Project Kengikat

Stay the Course

// September 1st, 2010 // Animals, Cooking, HIV and AIDS, Health and Fitness, Homeless Outreach, Me Time

I’ve been doing “peer support” and “case management” for quite a while now through my outreaches and for the most part it has been very rewarding work to see the people I am helping move forward, but there are times when it can be very frustrating because the person I may be working with is their own problem and not HIV or homelessness.

For example I’ve been working with this guy who says he is having a difficult time understanding all the many things he is dealing with, but after spending three days with him and sitting in on one of his sessions, I must say that more the 80% of the problems he is experiencing is a direct result of him not following through or not asking questions.

If I have learned anything from being homeless, HIV positive and having to rely on government funded programs is that I must stay on top of everything. I must be my own advocate. Sitting back and waiting for someone else to care or someone else to do something is just plain silly. Furthermore I have learned to remind social workers, case managers and even doctors of what they said they would take care of. More then 90% of the time they had not done what they needed to do in order to move me forward. I can only point to one case manager where I did not have to check behind her to see if she had done what she said she would. This was my case manager at APLA.

It seems that so many people who are HIV positive use their diagnoses as an excuse for everything in their life. It is my opinion that  to some degree support groups and ASO’s play key roles in allowing people to make excuses instead of encouraging them to deal with the real issues that were there long before their HIV or AIDS diagnoses. It is my opinion that a person with HIV or AIDS is better served when they are encouraged to live a normal life without hiding in the HIV or AIDS closet as well as fully deal with the problems and issues they have unrelated to their diagnoses. I have this opinion because I have been on the inside looking out and the outside looking in.

Working with this person was still very rewarding, please dont get me wrong and even though it is  huge challenge to work with him, I will continue to do so because it is the right thing to do and to be very honest, I know from my own experience how very frustrating, depressing, degrading, humiliating and down right nasty many places can be when it comes to helping homeless people and people with HIV or AIDS.

I think it is very important for me to say that not all people who work with homeless people or people battling HIV and AIDS do piss poor jobs, there are some people who do amazing jobs and serve their clients well. I know several of them, but from experience they are the exception to the rule and they are also far and few in between.

After the tree days of working with this person, I was very drained, some might say I was exhausted and in the end the person has still decided to go down the “whoa is me” road. Which is fine and is his choice, but this person can not say that he did not have options or that someone did not only tell him of the options, but made arrangements for him to sit face to face and explore the other options. This person now has no one to blame for the “whoa is me” road but self.

As I have stated before I will continue to support this person as best I can and offer any advice I may have. I will even refer and make phones to try to help, but the bottom choice must come from them. No matter how much cheer leading I do, no matter how many hours I or anyone else spends with this person, ultimately the work must be done by this person and the desire to change and live a long and healthy life starts with them.

After those three days I was really looking forward to going to ceramics on Saturday. As I have stated before ceramics became my safe harbor back in 2008 when I was first diagnosed. However I have not been in a while because there has been some drama taking place there, but I was really wanting to go take some time out for me and just create something. I am not sure what it was, but there was some tension there and I was not able to dig into my creative side to create anything. It’s funny how other people and the energy they bring can change the entire atmosphere of a place you really love.

KENGI’s BOOK CLUB

I asked three of the guys from my Unpluggin’ HIV outreach if they would like to be part of my book club and they all said yes. We decided to read Invisible Life by E. Lynn Harris which happens to be my favorite writers. He passed away not long ago and he will be missed a great deal. Myself and two of the guys had already read the book, but were willing to read it again. The third guy had never read the but and we knew if would be an awesome book for him to start with. Plus we all wanted to read the book again.

The guys came over to my apartment on Sunday, I cooked dinner and we laughed and enjoyed a nice long evening of great food and great conversation. I am so happy that I picked these three guys to do the book club with because they are all intelligent,  respectful, trust worthy and my friends. Another cool thing is that we all in very different points in our lives and even in our diagnoses, but we all are very much fully engaged in our overall health and well being.

Suddenly the stress of my week had passed, the tension from ceramics no longer dogged me and I found myself in the company of three beautiful Black men sharing an amazing experience of reading, friendship, food and laughter. In that moment my heart began to smile because the stress was replaced with laughter and friendship and in that very moment understood why it is so important to keep doing what I am doing. I that moment I thought how cool it would be to one day be able to see the person I had just spent three days with in this book club with us. In that very moment I saw what is possible when you put people first, when I do not allow myself to place people into molds, I saw what is possible when we simply show up for people without excuse.

Dodger and I walked the guys to the train and along the way of the the guys said “I’ve always wanted a group of guys I could hang out with and have fun with. I hope this doesn’t end.”

I smiled because after the evening with them I was thinking the very same thing.

(The pictures in this blog are from my book club)