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Authors: Kate Christensen
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Resource Center to handle the overflow. When that is full, an additional 17 mats are placed in the cityâs general assistance office. And when that is full, people in need must sit in chairs in the cityâs refugee services office.â The city also rents motel rooms for the overflow, particularly families: âThe number of families seeking emergency shelter in Portland increased 19 percent this year from a year ago, and a tight rental market is forcing people to stay longer and overflow the cityâs family shelter. Portland spent more than $61,174 on motel rooms for homeless families during the past year, more than triple what it spent in fiscal 2012.â
For another article in November of 2013, Billings interviewed a Coast Guard veteran named Chris Wagner who had been living in a tent in the woods on the outskirts of the city for two years after heâd lost his apartment. He and his partner had just found an apartment downtown. As Wagner told Billings, âPortland is known as a place where the homeless can find services such as shelter and health care, as well as help restoring their independence. If you want to help yourself, you will get help.â
And so, on one particularly cold day in winter, as we drove by the Preble Street shelter for the umpteenth time, I looked out the window at the orderly but desperate-looking crowd smoking outside and decided to volunteer in a soup kitchen. That night, I filled out the online application. When it was accepted, and I was assigned toThursday lunches at the womenâs shelter kitchen, I felt oddly thrilled, as if Iâd been deemed worthy of service. I had few illusions about my reasons for doing this; I knew that volunteering would benefit me far more than it would any of the homeless women I served. Giving always feels better than receiving. Volunteering was a luxury I could afford, and I was the lucky one, not them.
On my first day, Brendan dropped me off at Florence House, a women-only shelter down on Valley Street at the bottom of the Western Prom. I was fifteen minutes early. I went in at 10:15, nervous but glad to be there. I told the women at the front desk who I was and what I was there for. A staff member led me back through the dining room, which had floor-to-ceiling windows leading out to a big deck. We went into a clean, large kitchen with an enormous gas range, stainless-steel shelves and countertops, and a roll-down window by the service area. As I signed my name in the register in the little office, I heard Nick Drake on the CD player (âThree miles from sundown, Jeremy fliesâ), saw a Julia Child quote on a banner (âYou donât have to cook fancy or complicated masterpiecesâjust good food from fresh ingredientsâ), and smelled something good cooking on the stove.
I was meant to be here. I was suddenly in tears.
I wiped them away and introduced myself to Monica, the kitchen supervisor. She was only twenty-six, fresh-faced, with an ebullient, easygoing, laughing nature I would come to love and admire. She had been a chef at one of the most popular restaurants in town. When she realized that she wanted to make a difference in the world rather than pursue a career as a chef, she applied for the job running the Florence House kitchen, and got it. She was from an old Maine family, but herparents were peripatetic; she and her brother had grown up all over the country before her family returned to Maine.
She was also an amazing cook; I was almost twice her age, but during the year or so I worked my Thursday lunch shift at the Florence House, I learned a lot from her about both cooking and life.
She put me to work right away. I assembled about sixty cheese sandwiches and toasted them in butter on the grill and set the container into the steam table, loosely covered, to await lunch service. Then I peeled and diced a box of carrots and stored them in the refrigerator in a âfish tub.â I learned that local
For another article in November of 2013, Billings interviewed a Coast Guard veteran named Chris Wagner who had been living in a tent in the woods on the outskirts of the city for two years after heâd lost his apartment. He and his partner had just found an apartment downtown. As Wagner told Billings, âPortland is known as a place where the homeless can find services such as shelter and health care, as well as help restoring their independence. If you want to help yourself, you will get help.â
And so, on one particularly cold day in winter, as we drove by the Preble Street shelter for the umpteenth time, I looked out the window at the orderly but desperate-looking crowd smoking outside and decided to volunteer in a soup kitchen. That night, I filled out the online application. When it was accepted, and I was assigned toThursday lunches at the womenâs shelter kitchen, I felt oddly thrilled, as if Iâd been deemed worthy of service. I had few illusions about my reasons for doing this; I knew that volunteering would benefit me far more than it would any of the homeless women I served. Giving always feels better than receiving. Volunteering was a luxury I could afford, and I was the lucky one, not them.
On my first day, Brendan dropped me off at Florence House, a women-only shelter down on Valley Street at the bottom of the Western Prom. I was fifteen minutes early. I went in at 10:15, nervous but glad to be there. I told the women at the front desk who I was and what I was there for. A staff member led me back through the dining room, which had floor-to-ceiling windows leading out to a big deck. We went into a clean, large kitchen with an enormous gas range, stainless-steel shelves and countertops, and a roll-down window by the service area. As I signed my name in the register in the little office, I heard Nick Drake on the CD player (âThree miles from sundown, Jeremy fliesâ), saw a Julia Child quote on a banner (âYou donât have to cook fancy or complicated masterpiecesâjust good food from fresh ingredientsâ), and smelled something good cooking on the stove.
I was meant to be here. I was suddenly in tears.
I wiped them away and introduced myself to Monica, the kitchen supervisor. She was only twenty-six, fresh-faced, with an ebullient, easygoing, laughing nature I would come to love and admire. She had been a chef at one of the most popular restaurants in town. When she realized that she wanted to make a difference in the world rather than pursue a career as a chef, she applied for the job running the Florence House kitchen, and got it. She was from an old Maine family, but herparents were peripatetic; she and her brother had grown up all over the country before her family returned to Maine.
She was also an amazing cook; I was almost twice her age, but during the year or so I worked my Thursday lunch shift at the Florence House, I learned a lot from her about both cooking and life.
She put me to work right away. I assembled about sixty cheese sandwiches and toasted them in butter on the grill and set the container into the steam table, loosely covered, to await lunch service. Then I peeled and diced a box of carrots and stored them in the refrigerator in a âfish tub.â I learned that local
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