Presence

In the early months of COVID, our direct service staff traded shifts. One to two days at home for shelter caseworkers—kitchen tables with swirling stains, the repetitive burble of homemade coffee—and the rest of the week on site. All day, every day in-person for front, frontline coordinators, our lowest paid positions. 

How to describe the mixture of unease and surety that trembled our shelter counters, our checkerboard of open and closed office doors? The front desk, with its daily grind of clicking screens, marked beds, noted client requests—there at the front desk we heard hooting and howling continue in those early days. We heard the keen words of resident jokes each night and morning, alongside the deepest confessions, the type of secrets people lay in the earth and shovel over, untouched for decades. Sometimes entire lives. People remove pieces of themselves when they walk past the waving metal wands, or when they gather up grocery bags of belongings. Some of these hidden stories surface in caseworker conversations or front desk talk, a little self spilled down corridors and into ears where a person suspects it will never be heard again.

We knew what proximity was, as frontline staff. We knew what it meant to be there.

Upper management had abandoned the building, offices empty but for paper files and dark desktop screens. But their offices were already far away from our unhoused residents, beyond skeletal shelter bedframes, beyond concrete floors, beyond barricades of thick, weighty, rust-red doors. Management worked in the back of the building, closest to the cars and the parking lot, in the only spaces that were carpeted, and in the only offices with windows. As COVID began to shudder in our residents’ and co-workers’ lungs, upper management’s office doors also shuttered. Natural light, rare and beautiful in the shelter world, whirled through clear windows into abandoned spaces.

 Out of the void came emails telling us and our residents what to do: Make sure all residents wash their hands. Make sure everyone takes their temperature. Round up and sequester all COVID-infected residents. Make sure you wear a mask while you’re rounding up and sequestering all COVID-infected residents.

 And we did, although the masks were sometimes as loose as the boundaries we tried to hold. 

Some of us cupped our hands and called: Wash your hands as you come in or Please wear masks, while we received dotted and lined and italicized directives from an upper echelon netherworld. Other hands tore loose scraps from the spinning roll of towels or pumped large clumps of soap or hand sanitizer on outstretched hands and fingers. Other legs paced the mobile wash basins by the front doors, ready for questions, comments, complaints. Words echoed with a resonance beyond the news channels so many watched religiously in those days. Calls and guidelines, complements and wise cracks. We failed in social distancing—we were always bad at distancing. A truly frontline problem. Bodies circled the countertops, traded off keyboards, swapped raised chairs and stools. Leaned in to hear the elderly, low-toned gentleman or the standoffish, first-time homeless youth.

We were accustomed to the ebb and flow of stories, as bursting and bright as campfire snaps, regardless of the current crises (and there were constant current crises, long before the pandemic). Laughter and empathetic Hmmmms persisted, echoing on plaster walls and closed, scarlet doors. Voices elevated, occasionally, by the lack of supervision. 

Hierarchical leaders disappear during crises. The people who know the number of every bed, the space of every mat, the name of every resident remain, their voices amplified by the times like the blare of plastic megaphones. We were always aware—especially during crises—that leaders are made by the presence they make.

It mattered when coworkers sat at the computer console along the backside of the desk, checking in with clients over income changes, perpetually moving court dates, and indefinitely suspended medical hearings—it mattered that staff could say, early, I’ve had that nasal test. It sucks. Or It’s uckie, I know, but we have to do it. Got to keep each other safe. It mattered, in a world preoccupied with distance, that we could demonstrate how present a person could be. To our clients. To each other.

Although our names and faces shifted, we lived through a binding in those early days, and even before, in those walls where the boundaries between people evaporate in the strangest ways, where home reshapes itself according to the people who people it. Perhaps we lived the type of trauma bond we warn our clients about. But when we showed up, however long we could show up, it mattered. 

There are rare occasions when we better our world through distance. But for people who work on the frontlines of homelessness, separation is a messy and untrue thing. We’ve never known how to make homes through distance.