Two things made me decide to spend a week in an emergency shelter for men: The first thing was when Vancouver Burrard MLA Lorne Mayencourt spoke to the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association at The Four Seasons Hotel. Mayencourt said he wanted to make a detox center in a rural area for substance abuse victims, where they could be put to work. The idea is based on the model of an Italian institution in San Patrigano that Mayencourt visited last January.

The other thing that influenced me to check myself into a shelter was the much-publicized trips of Vancouver and Victoria mayors to tour European facilities to see how they deal with poverty. I found myself wondering, with all these trips, how many of our wealthy leaders have even bothered to see what life is like in their own backyard?

So I set off to document a week in the shelter over top the offices of the Diocese of Vancouver, and what I found was enough to challenge my faith in the church.

It is eight at night when I climb up the two and a half flight of steps. Substance abuse victims fidget in the corners. An old man struggles up one step at a time. The windowsills are littered with bits of aluminum foil and scratch-and-wins. When I get to the top, a man behind a plexi-glass window takes my name and tells me to come back at midnight.

At 12:10 there are seven men under the sign of Jesus, who is holding a lamb. A man’s voice comes through a little box on the wall and calls out three names including mine, and the other men are turned away. Five minutes later a man opens the door and we climb up the stairs. We get buzzed through the door at the top and wait as each man is asked for his name, Social Insurance Number, birth date, and signature. Each of us get two sheets, a blanket, and a pillowcase. One hundred men sleep in four dorms with rows of a dozen beds down each wall. The beds are set about 1.5 feet apart.

I find my bed between a substance abuse victim that can’t stop fidgeting and a tidy, young southeast Asian man. The room smells of dirty socks, my neighbour never stops moving about, and several men snore, but I am tired and I’m asleep by one. At six the lights come on, the morning radio comes through the intercom, and a voice says “First call for meal tickets.” I line up to sign for seven dollars in meal tickets and then stagger down the stairs and out into the cold. Many of the men are waiting for McDonald’s to open so they can use their meal tickets. I decide to opt for the Senior’s center and get a special omelet breakfast for my pink and white tickets, leaving me with a green $3.25.

When I get back to the shelter at 8:30 the man at the window tells me I don’t have a bed and that I should have been back before eight. There is an old sign on the door that says “Ministry referrals only after 4pm. Self referrals only after 8pm,” so I thought I had to be back after 8pm. I come back at midnight but this time the voice does not come out of the little box on the wall until nearly 1am. This time I get a bed illuminated by the light from the hall. I’m so tired I can’t sleep.

The man next to me injects drugs into himself while watching for staff in the reflection in the window. Two men play cards in the hall. There is a smoking room with church pews full of men fidgeting with crack pipes. The continuous noise of flicking lighters is everywhere. Finally, I wad up toilet paper to stuff into my ears in hopes of warding off the roaring snores in my dorm.

On the third night I make sure to get back before 8pm. The man behind the window tells me I still don’t have a bed booked and to come back at midnight. If I want a bed, he says, I should get a referral from welfare. I overhear a man arguing that he works and can’t go to welfare. The staff explains to him that this is a business and if they don’t get welfare referrals, they don’t get paid.

The next morning I go to welfare and ask for a referral to the shelter. The man at the window tells me that they can’t write a referral but he gives me a paper with an appointment time for a meeting with a social worker. He tells me that the shelter will like to see this.

At the Gathering Place Downtown Community Center I meet a man in the cafeteria line up. Dinner is $3.75, so I have to supplement my green ticket with fifty cents, but it is a big meal. The man tells me that dinner used to be $3.25, but it went up a year ago. He stayed at the shelter nearly ten years ago and tells me that he got $7 in meal tickets back then too. He says he doesn’t do drugs, drink, or gamble. He tells me of how he’s been staying at the shelter for more than three months and working for a granite business in Richmond for six weeks. Welfare refused to give him a referral because he works, so he had to check in at midnight every night. Finally, he started forging the referrals. He says he’s really looking forward to getting out of the shelter, but he has no time to look for a place. He works six days a week moving granite slabs, and he only has a chance to shower on Sundays. If he can’t find a place to rent soon he’s just going to buy a camper and live on the parking lot at his work.

I show the man at the desk my appointment slip and he checks me in for a month. From then on I have the security of knowing my bed will be there. I also get a locker, but I must provide my own lock. My neighbour, a man so twitchy he looks like he’s been ingesting bug poison, tells me I’d better get a lock because the place is full of thieves. Somebody had stolen his work boots before he’d had a chance to buy a lock and he’s been out of work ever since.

I try the showers. Bits of toilet paper are all over the floor. A man is rinsing his socks in the sink and complaining that it takes more that two days for them to dry. There are no doors on the two toilet stalls. The toilet seat is melted. No matter where I stand in the shower room, I’m visible from the dorm. There is no control on the shower, only a button that must be pressed every minute to continue the flow of hot water. I use my sweater as a towel.

If men can come up with a dollar they can use the private showers and laundry facilities at the Gathering Place. They give me two towels and soap. One man gives me a pair of socks and says that it is not in the center’s mandate to issue socks so I shouldn’t expect another pair for a month. As I’m showering I notice itchy little welts on my wrists and ankles.

That night I ask my neighbour about the welts and he tells me that they’re bed bug bites and that our dorm has them pretty bad. I hadn’t noticed them before, but now I can feel the little creatures crawling all over me. I take my bedding into the smoking room but I can’t find one. Finally, I manage to catch one, full of blood and therefore slower. It’s nearly a centimeter long and looks like a tiny crab, normally flat, but after they feed they swell up to an oval shape. The man on one side of me says that they don’t bother him; he can feel them moving, but they don’t bite him. The man on my other side is tormented. He has incredible swelling up and down both arms. That night he puts on all his clothes, even gloves, and tucks his pants into his socks. He pulls the drawstring of his hood tight and all you can see of him is his face. The next morning his face is swollen with bites. He complains to the staff at the front and they tell him that they are aware of the problem. He goes to a clinic and they give him two squirts of calamine lotion that does no good. I decide to throw away all my clothes when my time is up. That night we form a hunting party and kill many of the little parasites living in the seams of our mattresses, but they are fast and it is suspected that they are hiding in the ventilation system and in the cracks of the old building.

The next morning I decide to attend the morning Eucharist at the Holy Rosary Cathedral. I remember once, years ago, I had come into that cathedral and noticed that the tired were granted sanctuary and allowed to lie down in the pews. The policy must have changed because there is nobody sleeping in the pews anymore. The sermon is about how we should not be too poor or too rich. If we decide to become too poor, the priest says, we will become angry.

The next day it rains. They say it will rain for a week. The choking stench of rotting feet is unbearable. I decide to take the priest’s advice and never become too poor, leaving my brothers behind in their church-sanctioned hell.

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