Spring-break trip introduces EWU students to harsh life of poverty
A
spring-break mission trip to Vancouver, B.C., Baptist Student Ministry
(BSM) student Jeslyn Lemke from Eastern Washington University came face
to face with the harshness of big-city poverty and discovered some
truths about loneliness and God.
The group included 30 students and BSM leaders from Columbia Basin
College, a student from the University of Washington and Jeslyn, a
junior majoring in journalism with minors in anthropology, French and
women’s studies.
On the first day in Vancouver, the students worked with the Lifeline
Outreach Society, a nonprofit organization that aids homeless people in
the city.
Jeslyn and others on the team prepared food to take to homeless people
in downtown Vancouver. According to city statistics from 2001 to 2003,
there were from 500 to 1,200 transients in downtown Vancouver on any
given night. Students and Lifeline staff loaded a school bus with two
vats of stew, a bin of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and numerous
bags of groceries. That night they met the rest of the mission group
downtown.
“We passed out gobs of food in every direction to the crowd of homeless people,” she said.
Jeslyn was leaning in the doorway of the bus, handing out groceries to the people, when suddenly, a large man loomed at her in the darkness.
“He was shaking and sweating, drugs were perhaps pulsating throughout
his body. He took the bag of groceries. I smiled at him,” she
said. “He didn’t seem to hear me when I asked him how he was
doing, and I had almost turned around when I heard this voice whisper,
‘Where do the sick and the homeless go?’ I didn’t know what to
say. What do you say to something like that?”
Before she could answer, his shadow was lost in the darkness as he sank
away into the night. Loneliness was rearing its ugly head.
When the “supply of hungry transients” in that area ran out in an hour,
before the food supply ran out, the Lifeline Directors called all the
missionaries together. They huddled in a bay of a dirty parking lot at
the foot of these dark skyscrapers and listened as the directors told
them there was some food left. They would take it to East
Hastings, one of the most dangerous streets in Vancouver. Any
student wishing to go home could do so. No one volunteered to leave.
According to Jeslyn’s Eastern Washington mindset, “mayhem and havoc ran amuck along the frozen howling corridor of East Hastings St.,” she said.
Homeless people, prostitutes and drug addicts lined the sidewalks,
hunched over, screaming at each other, rocking back and forth, dancing
in circles around their feet, she described.
She ended up being funneled into a prayer walking line, which involved leaving the warm vans and her BSM leader, Arlett Coumbs.
“I was freezing and shocked,” Jeslyn said. “All I could pray as
we trudged up the hill was ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus’ amidst the screams,
and cries, and wild-eyed stares.”
At the end of two blocks was a police car.
Held in the grip of two officers, a man was smashing his head on the
hood of the car. The hood was denting. He was moaning and screaming,
“his movements like some trapped animal,” she said.
Jeslyn was moved by the look on the man’s face.
“It was like he was far away, in some terrifying cold place, incredibly
alone,” she said. “Immense fear and loneliness had him by the throat.”
It made her think of a sermon she had heard about Jesus struggling with loneliness but continuing to put his faith in God.
“One of the greatest benefits in knowing Jesus Christ is that God is
perpetually with you,” said Jeslyn, who grew up in Cheney and attended
a Presbyterian church.
Jeslyn and the other students were planting seeds for other people to find companionship.
“Through us, God was leading others to a place where loneliness dies
and love blooms eternal,” she said. “Loneliness has been
identified as one of the great struggles faced by humans. Human
companionship can carry us only so far.
“With God we can ultimately lay down our burdens,” Jeslyn said. “We are never alone because God is always with us.”
For her, the encounters with lonely people in Vancouver and the message
of a sermon preached during a worship service there came together.
“God promises always to be with us,” she said. “So as someone who believes, I know in my loneliness I am not alone.”
For spring break last year, she went on with the Baptist Student Ministry to build a church in Las Vegas, Nev.
She also volunteered four months with the former Downtown Women’s Shelter, Hope House, in Spokane.
Her goal with journalism studies is to “work for rights for women in Africa,” Jeslyn said.
“Seeing humanity in its many stages is incredibly important.
Working with the homeless in Vancouver introduced me to solidarity of
the poor, people I must feel comfortable with when I work with and
write about women in developing countries,” she said.
For information, call 920-3698.
By Mary Stamp, Fig Tree editor
- © May 2005
