#59: Our Work (PART 4)

​【Job Coach】
Losing a job, and then our home. It can be a living nightmare, a devastation, and those who participate in our job coaching program may literally be in the midst of it. Our clients may be living through it as we speak with them.
 
In every interaction with the homeless people, we try our very best to make a wholehearted connection to the feelings and emotions of each person. Nonetheless, we can’t deny the fact that the pain our clients suffer in front of our own eyes is of the variety that most of us have never experienced first-hand. In that sense, we can only try to make a connection through imagining ourselves in their shoes. By trying to place ourselves in the images of their pain.
 
What helps us get there is the fact that we team up with the shelter employees to run our job coaching program. This is truly valuable, especially because many of these employees have personally experienced homelessness – coming from various backgrounds with each unique story.
 
Some lived on the streets with their parents as young children, when by all rights every child should feel the hope and excitement for what’s to come ahead – instead of the worries for the next meal. Some became homeless after dropping out of high school and leaving their dysfunctional parents, having no adult figure in their young life to guide them. Others ended up on the streets due to the physical/mental disabilities that overwhelmed them from staying on a job.
 
Renewed from such background, many of our shelter employees are the living proof that homeless people can, indeed, get off the streets. They’re the success stories for our clients.
 
Nonetheless, people who’ve experienced homelessness at one point in their life say not a day goes by without thinking about those difficult times. Especially, when such unjust experience was forced upon them in their playful youth or self-conscious adolescence. They tell us that sense of humiliation, frustration, and anger lingers on and follows them around like a dark shadow.
 
Through their experience, our shelter employees are better able to come to grips with the feelings and emotions of our clients, perhaps, much more vividly than we can. Indeed, such first-hand perspective is invaluable not only here but in any field of work. We can learn so much from their personal experience as we try our very best to make a wholehearted connection to the feelings and emotions of each homeless person.
 
To be sure, there are plenty of difficulties ahead. After getting repeatedly discouraged, denied, and rejected for so long, it’s understandable that we’d often feel utterly incapable of staying positive. That all odds are stacked up against us. That even if we muster up the courage to try our best yet one more time, we’ll just end up getting crushed again. Nevertheless, turning negative won’t help. It won’t help us at all – so we tell ourselves to let’s stay positive to help our own selves.
 
There are a few who – from start to finish – show very little motivation in getting job coached. Probably and understandably, they have their own reasons for that. Yet, as we proceed on with our interview coaching, most faces start to light up. And some will even express gratitude saying, “no one’s ever taught me any of this, ever.” Indeed, such are the moments that give us hope that maybe just maybe, they can start moving forward in their new chapter of life.
 
Every month, between 20 to 40 of our clients get a new job and start on their first step towards permanent housing.
 
Time and again, we hear through our daily interactions and the media that Homeless problem is a huge social issue. And in their voices, we often sense the subtle innuendo to imply that the homeless people are the problem. However, isn’t the real problem Our society that mass produces homelessness yet offers very limited help?
 
That is, turning a blind eye to those who are less-fortunate, all the while knowing the very real existence of a born-into, very nearly insurmountable Inequality of Opportunity. Many people who live in relative comfort choose to look the other way, trying to justify their inaction with a long list of dry excuses. Isn’t that the real problem?
 
By all means, it’s certainly easy to maintain a society that centers around only those who live in relative comfort. And it’s our natural tendency to try to please the powerful rather than the powerless. Surely, living in such society feels cushy and comfy for many of us.
 
Nevertheless, if we just accept that and try to maintain it, then the people on the opposite end of that social spectrum – those who are less-fortunate, who often go unheard – will be left behind and forgotten.  
 
Let us have the honesty to confront the reality, no matter how brutal that reality may be. And if the reality is uglier than how we wanted it to be, then let us muster the courage to take action. Take action to make a change – for a better and more inclusive society – instead of turning a blind eye. Let us do that, even if we ourselves aren’t the victims of that brutal reality.
 
No matter how small each of our actions may seem, each and every one of us has the ability to collectively make a change for the better.

Read Previous: Our Work (3)【Interview Class】

Complete Series: Our Work (1)～(4)
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