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| Ten square blocks of hell | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Ten square blocks of hell By Malcolm McColl Doreen Littlejohn aspired to make a difference for the world's sick people. The focus of her aspiration used to be third world countries. She planned to take her professional credentials (Registered and Pyschiatric Nurse) where they were most needed. It would be someplace far away in desperate circumstances. While researching opportunities in world health services this bright and energetic Vancouverite found a crisis in ten square blocks of her own city. Littlejohn knew about problems with AIDS in the east end of Vancouver. Today she knows the problems intimately. Littlejohn is the Coordinator in charge of the Outreach Drop-In Program on West Hastings Street, East Vancouver, also known as the DES (downtown eastside). She developed the program for the Vancouver Native Health Society, one of the few groups there to combat the health crisis underway. Littlejohns's commitment to providing health services in the DES had to begin somewhere. That episode about a year ago was rather shocking. One day she volunteered to help a friend who worked at an AIDS hospice. They were making an out-call. The AIDS outreach team, a nurse and two volunteers (including Littlejohn) went out to a person in East Vancouver afflicted with AIDS in the late stages of the disease. She said, "He was lying in a room three flights up. I forget, but it was three or four flights of stairs. The drunks were lying in doorways. We faced a barrage of abusive inquiries on our way up the stairs. It felt very dangerous in a way." When she entered the room the sight was appalling. She said, "Snowball, that was a nickname we called him, was laying in a bed caked with feces. There were both rats and mice visible on the floor. He had inch-long," she measures a cockroach between her thumb and finger, "bugs on his bed, and on him!" She continued the horrific account, "There was bucket beside the bed filled with urine, feces, and vomit. Diarrhea. Snowball was in the late stages of his disease. He couldn't make the trip down the hall to the common washroom." She continued, "Putrid water sat in a container beside his bed. He had a fever of 104. He had meningitis, which is a common outcome of AIDS. He was sick and dying. We asked him, "Would you like to go to the hospital?" He said, "I'm nothing but a dirty old Indian to them. I won't go." We phoned a doctor who also tried to move him to hospital. Well, he wouldn't go, so I decided the best thing for him would be to try and make him comfortable." Littlejohn formed a team of cleaners and they swept through the room with bedding, scouring, and elbow grease. Once they had the room liveable and their patient cleaned and dressed, she arranged for a familiar face in the dingy hotel to keep an eye on him every day. Snowball died seven days later, but Littlejohn did everything she could to make his departure comfortable. That is all she can do today for the list of 900 clients she serves at the Vancouver Native Health Society's "Positive Outlook" program in the DES. There are countless more with AIDS in the DES, but these 900 are Littlejohn's clients. They are all terminal. "Basically what we do is done with very few staff. We are funded by the Vancouver-Richmond Health Board and the Provincial Government, more by the health board. I was hired a few months ago to develop a case management model. It is a multi-disciplinary team. We have social workers, nurses, outreach workers, drug and alcohol counselors, a medical clinic with physcians, a methadone program, and a few hard-working, dedicated volunteers." She explained, "Our goal is holistic care. They walk in our door very sick. Their CD4 'helper T' cell count is below fifty, which is very low." (Helper T cells are a fundamental part of the immune system. HIV specializes on the white blood cells since they have CD4 molecules on the surface, to which HIV (the infecting virus) binds; source: www.aegis.com). "They are at the late stages of AIDS with all kinds of infections. We provide a welcome place." The centre, it turns out, is one of the few such places for these people. She said, "We provide a little food, you know, soup and a muffin. We don't have a budget but we get some food bank donations and prepare what we can." The store-front drop-in centre has a kitchen run by volunteers. The centre provides a few tables and chairs to give a coffee-house atmosphere, also maintained by volunteers. The clients, she said, are homeless, starving, and ill. They have mental illness, Hepatitis B and C, Tuberculosis, HIV, AIDS, and alcohol problems, and injection drug-related problems. She said, "We make it a safe place for them to walk in and warm up for awhile. You see so many people standing in food lines these days. We are dedicated here to making it open to everybody, no matter how sick. Come in, get a welcome hug and a hot coffee. We have a social atmosphere. We give the client a network. Most have nowhere else to turn, but this is someplace. "A family, a community is something you have to build. At first they might feel awkward about taking our services. But the volunteers make it happen, pair up with a client and talk to them. Then they get information about our services. We can obtain prescriptions like the protease inhibitors for HIV/AIDS and store drugs in the centre's refrigerators. "We have a close working relationship with three physcians next door at Vancouver Native Health. We recently added an acupuncturist to treat the addiction cravings in people who want to quit." There is the aforementioned methadone program. The centre's staff searches through rare prospects for hospice beds when a client reaches the end. The people who visit the drop-in centre will find a movie playing in the tv room two afternoons each week. The centre made itself a food bank distribution point once a week. The centre's team of outreach workers launch the "Positive Outlook" program, ,and thus themselves, into the heart of the problem from this store front operation. Positive Outlook was modelled on Littlejohn's first horrific experience. There are countless numbers available for what Littlejohn calls the centre's "salvage therapy." It could also be called "triage social work." She used to work in mental health. Her method is holistic down to the basics. They had a Thanksgiving Day lunch for 150 people who stood everywhere, "in the halls, in the nurses office, in the lobby, my office, even out in the back lane. Unfortunately, we run out of everything. We never have enough." Littlejohn knows about the total breakdown of services in the DES. It includes such simple items like payphones. "BC TEL pulled out all payphones because people were breaking in to steal the money." Of course few people can afford their own phone. Furthermore the social problems leading to this poverty are irrevocable. "Nobody will hire them because they are obviously ill." She estimates 8,000 to 10,000 HIV/AIDS victims in ten square blocks. Nobody can be sure of the numbers. Nevertheless the little drop-in centre serves about one-tenth of Vancouver's AIDS victims. The outreach services function six days a week. The drop-in opens five days a week. The only time demand drops slightly is during the celebrated welfare Wednesday. "The goal is service 16 hours a day, seven days a week. We need housing support. People are dying in third world conditions. The sick in this community live in scuzzy single occupancy hotel rooms filled with disease. No phones, no stove or fridge, rats, bed-bugs, roaches and mice." Littlejohn will continue to lobby for funds and assistance for the current list of 900 clients. She can only hope the agencies and government departments increase their efforts to control the growth of the crisis and spread disease in the streets of Vancouver. 30 Interview conducted with Doreen Littlejohn, R.P.N., R.N., Coordinator, Outreach Drop-in Program for AIDS sufferers, Vancouver Native Health Society, DES (downtown eastside of Vancouver). | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Malcolm McColl is Walking Eagle | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Malcolm McColl writes articles for various periodicals and newspapers. Most of the First Nations newspapers in Canada carry his stories every month, equal to thousands of papers distributed nation-wide. Currently he is covering BC from the city of Nanaimo. He recently re-located to Nanaimo from Campbell River. Phone: 1-250-390-1518 (email: [email protected]) Address: 131-6439 Portsmouth Rd, Nanaimo BC V9V 1R6 He began his First Nation journalism in 1992 with Western Native News. Today Malcolm appears in Western Native News, Kahtou News, Native Journal, First Perspective, First Nations Free Press, Native Youth, Alberta Native News and a few others. He has written and edited for business periodicals and seniors periodicals. He submits articles to a variety of monthly, weekly, and daily publications. In the summer of 1998 he visited over 50 First Nations communities in British Columbia. He was born in Edmonton in 1954. He lived in Regina for seven years in the 1980s. Through his own personal initiative he became familiar with First Nations issues across the country. All of his stories are obtained at the source, the First Nations people. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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