Craig and Lynda are now resigned to avoiding the constant hassle of the overpass life, sharing a dead-end side street butted up against the chain link fences meant to keep people away from the freeway. This new spot is equidistant between where the others still stubbornly squat near the money-generating ramps on busy Nordhoff, and the saving grace of the old Methodist Church and community center run by the North Valley Caring Services a few blocks east. Even though Craig, Lynda, Gracie and rest are loathe to take advantage of the food pantry, breakfasts and other services, it’s not an exaggeration to say that with Manny and others so ready to come to them, their proximity to the mission is almost comforting in itself.
It wasn’t surprising to find Gracie relaxed and pleased to greet company, sitting alone in Craig’s tent, spirits buoyed by her new status as the “honorary grandmother” of a baby girl recently born to Emmy, the raw-boned gal who along with boyfriend Mike were caught up in the ultimately unhelpful New Year’s Eve crackdown that put most of the group (including Mike) in the clink. Now living close to Gracie on the sidewalks off Nordhoff, the couple are part of what Craig somewhat emotionally refers to as their family, which includes everyone mentioned so far plus Terry and Amy. “We’ve had our spirit broken,” he confesses, “but we got it back.”
Gracie Crilley wants to help get Emmy into a drug addiction program, so she can get off the street and care for her child herself.
But there’s more… there’s always more…
The child’s twin did not survive until birth. This happened outside, on the ramp, though in the overall scheme of things was not overly dramatized, and everyone soldiered on. Emmy’s aunt in Santa Clarita has taken the baby in, hence the studio portrait Gracie pulled out of her shirt to proudly share. The printed photograph stabs at the heart, a throwback to a simpler, pre-digital time It will not lose it’s preciousness even as it weathers and fades, as a possession stored in a refugee’s belongings must do, and relatively quickly. Slipping back into the first-person witness of the human condition, I feel an uncomfortable sense of awe at the resilience and capacity to endure hardship my friends often show. What I am moved so much by is not Gracie’s cracked fingernails, or the depth-of-field you can achieve with an iPhone, but her happiness while sharing the news, the photograph, the experience of being a grandmother. Don’t believe this photograph. Or at least believe that for a few minutes, Gracie was smiling.
Can somebody please get this woman (and her family) a place to live?
Strong resilient women participated in a self-defense class to better understand techniques for protecting themselves and fighting back when the time is crucial. Laura Rathbone hosted a self-defense class with defense instructor and senior black belt Michelle at North Valley Caring Services on Sunday, March 26th.
Rathbone is very involved in the community and helping people in need. She works tremendously with the homeless community and says too many people are misinformed about the homeless community. She pointed out that over 25% of the homeless are working and that many people couldn’t come to this event because they were working at the time. Rathbone mentioned that she feels it is important for everyone to take a self-defense class.
“I hope you learn something today that will make you more confident,” said defense instructor Michelle.
Michelle expressed the gratitude she feels from being able to impact women who come from different walks of life. She spoke on her childhood of abuse and has overtime learned to accept herself.
“One thing we have in common is that we are strong,” said Michelle. “We are silent, but deadly. We don’t quit!”
Michelle said it is important to always be prepared to defend yourself because you never know when you could get hit. You must always be ready.
Michelle shows the women different techniques in different situations of being attacked.
Rathbone asks Michelle for tips on how to react if one gets attacked while sleeping on the ground.
She also points out how crucial the “metal box” is. It is a guard with our arms that must be put to use in any situation in which one is being attacked.
“You must move quickly in all situations” said Michelle. “You must stay close. When you decide to go in, you have to get back out quickly.”
When fighting back, Michelle says it is important to allow your strike to go further than just hitting someone. To act as though you are aiming for something beyond them so your hits and swings are much more powerful.
“There is a lot of wavelength movement,” said Michelle. “That is used as a particular point of power release for a strike.”
Michelle teaches the women how to react when being attacked by a weapon and the different hand techniques one can use.
“I love being a woman and what we stand for,” said Michelle. “I think we have forgotten who we are. I love the idea of being able to express who we are because we are powerful.”
Michelle says it is important to learn how to forgive ourselves when things happen to us. We need to learn to not blame ourselves and let things go.
“As we learn to love and accept ourselves we are able to love and accept others” said Michelle.
Michelle says to silence all the voices because through this silence comes the physical power one has within.
“You are capable of anything!” said Michelle.
I don’t re-blog the work of others very often, but this photo story by Lauren Valencia, done as part of our Documentary Photojournalism project on homelessness, is worth sharing.
“Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.”
Manny Flores and his outreach team from the North Valley Caring Services bring warm meals, hygiene kits, human kindness and even prayer to people living outdoors. Encampments, alleys, sidewalks, the wash, even groups camped inside the bushes of public parks are visited each Wednesday night. It requires just the right blend of missionary zeal, street cred and unconditional love to gain and keep trust. Some of the spots, such as the “Trails” encampments that line the 405 freeway, are home to the hardest cases of chronic homelessness, notorious for tough, sometimes fatal living conditions. Deaths among the homeless and other street dwellers in this repressed section of North Hills are surprisingly common, and Manny talked about some recent incidents while driving his loaded-down pick-up through the night traffic between spots.
Randy, an elderly gentleman surviving the elements and lung cancer, talks to volunteer Lauren Rathbone and her service dog, and unburdens himself to a sidewalk ministry.
MOTEL LIFE
Outreach includes regular visits to families who have secured temporary shelter in motels along Sepulveda Boulevard, through a voucher program provided by Los Angeles Family Housing. Kids and adults congregate on the balconies as doors open to greet the visitors. One of the motel rooms we visited housed a family of ten…
Chaos reigns at the 405 and Nordhoff. Officer Diaz of the LAPD’s purportedly “compassionate” HOPE program has got a “hard on” for certain members of the homeless community there. This is exactly how it was characterized to me this morning, in remarkably similar language in separate conversations with Lynda, Amy and Terry. The small refugee camp that had once again grown into something that was appearing semi-permanent along the northbound onramp was forcibly dismantled a couple of days ago, and in what appears to be a coordinated effort between state and city officials, sanitation moved in quickly with the LAPD. Most everyone (except Craig and Gracie it seems) was once again ticketed, this time for illegal use of shopping carts. Terry and Amy moved to a nearby residential sidewalk, Lynda and Gracie to another, and once their carts were taken away, all of their belongings remained strewn on the sidewalks. Thursday (tomorrow), they have been warned by Diaz, is “arrest day.” How they are to move their things without the carts, is a Catch-22 level head scratcher…
Stress and anxiety rule the day. Lynda, while still managing to show me her latest artwork, is now desperate to get out of this area, and Terry has plans to move their stuff to another location (which I will not disclose here for the time being). Being out of the jurisdiction of Officer Diaz they believe will lower the threat level to their freedom. Nobody is in a hurry to go back to jail.
Terry showed the most frustration, sifting through their belongings which were organized to look like a yard sale where there was really nothing worth buying. Meanwhile today is Amy’s birthday; considering she was coming off a night where she spent most of Terry’s earnings ($70 on a bag of heroin), she seemed in a reasonably light mood a few blocks away at the North Valley Caring Services Methodist Church site, picking out a free bicycle with help from Manny, Jose Ruiz, Jr. and the others. Terry desperately wishes she would do what she has done before, go into a rehab environment and kick her habit; it’s a decision she has to make for herself and is apparently just not ready…
This week’s events bring to mind what Gracie said during her interview late last year, which bears repeating here:
It is unacceptable that
such conditions exist, and that so many are allowed to fall so low. To sleep outside, no matter the weather, while churches, temples and mosques shutter their doors to keep them out. So much of the most passionate and inspiring writing remains relegated to the comments sections of social media activists. Why aren’t the
professional media people trumpeting this humanitarian crisis? Inexplicable….maybe not. It could be that the media has done all they are entrusted to do, and have done it well.
There is no shortage of intimate and revealing photographs of want and despair, degradation and madness. Stories, too. What is left is for the municipalities and business interests to marshall the resources and strategies to end the scourge. The scourge– in broad terms, that’s how it feels when considering the ubiquity of urban squalor that has taken root. Those out there in the streets, alleys and cars tonight, who have navigated the social services and judicial systems only to land back on their feet in pretty much the same place, wonder when will real change will come …
#oneofusarts #oneofus
“I trusted people too much because of my Christian religion. People would just take advantage and advantage and advantage of me and say, ‘trust me, trust me, I’m a Christian also and lend me, oh I see that you have great credit, but my credit is bad. Can I borrow your social security number?’ This was an escrow lady that’s living in one of my houses right now. Well, it’s her house now. I had sold to her and because of my good credit, she was able to buy my house, but before she could transfer her name over to my name, when the market crashed and everything, she stopped paying me. So the banks were foreclosing on me, not on her, even though I had already sold her the house. It was a big, big mess, a big paper mess. Everything was done crooked.”
Linda Zazanis has a need and ability to continue producing
her nail polish-brushed canvases, knick-knacks and jewelry in the face of
obstacles that are discouraging and sometimes outrageous. Those in the
community who are aware and supportive of her can recognize the use of color
and abstract creations as more than therapeutic.
Linda keeps a small black bag containing tiny
bottles of many colors, some glittery, and she delights in showing off a new
shade of green brought to her by a friend like Gracie in their camp. Her
studio, as it were, is under the cover of a tarpaulin that shelters her from
the elements. It’s a cluttered place to live and work, and one that has been torn down and rebuilt
more times than I can count in the last year. Few in the camp can put together
a shanty like Linda’s.
Late last year, when the city sent a garbage truck to clean
up what was deemed as an overabundance of personal property cluttering up a
public space, Linda was not on site to salvage or protect her possessions, and
along with a lot of other items not considered by her to be expendable were
several of her artworks—finished canvases, and most of the jewelry, statuettes
and other items she had been collecting. Linda, having survived on the streets
for enough years to learn how to balance toughness with grace, is rarely prone to total despair, but during the conversation printed
below she became understandably emotionally when explaining how the lost artwork
affected her.
So they took some of your artwork? What happened?
“They took it. They took it all. For two years I’ve been
doing my artwork. For two years I’ve been collecting jewelry, so I could open a
store. In January, ok, I had two of the counselors from LA Family Housing that
were my helpers, that were willing to go and say that I was highly recommended
to get this loan. Ok? I was going in January. I was ready for it and sanitation
took it all. I mean, took my future. I tried for two years to get up out of
here and it’s like now I’m right back where I started. It’s been 15 years, come
on, give me a break! A person doesn’t try that hard and work as hard as I have,
18 hours a day, 7 days a week, to try and get out of here if they didn’t want
to get out of here, get out of this situation. They wouldn’t do it. They’d say
“Hey screw it!”
There was a three-day notice, but I wasn’t in town. And then
I had some of my stuff over there and then this police officer comes up to me,
and I had five carts sticking out, and he said,
“How many carts are you going to take” and I said “Well, I’m gonna take
all of my carts.” And he said, “No you’re not. You’re taking two.” You know? I
mean who are you to tell me after everything I’ve done for the last two years,
to get out of here? Who are you to put me back at the bottom? By taking
everything I own that was of value, that meant anything to me”
Canvases donated by friends and well-wishers have allowed Linda to resume her work.
“ … you know, when you don’t have income… and now at 62
I can’t get a job, because I’m too old. You know? So, I tried… well, you know,
somebody said ‘Linda, you know so much about jewelry, and about stones, and
about emeralds, and about metals, when it comes to jewelry. Why don’t you try
and open up your own store?’ And I have a friend, there’s a couple, that are
real good friends of mine, and we all recycle and we have all found, beautiful,
wonderful, expensive valuable things. And a lot of them aren’t valuable, but
they’re beautiful and they’re still able to be sold. So, I was going to open a
store and then that went into the trash. And they put it in a trash truck. A
smelly, stinky, dirty trash truck. That goes around down the street and….and
puts… you know, empties the blue bins and the black bins, and you know all of
the bins that are in front of your house. That’s what they put our stuff in and
then they want… you know, they say you have 30 days to go pick it up, by
appointment. Get ‘em to answer the phone.”
Most of the artworks in this last series of photographs were lost…
“Anyway, she was all white when I got her and I happened to
just start, you know, messing around with nail polish and painting, and trying
to get a little color on her. And people were commenting and saying ‘Wow that’s
beautiful.’ You know? And so I decide to paint her dress all black and I built
her hat up to make it look like it had a feather on it. There was a lot and the
thing that is so hard… I was gonna have my grand opening at night and I was
going to auction her off for a shelter for single women. It was gonna go for
good.”
Breaking down the current and enduring situation for our friends at the 405, life seems to have a taken on semblance of normalcy for the inhabitants of the camp along the northbound on-ramp. Of course “normalizing” the lifestyle is an absurd temporal trick the campers might seek solace in, and a dangerous fallacy the rest of society do better to discard. Linda’s stock response to any question of whether there’s been any new problems with city or state officials is a fatalistic and annoyed “not yet.” She has gotten her mojo back after receiving some small canvases from a friend, starting to produce new nail polish paintings. There is talk of having a little show at the nearby #North Valley Caring Services site soon, and I hope I am not making promises I can’t keep when telling Linda we would like to feature her artwork and profile on social media, ideally to her benefit.
Meanwhile three very kind high school students stopped by with supplies for the camp; water, snacks, that sort of thing. There seems to be enough of that goodwill in the air to keep the stomachs and sometimes the hearts full. The girls expressed their desire to work with any local community agencies in the area…