38 Reflection on Working in a Shelter

I’ve had the unique pleasure of being able to work at a men’s shelter for 2.5 years now. In general, it was a very illuminating experience for me as before that time, I had never really had any contact with a homeless person before. I’ve always told people that the biggest thing I learned from working in the shelter is that homeless people really are just people; you get all the same kinds of people at the shelter as you do everywhere else in life (good and bad).

In regards to gender, one of the first things that stuck out to me was the differences in how the shelter residents reacted to female vs. male staff members. I only rarely felt like I was in a risky situation or like I wasn’t being respected but I know my female coworkers were much more likely to be actively threatened by residents and more commonly had to deal with constant sexual innuendos and having their authority be ignored. One of my coworkers ended up quitting because she was physically threatened twice in two weeks (though it was from a community member and not a shelter resident) whereas I have never been threatened in the entire time I worked there.

While I worked at a men’s shelter, we also did a lot of community outreach programs like lunch and dinner programs as well as a laundry and shower program and we also handed out snacks and other supplies (socks, toiletries, etc.) from the front desk to the community. Due to this, I also had lots of contact with homeless women. One of the biggest differences was that I got offered sex quite often; as the shelter didn’t have a parking lot, I had to walk roughly 5 minutes to get to me car and it was pretty common when going home from the afternoon shift (9:30pm) for me to get approached by a woman with an offer. The very first time it happened was incredibly awkward for me but overtime, it quickly became apparent that this was a common process for them as I began to notice that the same women would always approach me with the same script and that even their response to me rejection was scripted as well.

When working a night shift, it was also readily apparent that the women in the community would come at weird hours. Usually by 12:00am the crowd at the front of the shelter would disperse and everything would be quiet until around 2:00 when women would start to show up with requests for food or whatever else. We never had many show up but they were very systematic about sticking to their schedule and they always made sure to hide whatever we gave them in pockets or under their shirts whereas men hardly ever made the effort to conceal what they had. Another thing that was common was that single women would often come to sit on our front steps because they knew that we had cameras and that they would be safer there than anywhere else at night.

During the day, we always had more women than men making use of our laundry and shower programs and most of them came dressed up a bit so that they didn’t really look homeless. I got pretty good at it but when I first started it wasn’t uncommon for me to have the complete wrong impression for why they were coming to the shelter and assume that they were actually dropping off donations or had a meeting in the building. One important note though is that the women that came for the shower and laundry were not usually the same women that we saw coming by the shelter at night. To me, this implies that the women coming during the day were hidden homeless and likely not actually on the street. It also shows that the number of homeless may be much higher in Nanaimo than official statistics state as we had so many coming that we would have to start turning some away when our programs ended for the day.

One of the parts I most loved about working at the shelter was getting a chance to talk to the residents about their lives. Interestingly, most of the residents in the shelter were in their middle age so they often had a lot to talk about. One of my favourite guys to talk to used to go on tour with various rock bands in the 70s as a roadie or stage hand and we made a kind of game out of guessing whether or not he was telling a true story or just making things up. On a less happy note, I always found it incredibly moving to hear about how our residents ended up at the shelter. For a lot of them, it started with broken childhoods and them turning to drugs and alcohol to cope with it. Others talked about bad endings to their relationships where they were forced to become homeless as a result. We did have one guy that actually chose to be homeless, I’m confident that he could have been successful had he wanted to but he doesn’t want to have to work so he has set up a permanent camp for himself in the woods and he rides his bike all around town. He only comes to the shelter when he wants to stay for a few days to shower and make conversation before he checks himself out and goes back to his camp. I think it’s worth bring him up in particular because he chose to be homeless (assuming he is actually telling the truth); this is something I feel confident in saying that women would not choose for themselves as they are at significantly more risk in being homeless than men are.

I never got to work with women to the same degree that I did with men but, in general, I think that men are capable (or at least more likely) to be able to enjoy or be comfortable being homeless. While there was definitely a lot of anger and depression in their situations, the shelter could sometimes feel extremely cheerful and just as there was a lot of guys struggling, there was a lot of guys that seemed more than happy just doing their own thing everyday. In contrast, the times I had contact with homeless woman were tinged with anxiety and desperation (on their part) like they felt they weren’t really supposed to be there. Also, while it’s not something I can directly comment on, I have heard from people working at the women’s shelter that it is much more rife with anger and frustration and that they have far more problems with behaviour between residents than we ever did at the men’s shelter.