Number 6

by: poppyseed

Tue Dec 27, 2011 at 00:00:00 AM PST

I always think I've passed the place already, that I've missed my turn and am barreling on into the darkness in the wrong direction with nothing and no one to stop me. Then I see the sign -- wooden, lit -- Cornerstone Church of the Nazarene. We had a meeting that evening with pastor Robyn, a tall, kind-faced man with a pastorly grey beard. He answered the door with a smile that felt more like a hug and led me to a big den where Rikki, her husband, and her son were waiting. It was the first time I'd met her family. It felt intimate, homey. Good -- I was here to ask for money.

Not from them, of course. I wanted their magic number-- the 501(c)(3) number-- so I could ask other people for money. I wanted their reputation, their history. I wanted them to trust me.

We arranged ourselves on the sofas.

Pastor Robyn's story spilled out of him. It began with a church that was moving on to better things. It was a little church on the edge of a very poor part of town with a little congregation that mostly commuted in and wanted to move to a nicer neighborhood.

So they starttour roving around in a van, looking for a better place to be.

Which was what you'd expect. The activist streak at the root of the church was maybe fifty or sixty years in the past. What had started out as a bunch of poor people turning their lives around, turning back to God ended up how these things do: you turn your life around and start living better and after a while you're living better-- you leave your past behind, get a job, pay your bills, and buy a little house. In a better neighborhood. And so do all your friends. And then you start wondering why your church is in the poor part of town.

So they started with the tours.

The Quran says But they plan, and God plans -- and God is the best of planners.

And He began to whisper in pastor Robyn's ear. And what He whispered was who will take care of my kids? And no one who prays for real is going to get away from a whisper like that.

Months and months of prayer, study, scripture... Justifying it was easy, but it is frightening to stand in front of a group of people and change your mind. It took six months to convince them to move, could he ever convince his people to stay? But they were convinced. They wanted to stay. If you put it like that, if you ask them to serve... This was a return to their roots after all. The Nazarene Church had a long history of service. They would stay. They would serve.

The first challenge is getting past the people to the little room where we would vaccinate them. This was literally the first challenge i'd had on the project. Lisa, my nurse, had run the whole thing-- called public health, arranged for the vaccines, picked them up, stored them, packed the igloo, showed me how to fill out the paperwork, packed up everything we would need in a big, carry-able bag-- gloves, sharps container, consent forms, band aids...

The second challenge was training my army of volunteers. There were med students as far as the eye could see, arranged by our medical student liaison, Veronica, who had asked me how many I would need, recruited them, directed them to the outreach, and even made a sign-in sheet so I could remember whom to thank and could write them letters later that would be engagingly specific (ah yes, I remember meeting her at the vaccination drive at cornerstone church of the nazarene lo those many years ago--  she will make a fine ophthalmologist...) I am always afraid I will forget to thank people, to help them. These are med students, they need letters. I have to write them letters.

But there is no time. The long tables are packed, people are tucking in to the first seating. The first diners are discovering the outreach. A line starts to form outside. The med students are timid for about five minutes, watching me give shots, worried they missed something, uncertain. A few of them are more adventurous, they watch once, take a needle and have at it. Good, I say.

The first few patients came in a trickle, including Pastor Robyn, who wanted to show his band-aid to his congregation. You knew he would, didn't you, lead from the front, ask people only to do what he himself would do.

The medstudents begin to organize, forming little groups, the adventurous ones with the needles, the shy ones with the band aids and the pens. Then they get the feel of it. The line lengthens, broadens. Get the vaccinations into the people, I am bellowing at them. They ask for another table, start setting out more chairs. They are self-organizing. I preside for the rush, then feel it slacking off. Hard to get a sense of the count, 50 maybe so far? Time to get the lay of the land.

Pastor Robyn is raising the roof in the sancutuary. The place is packed-- people are leaning in from the doorway. They hold babies I the little lobby. They cheer and shout out. I can hear the drums from the vaccination room as I walk back and forth between dinner seatings, circling restlessly. The tables are set again, neatly-- waiting, ready.

Then the service lets out. The line forms and subsides, the tables fill.

The students have formed four vaccination stations, with a recording secretary, a vaccine preparer, a band-aid putter on-er, a vaccinator. Rikki is in the back handling the stream of asthmatics out of control who heard there was a doctor around here somewhere. There is a line out the door and halfway across the quad of people who can't breathe. I send my husband to grab more inhalers from our stash, locked away about a half an hour from here. I grab the next sheaf of H&P forms (formatted beautifully by Michelle, who is too humble to admit how huge a role she plays in all this-- but will admit that she formats beautifully) and throw a bunch at Rikki, setting up behind her to take every other patient, grabbing handfuls of inhalers, hastily jotting down inventory, names-- stuffing the finished forms into our new outreach backpack (thanks, Suzanne!)

I grab Pastor Robyn in between services. We stand near the coffee dispensary, within sight of the tables, long and festively-set between seatings. I never saw so much as a spilled kernel of corn on those tablecloths. The napkins and cutlery sat so neatly, so evenly. The volunteers looked so organized; the volume of food unimaginable.

Everything moved so quietly and efficiently on their side. My side was chaos. We worked quickly, in a swarm. I wanted there to be no waiting, no hassle. I wanted there to be no barrier. When I saw a line I vaccinated the line until a med student wandered too close and I called out where is my vaccinator and shoved the toward the shoulder i'd just bared and prepped, handing them the syringe. My side was loud. My throat was raw from shouting at them. (do I really shout?) During the services, I had invited them to pray, but they were all geared up. I expounded on poverty, homelessness. The US Census ranked San Bernardino the second-poorest large city in America-- second to Detroit. They fell silent. CAP San Bernardino's last homeless count in January counted 2000 homeless people in San Bernardino, widely regarded as a vast underestimate by homeless service workers.  They asked questions-- good questions. Retention rates in supportive housing are upwards of 98% in LA's project 50, where the most vulnerable homeless were placed in housing regardless of sobriety status. Eddie tossed me a softball from the back-- what about cost? I crunched the numbers for them. I told them about the $2100/month cost of a homeless person in LA vs the $700/month cost for the same person in supportive housing. The background sound changed slowly, people started appearing, the next seating, the next wave was here. We snapped back to work.

I had needed Pastor Robyn to show me the little exam room they used to use for the parish nurse program they had running for ten years, that just stopped two months before I started at Loma Linda. I needed to see it, to hear its history. This wasn't for my amusement, it was for the grant. I wanted to write the grant that brought it back. I needed to.

There was the exam table, the little doctors' office posters, clean and bright and fallow. There was the file cabinet with their medical records. A Dorland's sat atop it. There was a little desk, an anteroom, so close to the soup kitchen, to the tables. It was all so beautiful to me.

I had started on skid row in a little room with an exam table just like this, with a little closet for my medicine. Pastor Robyn opened the medicine closet. Diapers, hygiene kits-- still new, neatly stacked. Waiting.

I have to hold back. When we'd first talked, weeks ago, when the vaccine drive was nothing but hope-- I didn't know how we were going to pull it off-- there was another problem. This is going to sound little to you but it's not: the soup kitchen at Cornerstone runs on Wednesday evenings and I was scheduled to work then. Scheduling is tricky; you don't always get what you ask for-- you can't. There are practical concerns; other people with other lives are involved. The practice has to do well and I have to work to support my family. And so far I was still the only attending. This would change someday, but it will take time. I couldn't be sure, but I couldn't turn away. Any day but wednesday... But God is the best of planners. And they don't call it faith for nothing. I asked everyone to pray. I looked Pastor Robyn in the eye and told him I would bring the outreach to him on Wednesday nights, that there would be some way to vaccinate his people. I didn't know how, but we would do it. I asked them to pray.

And then i got a big surprise-- the practice had decided to donate my evening clinic time to the outreach. I could go! I could go! I could go! People tell me that I can get a little intense. I tried to veil the glow in my heart. So, um, do you think maybe we could still do Wednesdays? Do you think we could start soon, like maybe 12/7? And I got the smile again. And the hug.