Listening to Addicts in Chicago: An AYA Community Service Fellow's Report
by Martin Tommajian ’06
For eight weeks in the summer of 2005, Yale College senior Martin Toomajian ’06
volunteered as an AYA Community Service Fellow at the Cathedral Shelter of
Chicago while living at nearby Higgins House – both facilities for recovering
drug addicts and alcoholics. His fellowship was sponsored by the Yale Club
of Chicago. Here are excerpts from his report:
I should preface my evaluation with what is probably the greatest value I learned from this summer: gratitude. I heard about gratitude every night at dinner, when my co-residents at Higgins House shared about their day during “round robin.” Every man would introduce himself with some variation of the following: “Good evening, family. My name’s Jack, and I’m a grateful recovering addict.” Many of these men have lost all of their past riches—flunked out of law school, relapsed after twenty years as a drug counselor, fallen from status as the neighborhood drug kingpin. Others were sleeping in cars or eating from dumpsters before they checked into detox. But they said they were grateful. “Why shouldn’t we be?” some insisted. “We should be dead by now, the amount of gunfights we’ve been in, the number of people we’ve fooled around with. But we’re here, and that means God’s got something more for us.”
All I knew when I arrived at Higgins House was this: I’d be working at a non-profit during the day and living with recovering drug addicts and alcoholics at night. I was not particularly well-prepared. I was thus extremely relieved to get a warm welcome at the halfway house. On my first morning, Willie, a resident who’d been a short-order cook in earlier days, cooked me a ham omelet for breakfast. That breakfast became for me an emblem of the warmth and acceptance I felt throughout my stay at Higgins.
Every morning, Monday through Saturday, I arrived at the Cathedral Shelter agency building. Contrary to its title, there is no homeless shelter at Cathedral Shelter, but there is a thrift shop, a food pantry, employment counseling, GED tutoring, a computer lab, drug treatment and counseling, a Christmas gift program for the poor, and non-profit administrative offices. On my first day, I told program director Dezire Gordon that I wanted to experience every one of those aspects of the Shelter. The next day, volunteer manager Bryan Myers gave me a clear schedule of duties, covering about 20 hours a week and including GED tutoring, food pantry service and registration for the Christmas basket program. For the most part, I followed that schedule throughout my eight weeks at the Shelter.
That schedule left my mornings open, so at the invitation of some Higgins House residents, I started to sit in on the morning drug treatment groups held at the Shelter. For the first couple of weeks, I was basically a fly on the wall. Jackie Williams, an addiction counselor and a master of social work candidate, led discussions about self-esteem, rebuilding relationships and the risk of relapse, among other things. The participants included Higgins House residents, residents of a women’s treatment facility, residents of a halfway house for paroled convicts, and outpatient referrals from other case workers.
People told stories that I could hardly believe. One man had attempted recovery from heroin in the past, but he continued to buy the drug for his addicted girlfriend because he didn’t want her to “get sick” by suffering withdrawal. Then, one day, when she was out of the room, somehow her fix “found its way up my nose,” he said. One woman was trying to cut her ties with an ex-boyfriend, but he called her on the phone repeatedly between 4 and 5 one morning and persuaded her to come to his Fourth of July picnic. When the big drug dealer in the neighborhood arrived at the picnic, she felt uncomfortable and got up to leave, but her ex pushed her and wouldn’t let her out the door. If the drug dealer hadn’t stepped in and let her go, she’s not sure where she would be today. However, she shared several weeks later, her ex won’t be going anywhere anymore. He was shipped off to Afghanistan in late July and died in combat within days of his arrival there. These were relatively typical stories.
After I’d sat in on several groups, Jackie declared that I wouldn’t be allowed to just sit and listen anymore. She explained that I was now to be her co-facilitator, asking questions and giving instructions to people in the group when necessary. Since I lacked even the slightest training in addictions counseling, this unnerved me just a bit. But I went along with it, even when she told me I should be the lead facilitator for some groups. As anxious as I was, I agreed to lead discussions and even give lessons on some facets of addiction. By the end of my fellowship, I had led groups on spirituality and recovery, the disease concept of addiction, relapse prevention, and the family structure in recovery. Jackie made sure that I had sufficient information to lead, and she sat down with me to answer questions that I had before and after groups. I never would have asked to lead groups on my own, but they turned out to be the most valuable part of my daily work.
My afternoons were less definitely structured. Once a week, I attended the clinical staff meetings, where I was often able to contribute because of my interaction with clients both in morning groups and at the house. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I would tutor adult pre-GED students in math and reading, generally on a fourth to sixth grade level. I helped to sort bags of food for the agency’s regular commodity distribution days. I wrote a letter of inquiry for a grant and did other written work for the Shelter’s grant writer. I helped a few Higgins House men with writing business letters and searching for jobs in the computer lab. Of course, there was a bit of filing and photocopying and envelope stuffing as well, but not much.
I never felt like my work ended when I went back to Higgins House at five in the afternoon. Remember, I was living among sixteen recovering addicts and one or two counselors at any given time. Dinner started promptly at 5:15 nightly with grace – $3 fine if you’re late. At 5:30 was “round robin” – $3 fine if you’re walking around or talking while people are sharing. There were plenty of interesting stories during round robin too. The guys would mention if they’d been back to their old neighborhoods and had been tempted to stop by their old corner and get a fix. Many talked about their children, thrilled to attend the kids’ birthday parties clean and sober, worried that the kids were living in dangerous neighborhoods. I tried to be honest in sharing too, often mentioning that it felt strange to be the minority race for the first time in my life and admitting when I was feeling homesick.
After dinner on Mondays and Wednesdays, I went back to the office for pre-GED tutoring from 6 to 8 p.m. On Tuesdays, there was an hour of art therapy (assignment: draw whatever you want. On Thursday evenings, I experimented with my own programming ideas. I had noticed that a few of the residents liked to share their political opinions, often very vigorously. So I tried a sort of “political discussion/therapy” twice, once on Iraq and once on reparations for slavery. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much interest, and I usually was agitated by the end of the conversation. I decided it wasn’t as therapeutic as I’d hoped, so I stopped. On Thursdays, the Higgins House men held an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in the church parish house next door. They usually had guest speakers who were fascinating. One shared about paranoia and drug addiction, another talked about how his struggle against addictive behaviors (overeating, sexual promiscuity) didn’t end just because he was clean.
On Saturdays from 9 to 3, the agency held registration for its Christmas basket program. Needy seniors and families came to the Shelter, in person, on Saturdays in July and August to request the gifts that they would then receive in December. The best part of this weekly task was that I got to practice my Spanish by registering many Mexican immigrant families.
Sunday mornings I went to church, twice with Higgins House residents, five times with friends and family. I’m hoping to be an Episcopal priest, and I certainly had never attended an inner city Baptist church or an Apostolic church. But that’s where the Higgins House guys took me, so I experienced all of it: animated preaching and raising of hands and speaking in tongues. In fact, after attending church with one of the residents, he asked me to study the Bible with him, so we met almost every weeknight around 10 for study in the house.
My last week was full of lengthy conversations with the men where they talked a lot about their recovery and I talked a lot about what lessons I would take with me back to Yale. I left on a Saturday morning, after a night when I was up till 2 talking with the guys.
For eight weeks, I lived and breathed this work. It was a near-total immersion in a world I had hardly ever encountered, impacting almost every aspect of my life. Academically, I am more interested in psychology, counseling, and family issues. Professionally, I have a deeper understanding of many dilemmas that I will encounter as a teacher, a priest, or a counselor. Socially, I have learned to be more assertive, to ask better questions, and to be more patient. Spiritually, I have seen God at work in undeniably good ways, and the faith demonstrated by Higgins House residents has renewed my own life with God.