Disrupting Encampment Narratives for Good

We survived January. In Barrie, we have had 9.5 feet of snow since November, which has lent itself nicely to my “gentle January” plans of easy mornings and working away at my desk with cozy clothes, snacks and candles. I tried to stay focused and productive while working so I could work less time. While it might not work for everyone or in every season, it worked for me in January. 

I also prioritized reading time. :) Of course. 

I read a lot of fiction, but my books this month included Encampment by Maggie Helwig. 

Maggie Helwig is a priest in Toronto, and Encampment is the story of her activist efforts to provide a home to unhoused residents in her churchyard. It’s a slim book and in many ways an easy read. Maggie shares about the experience in such a beautiful, humanizing way.

On understanding mental illness:
People who’ve been identified as ‘presenting with mental health issues’ (sometimes, ironically, abbreviated to ‘presenting with mental health’) have included Douglas and Isaac, grey-haired men who were once young and bright and on the verge of a shimmering world, who after decades on the street can be sometimes overwhelmed with grief and rage at what their lives have become.

On understanding drug use:
I have come to realize that there are people, housed and relatively safe, for whom visible drug use is, in itself, terrifying, people who experience seeing drug use by others as harm. I cannot deny their feelings; the feelings are real, their pain is real, although that does not necessarily mean that there is any actual threat. 

There are, frankly, few people who are less dangerous to others than a habitual user of opiates only - I think of Tyler, a sweet broken soul, sleeping on the floor of the parish hall, cradling a box of pancake mix, a few months before he overdosed and died.

One of the things that strikes me most about attitudes toward the encampment is the really deep conviction, on the part of housed people, that the encampment residents are somehow getting away with something, that they are on a kind of permanent fun vacation while everyone else is going to work and behaving nicely. People have talked about self-indulgence, about entitlement. It says something, I suppose, about just how miserable many middle-class people secretly are, that they imagine people living in tents in the freezing rain are somehow, and unfairly, having too much fun. But we are taught to think about street drugs that way. We are not taught that they may be an adaptive strategy to extreme suffering, which can make rational sense in the moment. We are not taught that they may be, at least sometimes, the last-ditch attempt, in the midst of affliction, to make it alive to sunrise.

Needles won’t really jump from the street and jab you through your clothes. The unconscious person on the corner will not suddenly leap up and assault you. The weeping woman with a badly fitting Marilyn wig will not take your job away. The true, terrible threat is that, if you just once let those people get too close, you might learn that, underneath it all, we actually are the same.

Helwig even shares a perspective that fosters understanding for the “junk” at encampments:
Poor people, in particular, will rarely be able to own anything that is sturdy, permanent, well-made, or beautiful. Accept that we all, in our peculiar way, endow things with our own emotions, our hopes, and our longings. And if your life is all displacement and loss, and you have for a little while a place to be, you will hold on to the broken pots, you will imagine planting the pumpkin seeds next year, you will find beauty in safety pins because you must find beauty where you can. [...] Others may not be out of control, but everyone is hanging on to things that will eventually be discarded, things they may hope to fix, or only hope to cherish. And the rain falls, and the snow falls, and time and entropy pursue their course, and all things decay. And you are sitting in a tent full of garbage, but to admit that is to accept yet another saga of loss.

Storytelling like Helwig’s breaks through the prevailing rhetoric, I think, in a way that so many of our talking points just cannot.

I am newly reminded of the power of story to collectively provide an effective counternarrative to the fear-mongering that so many of us are seeing in our communities, with an enforcement-first approach to our neighbours who have been shoved outside by a broken system.

Or as Helwig writes, “The system isn’t broken, it was built this way… The system was built to ensure that people without the ability to pay also don’t have the ability to heal, indeed have very limited ability even to keep on living. And if we as a society are not willing to pay for treatment for people who want it, but decide that we are willing to pay for their long-term detention, then we are making it very clear that the only thing we really want to do is to punish the vulnerable for being vulnerable.”