Stone Soup Kitchen Ministries

Can you imagine being homeless and/or extremely low-income, and finding out that the wonderful neighborhood hospital you've relied on -- because you can walk there -- is closing thanks to the insatiable greed of a CEO and his investors?  Steward Health Care System's leader, Ralph de la Torre, sold the land right out from under the hospital (among other things) and the hospital is bankrupt.  And it's closing.  de la Torre is under federal investigation, and a subpoena has been issued, but whether or not he will comply or rather decide to sit smugly on the $40 million yacht he purchased with his bonuses as the Steward hospitals went bankrupt in non extraditable waters remains to be seen. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/steward-health-care-ceo-ralph-de-la-torre-senate-subpoena/ The nearby medical buildings where many of our favorite doctors, including primary care, cardiologists, endocrinologists, orthopedic surgeons, ophthalmologists, gynecologists, and many more has been spar...

The Rise in Homelessness "A severe recession in 1980 had inaugurated the era of rising homelessness.  But the problem was driven and sustained by many long-brewing problems: the shabby treatment of Vietnam veterans; the grossly inadequate provisions that had been made for mentally ill people since the nation began to close its psychiatric hospitals; the decline in jobs and wages for unskilled workers; the continuation of racist housing policies such as redlining and racially disproportionate evictions; the AIDS epidemic and the drug epidemics that fed it.  Also the arcana of applying for Social Security disability--a process so complex that anyone who could figure out how to get assistance probably didn't need it.   Many commentators and scholars have written that the Reagan administration fostered the rise in homelessness, with its deep cuts in programs for the poor and policies that led to declines in the supply of inexpensive housing.  Some responsibility for...

In Massachusetts, the people who lived mostly in shelters suffered a death rate about four times higher than that of the state's general adult population.  But the people who stayed outside year-round--the Street Team's special patients, whom Jim [the doctor who is the subject of the book] had once imagined as "hardy survivors"--died at about ten times the normal rate. Tracy Kidder, Rough Sleepers , Random House, 2023 Image: Canva

  Call us SJWs all you want...it's a compliment. This is for all of our friends in the Ayer/Shirley community. It's time to think this meme through again. Like many towns throughout Massachusetts, our small town has been (saddled/chosen/gifted...what verb would you use?) with a large group of immigrants.  This has caused some folks to be displaced from the motel which was chosen for the shelter.  Some residents are acting like this is an unsolvable problem, and they are using every platform available to scream their complaints rather than to help.  Their vitriolic comments tangle up the posts so that the person asking a question about how to help cannot even find the answers.      Either help, or at least get out of the way.  

"Dr. Bonnar had made rough estimates about the homeless patients he had known.  Ninety percent, he told me [Tracy Kidder], had been afflicted by substance abuse or mental illness or both.  And at least 75 percent had suffered the physical and psychological effects of severe childhood trauma. Over the years, Jim [O'Connell] had learned the worst parts of many patients' biographies, and he'd been astonished at how many had suffered abuse as children.  He thought Dr. Bonnar's estimate of 75 percent was credible, maybe even low." Rough Sleepers , written by Tracy Kidder, about Dr Jim O'Connell's career in bringing medicine to the streets of Boston, pages 71-72. Image: Canva

Steve Berg, chief policy officer at the National Alliance to End Homelessness:  "...only 1 in 4 Americans who qualify for a federal housing subsidy actually get it, and that's been the case since he was in law school decades ago. The vast majority of low-income renters must rely on market-rate housing, but the U.S. hasn't built enough housing for more than a decade, since the market crash of 2008. And the shortage is most acute for the lowest income renters — by more than 7 million units, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. That tight market, combined with the worst inflation in a generation last year, has led to double-digit rent spikes in many places around the U.S." NPR Article Image: Canva

  Jim believed that housing was a right and a necessity, but only a partial solution.  For most of the Street Team's patients, and for many rough sleepers in other locales, housing without adequate social support often led to eviction and worse.  Most people who briefly fell into homelessness could probably manage apartment life well enough on their own.  But for everyone, a dilapidated and poorly situated place could be a poverty trap and a way back to homelessness, or the site of an early death.   A study in Boston had shown that average life expectancies varied dramatically between the city's rich and poor neighborhoods, by thirty years in one pairing.  Environment was destiny in neighborhoods where violence was common and residents lacked access to anything except fast food and convenience stores.   Rough Sleepers , written by Tracy Kidder, about Dr Jim O'Connell's career in bringing medicine to the streets of Boston, pages 212-213. For c...

Popped up in my facebook "memories" from 5 years ago: I have to tell you all a story that happened last week at the Kitchen where I cook dinner for Friday nights. One of my regular guests came in a bit late and told me it was because someone had stolen his girlfriend's shoes overnight from their campsite, but she was also on her way and had told him to go on ahead. Could they have dinner even though they were late? Of course. She came in a few minutes later with her feet filthy and cut. But. The day before, a good friend had given me three gently used and freshly washed pairs of sneakers. Well, ok. No one's ever given me sneakers before for the Kitchen, but whatever. Guess who they fit? Perfectly. God is good. Image: Phulvar

I hear (and more often overhear) the same things about food pantries and public potlucks as expressed in this quote from Rough Sleepers .  Heavy sigh.  Not from the majority of people, fortunately.  There should be no us and them...most of us are only one disaster away from needing help.  Please remember the saying, "There but for the grace of God go I."     Over the years [Doctor] Jim had heard, and more often overheard, objections to the Program's expanding practice: Many people who worked and paid taxes struggled to pay for health insurance.  Why should their money go to providing what some would consider concierge medicine for these people who lived at public expense?  For people who produced nothing except indecent public spectacles, and didn't even try to take care of themselves....What was the alternative?  Ignore chronically homeless people, as the city used to do, or imitate draconian regimes and imprison all rough sleepers in a...

In the brilliant novel Men At Arms (1993) by Terry Pratchett, my favorite character Sam Vines muses about why the rich are so rich and why the poor stayed so poor.  It came down to one simple fact: the rich spend less money.    "Take boots, for example. He earned $38 a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost $50. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about $10. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford $50 had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in 10 years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet." Next...

For anyone who is interested in the issues surrounding homelessness, I recommend Tracy Kidder's book Rough Sleepers , published in 2023 by Random House.  It details Dr. Jim O'Connell's journey to bring healing to homeless people in Boston, and is full of heartbreaking stories, uplifting experiences, and hard-core data in equal measure.  I found the vocabulary they established for speaking about the status of their patients to be very helpful:   "Homelessness had a complex taxonomy.  It included families and also many lone individuals, generally divided into four categories.  There were the "hidden," such as the Street Team patient who slept in a rented storage locker.  The "transitional," by far the most numerous, fell into homelessness only briefly, while the "episodic" did so a few times a year.  A smaller number--about 10 percent in 2018--belonged to the "chronic" category, living in constant or near-constant homelessness.  Th...