I.
This is what it is like to be inside an inner city clinic that serves Latinos:
I enter the waiting room and take my seat among the older women, attired conservatively in dress pants, their hair slicked back, and the younger women in their tight jeans and long, Shakira-infuenced hair. I am wearing the only professional thing I stuffed into the backpack big enough to need its own bus ticket, and waiting for the Colombian psychologist and trauma specialist I came here to see. I can barely hear my native language as people pop in and out to schedule appointments in Spanish and low and behold! their ACTUAL doctors come to greet them at the door and bring them back. I think maybe no one has anything in common until both patients and desk staff are engaged in discussion around when to stop eating meat, i.e. the beginning of the Lent season. Calendars are passed around, everyone chimes in their opinion and it is decided: not until March. I do not tell them I stopped eating meat seven years ago.
Before I get the message that I must have actually written down the wrong time and that I need to return later in the afternoon, I am visited out in the waiting room by one of the desk staff, a lovely and friendly Salvadoran woman who is very interested in details of my trip. I ask her if she enjoys working at this clinic; she does and feels the doctors are all very friendly here. We get to know each other among the flow of doctor and patient encounters. That is, until she remembers her administrative duties.
I am left to search the walls for information about this clinic. The brochures extruding from bulletin boards inform me that this clinic serves many Latinos who are HIV+, or at risk for the virus. The information regarding men and drugs is too tempting and I grab a load of handouts to send home to Portland. I am thinking about the HIV+ Latino client whose case I just left in Portland, and his amazing capacity to navigate the health care system there with charm and grace despite the barriers of illness, immigration, and language. Sometimes immigration law in this country can make people feel and live as though they are terminal.
I am ready to return for my later appointment. I am hopeful that my discussion will feel as familiar as this waiting room. I have spent half a week in university-laden Boston to educate myself about trauma-related services for the immigrant community. In this moment, this waiting room was the education I needed.
II.
I returned later in the day to speak with the trauma specialist. Truth be told, all afternoon I was feeling like a little city woman in a big city. Nobody here knows the work I do in Portland, they have no real reason to trust me. I don't have half the degrees they all have, nor am I sure I want them. I was invigorated by the educated conversation, but wondered how I was being received on the other end. Being in a big city can make you feel estranged from yourself, a little lonely and needing solid ground. I was beginning to feel like I was auditioning for this part of my life and I wanted to know....Where are all the people who have time to talk about life at? What is the next step on this journey? Where do I experience more people than tall buildings?
As I walked into the St. Francis House, passed by the smokers squabbling about the passers-by and the gentleman with the nervous tic, into and past the metal detector to stare at about at least 200 homeless Bostoners in some sort of gymnsasium, it was the first time I felt at home in the city (that is, aside from the comforts of my second cousin's home in Fenway). The St. Francis House is like a mini-mall of services for Boston's homeless community. They have 6 floors of service, and transitional housing above that. Impressive! Coming from a life of social work on one floor that sees a ton of action, I don't know how they do it. There are whole floors dedicated to clothing, day shelter, health services, women's services, etc. A security guard sits next to the desk staff; this place is huge.
Instantly I felt the constraints of city fashion and wealth culture drip off me and I was rolling along in my puffy black coat and jeans. I stayed to chat with the metal detector guy...does he like his job? yes. does he feel safe? yes. are there ever conflicts here? yes, but he feels good about having the security guard at the desk. This place serves 700-1000 people. Mmmmm...I was hungry and I smelled food, but I wanted to check this place out. I asked the gentleman whom I'm speaking with about touring upstairs and he gave me some names to look for, they sounded like Vinnie and Frankie. But the elevator wasn't working. Perfect. I love to walk.
During this first experience at the St. Francis House, I met people on the Latino team to connect with. The immigration lawyer actually called me back while I was in the restroom. Everyone seemed to enjoy their job entirely, and the woman in the health clinic had this smile like one of those big paper fans that you can keep opening up on a hot day. Then I checked out the day shelter...I sat next to this older black man with a cane who filled me in on the kind of help one gets here and who knows what. I noticed I was the only white girl in the day shelter. Although there are maybe about thirty people in this little room, they are all black. Eventually as people move up from lunch, more Latino faces trickle in, and then a few white females in interracial relationships. Nothing paints a clearer picture of racial injustice than a visit to an inner-city shelter.
The trauma specialist and I talked later about the specifics of trauma work with Latinos. She is working through a satellite program with a grant from VOCA (Victims of Crime Act) at the clinic. She sees mostly women in the group she leads, which makes sense not only because women are more comfortable doing therapy that involves the body, but also because the clinic sees a lot of women in general. Although she never learns the cause of the survivor's trauma, she assures me that at the clinic the majority of patients they serve who have been trafficked from Latin American countries are women, many of whom have crossed the border and have often repeatedly experienced violence and rape. The model being used at this clinic is called "energetic pyschology", which hopes to find ways of creating balance in the body. I hope to learn more about this work when I visit the Trauma Center in the future.
III.
This may appear to be another story about trauma, but it gets better.
What do Anna Nicole Smith and I have in common?
Answer: we were both featured at an open mic.
Seriously, it's tough stuff to develop a music career on the road. It was my goal to play at least one open mic in each city or town, but what i've been learning about bigger cities is that sometimes they aren't as competetive as smaller ones because everybody who is good already has their own gigs.
Last Tuesday I was on my way to play with my second-cousin Tommy Rose and his lovely wife and a small handful of fans. Tommy plays the cello, or at least he does now. The truth is he hasn't touched the cello in ten years, and now we were headed to play at Club Passim, the old Club 47 where Dylan and Joan Baez once jammed. We were so excited and his lovely wife was falling in love with him all over again. Then we got hit in a Boston blind spot by Mr. Vermont.
We were on the road waiting for the police long enough to anger Mr. Vermont and arrive in Cambridge an hour later, into a surge of police cars, circling the area like buzzards. There had been a T (subway) accident, and it took us another half hour to get into the club. But the show went on- despite being sandwiched between two testosterone-driven musicians(?) on the set list, we got to play. Second to last, we rocked some folk in Cambridge.
IV.
I am off to Providence, but before I do, there is one more tourist site I need to add to all the guide books I have seen: The old Victory Gardens near Fenway. Now run by the Fenway Gardens Society, and originally created during WWII to supplement the food supply, they pose a botanical front to the view of the Prudential Building. The Gardens in winter are a urbanite's reprieve. These dormant, snow crested gardens are home to many hidden treasures: wind chimes blowing in the frigid air, a Christmas tree, decorated as if the garden were someone's living room, wooden chairs with climbing mustard-colored winter vines. They all suggested a little of piece of hidden earth to send me on my way.
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