Many shelter guests have told us that no one ever cared about them before: Never told them to stop drinking, to be back home at night, to be on time for supper. They marveled at the simple human care shown them. Some began to change, getting jobs in chicken plants, in maintenance, security, irrigation, and construction. The reality of minimum-wage employment hit all of us as we realized that housing options were few for someone earning $300 a week or less in a market in which rooms cost $150 and apartments require costly deposits. Nevertheless, we helped several to join together and rent apartments, lending the deposits needed from donated funds.
While we knew their lives needed to be changed, we had no such expectations about our own. More than 300 adult volunteers–young and old, students and workers, clergy and lay people– most commonly use “humbling” to describe their experience assisting the shelter guests. Some were fearful that we would take in men with some undesirable characteristics. Others offered to cook but were reluctant to interact. All who stepped out of their complacency were rewarded with friendship, appreciation, and a change of heart. Some volunteers recognized former classmates among the homeless, leading to at least one memorable evening of sharing old high school yearbooks. There but for the grace of God go I was a phrase often called to mind.
With Spring’s arrival, this year’s shelter program has ended. There are still men living on the street, sleeping in cars or under bridges at night; but I will no longer judge those with body odor or unkempt hair, and fewer others will. There is still much to do: We have created the Dover Interfaith Mission for Housing to attempt to develop a permanent shelter and more transitional housing, and welcome additional volunteers and donations.
I am proud to call many of these resourceful men on the street my friends; and I am prouder still to be part of a community in which so many volunteered and gave so much of their time and resources to help those in need who were once strangers.
—Jeanine Kleimo
I had the privilege of serving as coordinator this winter for the Dover Interfaith Emergency Winter Shelter, which provided overnight shelter for homeless men.
The statistics are notable: We housed 49 men during the course of the winter. Over three hundred volunteers from over twenty faith communities provided more than 6,000 hours of service to the needy of our community. For 29 of the shelter guests, the shelter was “home” for the winter; and most used it as a means to stabilize their situations so that they could move on to have more productive and comfortable lives. Many of them have acquired full-time jobs and decent rental accommodations. Being homeless, we learned, was not the best face to present to an employer or landlord.
More powerful, however, is what happened to all those involved. Lives were changed. We sought to keep men from freezing on the cold streets of Dover, huddling behind dumpsters and camping under bridges for shelter. What we did was give them faith in themselves and hope for the future along with hot meals and a warm cot. We learned that most are hard-working men who had lost paychecks and the shelter they afforded, whose relationships and related housing had collapsed, or whose health or disability had led to financial disaster. Some had been incarcerated for nonviolent crimes and found themselves out on the street again to reconstruct their lives from nothing. Jesus tells us to forgive and to help others. For many of us, this was an opportunity to put our faith into action.
We took men in at an “intake center” on New Street, where we occasionally failed to permit a man access to the shelter if he were drunk, high, or uncooperative. This protected the men as well as the volunteers waiting to serve them at the local church halls which served as shelters on a rotating basis. I sent a man back out into the rain and cold one Sunday after determining that he had drunk too much. Four days later, he thanked me for doing so: He said he slept on someone’s floor, prayed and realized that he could not go on the same way. He proudly told me he had not had a drink since Sunday and was not planning to drink any more. He stayed sober.
Jeanine Kleimo facilitated the discussions among 15 Dover churches/religious institutions that resulted in the establishment of a temporary winter shelter for homeless men in Dover. She then became the Shelter Site Supervisor for the first week of the shelter opening on January 21 at Christ Episcopal Church and coordinated the overall effort.
The shelter hosting rotated among four church facilities, generally a couple of weeks at a time, (two churches, including ours, hosted three weeks) staffed by volunteers from that church for the first week and from another (one lacking physical facilities for the shelter itself) the second week. These volunteers were supplemented by others, both as individuals and from many other organizations. In addition, donations of food, clothing, bedding, etc. came from a host of different individuals and businesses. This extraordinary outpouring of help originated not only from Dover, but from places like Camden, Wyoming, and Milford.