedicated to Sarai Waters, who was the assistant audio editor for this episode. Eve Bishop was our associate producer and Gabi Mrozoski was our assistant editor.
If you’d like to support the good things happening here, including our new apprenticeship program where we’re training the next generation of women podcasters, you can find information on how to donate to Shelter in Place on our website, shelterinplacepodcast.info. If you’d like to help us but can’t donate, asking your friends and loved ones to subscribe to Shelter in Place helps Hurrdat find us sponsors and expands our community. Check out our new referral program where we send you gifts when you get your friends to subscribe. You can find that at refer.fm/shelter.
Shelter in Place is part of the Hurrdat Media network. The Shelter in Place music was created by Chase Horsman at Reaktor Productions. Additional music and sound effects for this episode come from Storyblocks. Sarai Waters was assistant audio editor, Gabi Mrozowski was the assistant editor, and Eve Bishop was assistant producer for this episode. Nate Davis is our creative director, Sarah Edgell is our design director, and our amazing season 2 apprentices are Eve Bishop, Melissa Lent, Gabi Mrozowski, and Isobel Obrecht.