The Downtown Eastside

Working in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside was exhilarating, frightening, poignant, devastating, and as it finally drove me to my own therapy, self-revealing.

And so begins the introduction to the stories borne from my community work in the late 90s. I was attending university but knew I needed relevant experience to ground the psychology degree I was working on. Plans were to eventually go to grad school, open up my own practice and do some good. Some plans, however, don’t always work the way you envision them.

An excerpt from Notes from the Bottom of the Box: The Search for Identity by a Modern-Day Renaissance Woman.

There was this moment early on in my shelter job when I was handing out meal tickets to those waiting in a long queue. If there was extra food left after the residents had eaten, it was given to those who lived on the streets or in hotels. Those who knew the system lined up early, and I got to know the regulars. I greeted each by name, until I saw someone I hadn’t seen in a while. An overdue absence always filled us with a certain dread: life on the streets was dangerous, whether through violence or drugs; we were not always privy to what happened once people left our doors. I looked at this man and, with recognition, exclaimed joyfully, Hey Bill, I haven’t seen you in a coon’s age. Even before the C word was out of my mouth, the black woman next in line was calling me down. Coon, she said with increasing volume, COON! Who are you calling a coon? I’m a coon, and you’re a racist! I stood dumbfounded. The expression was something my mom used to say. It came out of my mouth unwittingly; I didn’t even understand exactly what it meant, I just knew it had been a long time since I had seen the man in question. It didn’t matter. Her agitation and yelling continued as she was led out of the shelter due to her drug-induced state. This is not to diminish the effects my words had on her; I was definitely in the wrong, and it was the beginning of many such lessons.

The DTES demanded all I had. It crept into my blood, infusing my soul with the pain and courage of its denizens. But more than anything, it demanded I make a choice. With each position I accepted I had the option to power over the vulnerable folks that lived in this neighbourhood or meet them on their journey in whatever form it took. With the grass roots organizations, the struggle between power-over and power-with was overt—a physical and/or mental strong-arming versus consensus building practices that either created or dismantled barriers; with the institutions the difference was more subtle, taking on the flavour of condescension and paternalism. At times I chose the wrong route and did damage, as some of these stories will tell.

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If you like my writing, check out my other blog, The Interdependent Life.