The Centre

I volunteered once weekly at an outreach center when I lived London. The facility offered those in need gratis showers, unlimited hot tea, computer facilities, discounted hot meals and laundry washed for a few quid, a place to sit and watch TV, to talk with others, or to be left alone.  Interestingly, the clients weren't all solidly from the UK.  There was a large contingent hailing from right around the area in SE London, but many more were from not just other parts of the city and the UK, but also from Central and Eastern Europe, bits of Asia, Africa, and Western Europe.  Most of those who used the center were men, but there were more than a few women among the crowd.

Here are a few snippets of what I experienced while volunteering at the center---

I went in one day and saw a middle-aged woman sitting alone at a corner table.  I recognized her from previous visits, but wasn't sure if she were English-speaking or not.  I noticed that she had a purple bruise under her left eye.  I assumed she'd been hit.  Another worker at the facility told me that she'd been attacked right outside by another client just a few days past.  He had knocked her down, hit her in the eye and taken the valuable contents of her handbag.  He'd been drunk, I was told, almost as if that were supposed to have excused his behavior.

Three young adults, a man and two women, from Spain arrived one week.  They had a sort of shaggy look and wore ill-fitting, second-hand-looking clothes.  The young man wore his hair in an outgrown Mohawk and all three of them had multiple facial and ear piercings.  Their English was pretty poor, but I was able to suss out from one of the girls as she waited for the women's shower to be tidied that they were in London to look for work.  The Spanish economy was floundering and they felt that they had to leave home in order to find employment.  Without much English they would probably be in for a long and bumpy job search, but I wished them a 'buena suerte' before they left for central London.  

I helped a Pakistani couple fill out citizenship paperwork.  The husband had been in the UK for 15 years and the wife 8 years.  Their adult children were spread out between London and back home.  The husband's English was fluent, but thickly accented and his wife spoke almost no English.  'Helping' meant actually filling out the paperwork for them while they sat and looked on.  The husband had written down the dates of birth for both him and his wife on a scrap of paper quite legibly, so I'm sure that he didn't really need my help with completing his form.  However, when it came to having his wife sign her document, I realized that she was illiterate and didn't know how to give her signature.  She instead wrote in scrawled print the five letters of her name.  I didn't think that what she'd written would be accepted as a signature by whomever were to accept her application, but I didn't say anything.  Maybe I was wrong.

A tidy young man came during the afternoon looking for someone to help him find housing.  He was well-dressed, healthy-looking, and, judging by the caliber of his clothes, not without money.  It was hard to fathom that he was without a place to live, but I'm not at the center to judge.  The advice personnel are, understandably, busy throughout the day.  The man 'couldn't be bothered' to wait, and, after a few minutes of talking to me, left.  That was, of course, precisely the moment that the person able to advise him became free.  It was such bad timing.

An aggressive Rastafarian once called me an 'asshole' because I didn't want to continue a convo with him in which he was becoming progressively more agitated and directing hostility toward me. Not every man with a head full of dread is going to be chill, I suppose.