Beyond Religious Divide
March 1, 2010 • By Caitlin Hawes,
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HARRISONBURG, Va. — Within the Harrisonburg community, more than 160 beds are full, and many have waiting lists, according to Brooke Rodgers, executive director of the Harrisonburg and Rockingham Thermal Shelter (HARTS).
“We keep people from freezing to death,” Rodgers says.
The Catholic Campus Ministry hosted the HARTS shelter from Feb. 22 until this morning. The shelter travels to a new location every week and provides a warm place to sleep during in the winter months.
“People assume that homelessness doesn’t exist in a small town like this,” says Eddie Rozynski, a junior geography major and the co-leader of HARTS at CCM.
More than 120 volunteers came to the CCM from eight different JMU groups: Intervarsity, Harrisonburg Unitarian Universalists, JMU Hillel, Canterbury Episcopal, the Muslim Student Association, Campus Crusade and the Presbyterian Campus Ministry. Around 30 to 35 guests were expected to eat each night, with only 22 spending the night. CCM transports overflow guests to the Salvation Army to sleep in its gymnasium. Each JMU group came for one or two meals and helped with what they could: providing food, activities, assistance and company for the guests.
Patrick Wiggins, a junior biology major, serves as the community service ministry coordinator for CCM and has worked for nearly a year to arrange the campus-wide effort.
“It gives me purpose every day,” Wiggins says. “It gives me reason to live another day.” For two years he had volunteered every Wednesday in the Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church soup kitchen; the HARTS effort became his next big step. By drawing many JMU groups together, he hoped to “open up people’s eyes to poverty.”
He says that inviting many different organizations together allowed groups to participate that otherwise would not be able to host the guests for an entire week.
As students and guests linger at round tables, they chat and laugh over pre-dinner drinks and crackers. More guests shuffle in, dragging suitcases on wheels, duffel bags and large black trash bags. A man in a black beanie walks from volunteer to volunteer, shaking their hands and asking how they are.
Before dinner, someone whistles to get everyone’s attention and the crowd of volunteers and guests form a circle. A volunteer outlines the rules (no alcohol) and tells the group about the cable TV. Everyone cheers. She adds that showers were available.
“And you better take one!” one man exclaims. “You know who you are!”
“Does anyone know sign language?” a voice calls out.
Laura Morgan, a senior speech pathology major, steps forward. She signs with a dark-haired man in a neat striped polo shirt. Their hands flutter silently as people mill around them.
A woman with short, poofy blond hair and bangs saunters over and swings her arm around the deaf man. He grins.
“We’ve been best friends for 16 years, ever since we met at Woodrow Wilson Rehab,” she says smiling.
“As a matter of fact,” she adds, removing her arm, “not to make him blush, but he had a crush on me a long time ago.” Morgan translates the woman’s words to the manwho covers his face with his hands.
“God created all people. It’s a gift that we get to serve some of them,” Morgan says. She volunteers with Intervarsity, a Christian fellowship group at JMU, and had been unaware that the shelter would call upon her hand-signing skills.
“We desire to further the community around us,” says Chelsea Custer, a sophomore communications studies major, who also volunteers with Intervarsity. Monday was her first time volunteering
“I lost my job, ran out of cash, lost my place,” says a middle-aged man named Stewart.
He sits at a table chatting with a volunteer and wears an orange sweatshirt that reads “Virginia Sport.” After losing his job at R.R. Donnelly, a company which produces books, he has stayed in homeless shelters, but never longer than a month.
“It’s what people need, especially during the winter months,” he says of HARTS. He hopes to get out as soon as he can and find “a good job, stability, maybe some religion and a good woman. Misery loves company.”
On Wednesday night, members of the Jewish group, Hillel cooked and served a dinner of salad, pasta, bread and chocolate chip cookies to guests. Afterward, guests and volunteers divide into groups playing Spades, Scrabble, Rummy, BS and Apples to Apples.
“Stop peeking at my cards!” protests Hillel’s Jackie Hedeman, a sophomore communications major, to a guest whose Golden Corral nametag read “X-man.” She snatches her Apples to Apples cards out of his view.
“Stop showing them to me!” he says back. He teases her by showing his own cards, which she brushes away. They both laugh. A vicious game of Apples to Apples ensues, where pond scum is called “mysterious” and the U.N. “clueless.”
“Part of the Jewish religion is giving back the community, doing mitzvahs,” Hedeman says. Mitzvahs are “good deeds.”
She says the CCM effort “shows that the JMU community can pull together and bring together different religions.”
Mark, a guest with a puffy gray beard and large-rimmed glasses, sat at a neighboring table. He says he had landed at HARTS after suffering from cancer and then chemotherapy that had given him crippling arthritis all over his body, dislocating his bones.
“I would wind up on the ground,” he says. “Nothing would support me.” Now he says he is cancer- and arthritis-free, but is 60, weaker and at risk of relapse.
Mark says he has been unemployed since last July and has bided his time looking for jobs.
“I’d take anything. I’d paint, walk dogs, do brain surgery,” he says.
He discusses everything with the volunteers: wind turbines, breaking habits, trillionaires, adrenaline, flying in gliders, Karl Marx, telomeres and so on.
In return for his discourse, the Hillel volunteers tell about their 10-day trip to Israel. Hillel’s Katy Snyder, a sophomore psychology major, argues with Mark about the uses of psychology.
“They don’t have a product,” he says. “If you go to the doctor with a broken leg, they’ll fix it. If you go to the psychologist with a problem, they don’t do anything.”
“But what if you need someone to talk to?” Snyder protests.
“Talk to a priest!”
He argues the only friend people needed is a dog.
“Even though we are all different people, we all have something in common: to help the less fortunate,” Snyder says about HARTS.
As most of the guests snuggled into bed, a quarrel erupts between the deaf man and a man in a green turtleneck. They go up into each others’ faces, but volunteers divide them. Twenty minutes later, the two embrace warmly in an apologetic hug.
“Um sawree. Um sawree,” mumbles the deaf man, who then grins and gives a thumbs up.
Contact Caitlin Hawes at hawescm@jmu.edu
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