Cinci update!

Today we worked from 9 to about 1 PM at Our Daily Bread, a soup kitchen. Every day, they serve around 400 meals! We helped set up, serve and clean up. There were so many people coming through the line that it was hard to keep up! After lunch we headed back to our apartment for a short break before moving on to service project 2 at Over-The-Rhine Community Housing. OTR Community Housing maintains & rents out over 200 affordable housing units, and relies heavily on volunteers to help prepare units for folks to move in. There is a lot of need for affordable housing (which means rent should be no more than 30% of your monthly income) in the area-and as we've learned, a lack of affordable housing is a major cause of homelessness. We cleaned an apartment someone had just moved out of, preparing it to be painted and have a few other small repairs done so someone else can move in.
After dinner, we went back to the offices of the Coalition for a presentation from their speakers bureau; we heard from two formerly homeless individuals. I was reminded of a quotation I came across the other day from Rebecca Falls: "one of the most valuable things we can do to heal one another is to listen to each other's stories." I know listening helped both sides tonight (they told me so), but the experience raised some troubling questions. (don't you just love those? They're what inspire us to take our best actions and really think!)
Having done lots of service work and now coordinating service programs, I'm pretty familiar with the questions coming up again: what is the nature of helping? How does my racial and ethnic heritage, and my relative privilege, affect that relationship between me and the person I'm trying to help? Can outsiders really help a community or does change have to come from within? Who really knows what decisions and choices regarding development will truly serve a community's needs? What is true poverty, and what is true wealth? What does my service really MEAN in light of the answers I just gave?

These are big questions, and they're still troubling to me as I start to answer them. I don't know that we'll have all the answers by the end of this trip, but hopefully we'll be a little closer.

As far as some stats and following up on my last post: Over-The-Rhine is a neighborhood of .64 square miles. At one time, 45,000 people lived here. Now, only about 5,000 do. There are 400 abandoned buildings in the neighborhood, and every night in Cincinnati over 1300 people experience homelessness. I'm glad to be sleeping in a nice warm bed tonight.

Tomorrow, we are off to work at another soup kitchen, then get a tour of another shelter. Until then!