What’s happening in our city?

IF you drive through certain parts of the city these days, you’ll see people bent over where they stand. Frozen mid-motion, the way fentanyl leaves a person, folded forward as if the world had simply paused them there. You’ll see people lying on the sidewalk who may be sleeping or may be something more urgent than sleeping. You’ll see it in broad daylight, in view of the bus stop, the convenience store, the school a block away.

Some days the impulse to look away from all the suffering is overwhelming. The mind reaches for something else to focus on, something less heavy, less difficult.

But there are people who don’t look away. Not because it’s easier for them. It isn’t. It’s harder, in fact, because they’re not just seeing it once from a distance. They’re walking into it, every shift, sometimes more than once in an hour.

I think about the outreach workers who carry naloxone the way the rest of us carry keys. Who have, more times than they could count, knelt down beside someone whose breathing had slowed to almost nothing, administered the medication and waited, in that terrible suspended moment, to see whether a life could be saved this time. Who have done this for strangers. Who have done this for people they’ve come to know by name, and have had to do it again, and sometimes again after that.

I think about the people doing street outreach or those who work in drop in programs or shelters who greet someone at the door who is in crisis, who may be combative, who may not remember their name from the day before, and who treat that person with exactly the same dignity they’d offer someone arriving calm and grateful. Not because their guidelines require it, though they might. Because that’s what they’ve decided a person deserves, regardless of what state they’re in when they arrive.

Among them, there are the ones who have been on the other side of this. People in recovery, people who spent years in active addiction themselves, who know what it is to be the person someone else is choosing to see or choosing not to. Some of them have found their way to transitional housing, to stability, however fragile or hard-won. And what strikes me about so many of them is what they do with that stability once they have it. They go back. They volunteer. They find employment in community agencies. They walk the same streets where they once slept as people who understand, in a way most of us can’t, what it might mean for someone to be met without judgment in their worst hour.

I don’t think any of these people would describe what they do as heroic. If you called it that, most of them would probably deflect, the way people doing hard, ongoing work often do. They would most likely talk about logistics. Supply runs. Who’s been seen lately and who hasn’t. The practical aspects of the work, rather than its weight.

But I can’t help thinking about what it actually means to keep choosing being in community in this way. To choose not to stop looking, not to let someone else handle it, not to decide that the scale of the problem is too large for any individual to make a dent in. Not to feel discouraged.

Every day, these people choose otherwise. They show up to streets that have, in recent times, become harder to be on. Harder for the people living there. Harder, too, for the outreach workers trying to stay connected to people whose circumstances have become increasingly unstable.

Most of us will never see ourselves doing what they do, in the specific way they do it. Some of it requires things — physical capacity, training, circumstance — that not everyone has. But what I think all of us can do is choose what we do with our attention.

There’s been a lot of talk about these realities not being what we want in our neighbourhoods and about what it means for young children to witness them. Like anyone else, I want children to be safe and well. But lately I’ve found myself thinking about a different part of the picture: what a child might learn from seeing someone kneel down beside another person to save their life. From seeing a helper speak to a stranger in crisis the way they would hope someone would help a person they loved.

I don’t have certainty about what communities should do, how to best organize responses to addiction and homelessness and how to respond to the genuine, visible suffering that results when these things go unaddressed for long enough.

What I do know is that right now, today, there are people choosing to see. Ordinary people doing something of true value, day after day, without much awareness of the important role they play and often with little recognition. People choosing to show up for each other.

That, too, is part of what’s happening in our city.

Carina Blumgrund writes from Winnipeg.