My many moments
The day started off early, when I woke up to the sound of my third alarm clock blazing and the lights flashing 7:30, I wanted to shut it off, I really wanted to go back to sleep, it was cold out and I think even dark still, where had summer gone? I managed to get out of bed and started prepping my training I was giving that morning to the volunteers at VE GLOBAL, regarding crisis intervention and increasing coping skills. I made coffee, toast with hummus and wrapped my blanket around my shoulders. It was going to be a cold morning.
In the middle of the training that morning I was talking about the Therapeautic Crisis Intervention approach when I was asked a difficult question regarding a difficult child a volunteer was trying to manage. While I searched my brain for an answer, Eileen Bosworth, popped into head, my last supervisor and boss who had run the prevention center I worked in. Whenever I felt overwhelmed or stressed, she would make me put my thoughts into imaginary boxes and store the boxes on different shelves in my mind. That way I only took down the box that was the most important in the moment and searched the best answers without dealing with a whole mess of chaos that would otherwise be. Working as a prevention social work supervisor for two years was more than just a taste of the field of social work, but more like a giant swig. While I continued to think about the answer I needed or began to spill what I thought might be helpful in this scenario, I drifted. I drifted to an office with a computer and a drawer full of cases of families and children, I once supervised two social workers with 12 cases each of families, had my own caseload of 6 families and ran a therapeutic after school program for 45 troubled children, days flew by there. I suddenly had a twinge of "social work sickness." I wanted to be able to feel challenged again in this way, to have to think through real complicated and intense issues, to be thrown into left field when I was headed full force towards right, to walk into work in the middle of four families in crisis to be asked to turn around and head to the scene of a van accident, where a childcare worker had cut the corner too close and 15 of our foster care kids were now standing on the street, accident victims and the police needed our insurance numbers. That wasn't part of my job title, but it went hand in hand. I missed it.
After the training ended, I remembered with a somewhat butterflied stomach that today would be my first day at a community center in Santiago, Chile, working as a volunteer social worker twice a week. I had looked for this opportunity on my own when the "social work sickness" must have crept into bed next to me some months ago. Since about two months after arriving in Santiago it had been my wish to begin working again as a professional and to try my best to do that in a language that was still foreign to me. Now more than a year later I was finally get the opportunity to make this a reality. I left my old office with directions on a yellow post it note and stopped at the store on the way to the subway to buy some fresh bread for lunch. I headed south 25 minutes on the subway, where I needed to get off and switch to a bus to take me a neighborhood in the very southern ends of Santiago, called La Florida. I waited what seemed like forever for E12 to appear and finally it did, I boarded first and found a seat by the window. This was not a new Santiago bus with clean seating and high ceilings but rather the older outdated buses with ripped and broken seats, graffiti stained windows that might remind you of a converted yellow school bus. We pulled out the station and as the bus began the, oh so small incline up to the street, it stalled.
Yes, it stalled full of people standing on top of each other and every seat was taken and the bus went a little like this...
rrrrrrrrrrrchhhhhhhhhhhhh...rrrrrrrrchhhhhhhhhhhh....slide backwards...rrrrrrrrrrrchh hhhhhhhhhhh...rrrrrrrrchhhhhhhhhhhh....slide backwards... rrrrrrrrrrrchhhhhhhhhhhhh. ..rrrrrrrrchhhhhhhhhhhh....slide backwards...rrrrrrrrrrrchhhhhhhhhhhhh...rhhhhhh....slide backwards...
You get the drift, the highschool chilean girl next to me, giggly glanced at me and said some very chilean spanish about how we weren't going to make it up the hill and I nervously glanced back at her, like "what the fuck now?" Well somehow he switched the bus back on and up the narrow incline we headed to the streets of Santiago. It was about 5 minutes later the neighborhoods started changing. I had boarded the subway in the middle of Santiago, I had boarded the bus near a major mall and highway interchange, now the streets were slowly becoming dirtier and dirtier and graffiti was popping up everywhere. I peered through the white slashed letters on the bus window at the houses slowly passing (trust me the bus was not moving quickly) we were entering some serious poverty. The bus jalted to an abrut halt when god knows what was happening up front and the woman about one foot to my left, standing grasping the back on my giggly teenage neighbor's chair, screamed some nasty spanish swear words at the bus driver, even calling him a "weono," which i didn't even knew existed in the whole weon display of swear words in chile. They entered in a loud and yes, aggressive interaction where I tried my best to melt into my hard orange chair and keep my eyes on the dirty window. Stop yelling I thought, hes driving a bus full of crazy people. The neighborhoods got worse. I watched a woman get off the bus, and in my opinion dressed in "normal" work clothes, stick her hand in the garbage can casually as she walked by and pulled out an empty soda can. With this in her right hand she linked arms with the older man on her left and on they walked. 5 cents I thought? On we trekked.
The dogs came before the garbage which came before the stench, the filth and finally the people. Maybe it was just the order I noticed things. Homeless dogs by the dozen, and not the sad looking, but full bellied ones you find all over the center of santiago, but the broken legged, broken souled, ribs showing, blood shot eyed, missing hair ones you apparently find in the borders of puente alto, la granha, la pintana and la florida, where I was headed. Next was the huge piles of garbage. It was as if the street became the dump, the bus actually couldn't make it down certain streets because the garbage was piled so high. And of course in there you find all types of rodent looking animals. There was no trees, no grass, instead housing sitting on top of each other made out of materials they could find, each with some sort of gate wrapped around it keeping strangers out. I suddenly felt a bubble rising in my throat. I was going to cry. My eyes got hot and I swallowed hard. I was 28 years old and this was ridiculous. I had seen poverty before, I had done home visits in houses filled with cockroaches to 22 year old mothers with 7 children. I had seen severely beaten children, worked with sex abuse fathers, broken souled women of domestic violence, I had helped strap a 16 year old to a hospital bed after he tried to murder his best friend, I had spent 5 years hardening myself to crying or looking shocked or having strong reactions to anything, and here I sat. Maybe the year and a half off made me soft again, maybe I had never seen anything like what I was looking at in my whole life, maybe I was suddenly just terrified. I didn't feel like I had been living in Chile for 18 months anymore, I felt like someone just dropped me off in a foreign country without so much of a roadmap. How was I going to possibly do homevisits to people who didn't even live in homes, how was I going to speak to single moms and drug crazed fathers and aggressive teenagers if spanish isn't my native language, how was I going to get off this bus in this neighborhood with my suddenly blaring yellow blond hair, and blue eyes? I didn't look like I belonged here. Breath, I told myslef, you are going to be just fine. I started thinking.
Once, I had a gun pulled on me in a very dark hallway that was infested with cockroaches on a street with the highest murder rate in Albany, NY. I was there to do a diagnostic with a pregnant schizophrenic mother of four infant children who had reportedly stopped showing up for her medical visits. I was walking up the first flight of stairs with my stomach doing small belly flops hoping that no cockroaches were on my wet winter boats, when I suddenly was staring at the end of a silver pistol. Who are you? He literally bellowed at me. Maybe it was because the music coming from the first floor apartment was so loud you couldn't think that he yelled, but I think it was for a different reason. I have never had my knees buckle in my life until that moment, and let me tell you that phrase is absolutely true. My legs actually gave out. I don't remember what I said, if I said anything, I would like to think that I ran out of there like a crazy person or shouted my name or why I was there or did anything smart and put together, but instead, I only remember the buckling, the tears and later the insessive calling to my ex boyfriend for twenty minutes straight two blocks away in my parked car because my fingers wouldn't work to get turn the ignition on, until he picked up the phone so I could burst into tears again.
That was a scary moment. Then I remembered Christmas, 2008, I remember the bag of m&ms and homemade ornaments that the family I had been doing therapy with for the last year year and a half bought me, the way they presented the present, had chips and hot chocolate set out and the mom saying she was sorry it wasn't more. The family had already been evicted from the apartment, and all the presents the 10 year was receiving that year was from our christmas drive at the mall. She couldn't even afford a winter jacket but she bought me a pack of m&m's. It was my best christmas present ever.
I continued thinking and breathing and reliving moments of joy and fear of being a social worker. I was honest with myself, I am not fluent in spanish, I am not comfortable being the odd man out anywhere, but just like walking down first street in Albany or arbor hill in Rochester, throwing my badge in the air and hitting the floor during a drug raid (which was also taking place during a child abuse investigation I worked on during my masters program), I didn't really feel like I fit in then either. Being the only white face around I had gotten used to, being the only blond with an accent, I will have to get used to as well. I like not fitting in anywhere, that way I can make myself mold to any situation I need to be in and not the other way around.
I saw the yellow brick building at the last minute and jumped off the bus before it made the turn to head back into Santiago. It was the last stop. I made my way to the community center's door with my head held high, hand on my bag, and confidence in my pocket. I didn't need to be fluent, I didn't need to be hard, I needed to give it a try I told myself. You missed social work and here is your opportunity. I opened the door and started making my round of kissing and holas. Here goes nothing.
In the middle of the training that morning I was talking about the Therapeautic Crisis Intervention approach when I was asked a difficult question regarding a difficult child a volunteer was trying to manage. While I searched my brain for an answer, Eileen Bosworth, popped into head, my last supervisor and boss who had run the prevention center I worked in. Whenever I felt overwhelmed or stressed, she would make me put my thoughts into imaginary boxes and store the boxes on different shelves in my mind. That way I only took down the box that was the most important in the moment and searched the best answers without dealing with a whole mess of chaos that would otherwise be. Working as a prevention social work supervisor for two years was more than just a taste of the field of social work, but more like a giant swig. While I continued to think about the answer I needed or began to spill what I thought might be helpful in this scenario, I drifted. I drifted to an office with a computer and a drawer full of cases of families and children, I once supervised two social workers with 12 cases each of families, had my own caseload of 6 families and ran a therapeutic after school program for 45 troubled children, days flew by there. I suddenly had a twinge of "social work sickness." I wanted to be able to feel challenged again in this way, to have to think through real complicated and intense issues, to be thrown into left field when I was headed full force towards right, to walk into work in the middle of four families in crisis to be asked to turn around and head to the scene of a van accident, where a childcare worker had cut the corner too close and 15 of our foster care kids were now standing on the street, accident victims and the police needed our insurance numbers. That wasn't part of my job title, but it went hand in hand. I missed it.
After the training ended, I remembered with a somewhat butterflied stomach that today would be my first day at a community center in Santiago, Chile, working as a volunteer social worker twice a week. I had looked for this opportunity on my own when the "social work sickness" must have crept into bed next to me some months ago. Since about two months after arriving in Santiago it had been my wish to begin working again as a professional and to try my best to do that in a language that was still foreign to me. Now more than a year later I was finally get the opportunity to make this a reality. I left my old office with directions on a yellow post it note and stopped at the store on the way to the subway to buy some fresh bread for lunch. I headed south 25 minutes on the subway, where I needed to get off and switch to a bus to take me a neighborhood in the very southern ends of Santiago, called La Florida. I waited what seemed like forever for E12 to appear and finally it did, I boarded first and found a seat by the window. This was not a new Santiago bus with clean seating and high ceilings but rather the older outdated buses with ripped and broken seats, graffiti stained windows that might remind you of a converted yellow school bus. We pulled out the station and as the bus began the, oh so small incline up to the street, it stalled.
Yes, it stalled full of people standing on top of each other and every seat was taken and the bus went a little like this...
rrrrrrrrrrrchhhhhhhhhhhhh...rrrrrrrrchhhhhhhhhhhh....slide backwards...rrrrrrrrrrrchh hhhhhhhhhhh...rrrrrrrrchhhhhhhhhhhh....slide backwards... rrrrrrrrrrrchhhhhhhhhhhhh. ..rrrrrrrrchhhhhhhhhhhh....slide backwards...rrrrrrrrrrrchhhhhhhhhhhhh...rhhhhhh....slide backwards...
You get the drift, the highschool chilean girl next to me, giggly glanced at me and said some very chilean spanish about how we weren't going to make it up the hill and I nervously glanced back at her, like "what the fuck now?" Well somehow he switched the bus back on and up the narrow incline we headed to the streets of Santiago. It was about 5 minutes later the neighborhoods started changing. I had boarded the subway in the middle of Santiago, I had boarded the bus near a major mall and highway interchange, now the streets were slowly becoming dirtier and dirtier and graffiti was popping up everywhere. I peered through the white slashed letters on the bus window at the houses slowly passing (trust me the bus was not moving quickly) we were entering some serious poverty. The bus jalted to an abrut halt when god knows what was happening up front and the woman about one foot to my left, standing grasping the back on my giggly teenage neighbor's chair, screamed some nasty spanish swear words at the bus driver, even calling him a "weono," which i didn't even knew existed in the whole weon display of swear words in chile. They entered in a loud and yes, aggressive interaction where I tried my best to melt into my hard orange chair and keep my eyes on the dirty window. Stop yelling I thought, hes driving a bus full of crazy people. The neighborhoods got worse. I watched a woman get off the bus, and in my opinion dressed in "normal" work clothes, stick her hand in the garbage can casually as she walked by and pulled out an empty soda can. With this in her right hand she linked arms with the older man on her left and on they walked. 5 cents I thought? On we trekked.
The dogs came before the garbage which came before the stench, the filth and finally the people. Maybe it was just the order I noticed things. Homeless dogs by the dozen, and not the sad looking, but full bellied ones you find all over the center of santiago, but the broken legged, broken souled, ribs showing, blood shot eyed, missing hair ones you apparently find in the borders of puente alto, la granha, la pintana and la florida, where I was headed. Next was the huge piles of garbage. It was as if the street became the dump, the bus actually couldn't make it down certain streets because the garbage was piled so high. And of course in there you find all types of rodent looking animals. There was no trees, no grass, instead housing sitting on top of each other made out of materials they could find, each with some sort of gate wrapped around it keeping strangers out. I suddenly felt a bubble rising in my throat. I was going to cry. My eyes got hot and I swallowed hard. I was 28 years old and this was ridiculous. I had seen poverty before, I had done home visits in houses filled with cockroaches to 22 year old mothers with 7 children. I had seen severely beaten children, worked with sex abuse fathers, broken souled women of domestic violence, I had helped strap a 16 year old to a hospital bed after he tried to murder his best friend, I had spent 5 years hardening myself to crying or looking shocked or having strong reactions to anything, and here I sat. Maybe the year and a half off made me soft again, maybe I had never seen anything like what I was looking at in my whole life, maybe I was suddenly just terrified. I didn't feel like I had been living in Chile for 18 months anymore, I felt like someone just dropped me off in a foreign country without so much of a roadmap. How was I going to possibly do homevisits to people who didn't even live in homes, how was I going to speak to single moms and drug crazed fathers and aggressive teenagers if spanish isn't my native language, how was I going to get off this bus in this neighborhood with my suddenly blaring yellow blond hair, and blue eyes? I didn't look like I belonged here. Breath, I told myslef, you are going to be just fine. I started thinking.
Once, I had a gun pulled on me in a very dark hallway that was infested with cockroaches on a street with the highest murder rate in Albany, NY. I was there to do a diagnostic with a pregnant schizophrenic mother of four infant children who had reportedly stopped showing up for her medical visits. I was walking up the first flight of stairs with my stomach doing small belly flops hoping that no cockroaches were on my wet winter boats, when I suddenly was staring at the end of a silver pistol. Who are you? He literally bellowed at me. Maybe it was because the music coming from the first floor apartment was so loud you couldn't think that he yelled, but I think it was for a different reason. I have never had my knees buckle in my life until that moment, and let me tell you that phrase is absolutely true. My legs actually gave out. I don't remember what I said, if I said anything, I would like to think that I ran out of there like a crazy person or shouted my name or why I was there or did anything smart and put together, but instead, I only remember the buckling, the tears and later the insessive calling to my ex boyfriend for twenty minutes straight two blocks away in my parked car because my fingers wouldn't work to get turn the ignition on, until he picked up the phone so I could burst into tears again.
That was a scary moment. Then I remembered Christmas, 2008, I remember the bag of m&ms and homemade ornaments that the family I had been doing therapy with for the last year year and a half bought me, the way they presented the present, had chips and hot chocolate set out and the mom saying she was sorry it wasn't more. The family had already been evicted from the apartment, and all the presents the 10 year was receiving that year was from our christmas drive at the mall. She couldn't even afford a winter jacket but she bought me a pack of m&m's. It was my best christmas present ever.
I continued thinking and breathing and reliving moments of joy and fear of being a social worker. I was honest with myself, I am not fluent in spanish, I am not comfortable being the odd man out anywhere, but just like walking down first street in Albany or arbor hill in Rochester, throwing my badge in the air and hitting the floor during a drug raid (which was also taking place during a child abuse investigation I worked on during my masters program), I didn't really feel like I fit in then either. Being the only white face around I had gotten used to, being the only blond with an accent, I will have to get used to as well. I like not fitting in anywhere, that way I can make myself mold to any situation I need to be in and not the other way around.
I saw the yellow brick building at the last minute and jumped off the bus before it made the turn to head back into Santiago. It was the last stop. I made my way to the community center's door with my head held high, hand on my bag, and confidence in my pocket. I didn't need to be fluent, I didn't need to be hard, I needed to give it a try I told myself. You missed social work and here is your opportunity. I opened the door and started making my round of kissing and holas. Here goes nothing.
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