Caregivers

Today I went to the Edmonton Street News Vendor Christmas party, ate too much of the obligatory overcooked turkey and way too heavy donated cheesecake. Feel totally bloated and yech. Serves me right for being a pig.

I don't really have too much to do with the day to day activities of Edmonton Street News. I just do the layout because I believe if everyone would do something, even a small something, the world would be a better place for everyone. I sold papers on a street corner for four years and worked in the office doing distribution for another street newspaper so I'm no stranger to the environment. But sometimes I just get really irritated at some of the bullshit that goes down on the street.

For instance, two hours after our little event, while we were cleaning up and getting ready to go home, about ten people, not vendors or in any way connected to the paper, walked into the Mission. We told them, “we're sorry, lunch is over, foods all gone, closing up now.” Linda told them, there are a few sandwiches they could take with them. Instead they sat down at the tables and settled in. Half an hour later we are still asking for them to let us close the mission up, when this woman started yelling at me.

“I sleep in a dumpster, it's cold out there, we need a place to get warm, you don't know what it's like! You don't give a damn.” etc etc.

Just about lost it with her, the other volunteer ladies were beginning to look nervous. It's not that I expect people to grovel because I'm willing to donate a few days work every month to the cause, but I do feel that I can ask for commonplace good manners from everyone, everywhere. We didn't advertise we were running a drop in and warm up centre for the afternoon, we invited people for lunch. I think that's the hardest thing about doing any kind of volunteer work in the inner city. The lack of simple politeness. I really admire the people who stay out there on the front lines for year after year. Takes a special kind of forbearance to put up with abuse like that every day. I made sure I brought enough scarves for the volunteers too as well as the lady vendors. Sometimes the care givers need a little care too.

Katrina Rant

Watched a rare bit of television this summer. It was a movie in which cyclonic winds sucked super cooled air down from the troposphere and froze New York. In Alberta we have our local version of that almost every year. Happening right now. Alright, alright, so it only goes down to forty below, not sixty and freighters hardly ever get frozen in on the North Saskatchewan River and our coyotes look a whole lot better than those wolves in the movie. Those kind of temperatures are still deadly to unprotected human beings And we have way too many of those in this supposedly rich and developed country.

Calgary is doing the Katrina Disaster thing this weekend, putting people up in Stampede Grounds Concourse for the duration and local drop ins and homeless shelters are letting people sleep on the floors and the hallways in both Edmonton and Calgary. This is just not good enough Alberta!

There was a tiny tiny bit of space left in Edmonton Street News so I wrote a tiny tiny little rant in honour of the beastly weather.

I am on the homestretch of putting together the last bits of Edmonton Street News this month. Too bad it's so damn cold nobody can stand out there and sell it for more than fifteen twenty minutes at a time. I'm going to see if I can get this program to mount a pdf file after I get the thing finished.

Having a lot of fun playing around with the blogger program, seeing what it will let me get away with.

Well couldn't load pdfs directly, set up a second blog for the paper and put up jpegs of the pages, Pretty small but if you click on them twice they get a little bigger. Not really the solution I'm looking for but will have to do till I figure out something better.