RED JACKETS MEAN HELP'S HERE

Outreach Workers Know The Street, Know The Street People, And Are
Pure Gold Out There

Myles and Wenky have been walking the alleys around Main and Hastings
for a couple of hours, saying hello to everyone they meet. They
collect a lot of hugs along the way. Smiles and jokes, too.

"Do you need any supplies?" Myles Williams asks a couple in a
doorway. "Rigs? How many? Is 10 all right?"

The woman clad in a pink ski jacket is sitting on cardboard to cut
the creeping cold that seeps up from the concrete steps. She leans
forward and puts two used syringes in the sharps collection box that
the pair of Carnegie outreach workers drag along with them on their rounds.

The outreach is funded by the city until early in the new year. The
workers make rounds in the Downtown Eastside helping people get into
detox, find temporary or permanent housing, get on welfare and dozens
of other tasks essential to ensuring survival and perhaps recovery.

City council is to consider extending the program's $277,000 budget this month.

Wenky Chery, a former addict, is a towering black man of about six
and a half feet.

"I was a crack'ead," he said in his Quebecois accent. "I was in
psychosis and fighting people for no reason."

Wenky started with Carnegie as a peer worker. Peer training nurtures
locals who want to change their lives, keeping them housed and
training them until they are ready to join the workforce. Wenky is a
success story, working full-time, while keeping his apartment above
East Hastings.

He has street cred to burn. Wenky can't walk 10 metres down any block
without being hugged by the women who make their home in this
troubled community. Men, too, want to slap his back and share a laugh.

Myles and Wenky stop for every one of them. They carry satchels
bulging with syringes, condoms, tampons, and clean mouthpieces for crack pipes.

Myles is the quieter of the two, asking after every person's health,
sniffing for signs of distress. "How are you doing? Need any
supplies? Just out of rehab? You look great."

He hands out syringes, reminding all takers to use inSite, the city's
supervised injection facility. Many don't, shooting up right on the
street, prodding and poking their legs and feet for a vein still
healthy enough to take the needle.

Myles came to Vancouver 10 years ago, but spent about 30 years on the
street before entering Carnegie's peer program.

"I was in and out of jail, but I cleaned up for a bit and worked with
the needle exchange for about two years until I fell off the wagon,"
Myles said.

"I don't have a lot of schooling or credentials, but because I know
the people down here the Carnegie gave me a shot."

Syringes and alcohol swabs are available at a dozen places in the
Downtown Eastside. Carnegie's dozen or so outreach workers hand them
out as an ice-breaker, to build relationships. They don't have to
pick up discarded syringes either, but they might as well as long as
they are out there.

People love them.

We stop by the Carnegie Centre and find Sikee and Jessie, the other
two outreach workers on shift today, hunkered down at a table with a
client. Jessie is on the phone hunting down an empty room. Jessie
spent the entire previous day with one woman, finding a room,
collecting an intent-to-rent form, securing rent money from social
services, tramping around the downtown's freezing pavement with her
from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m.

"Most of the time we are able to house a client within a day," Myles
says. "We will follow up with them a few days or weeks later to make
sure they are okay and if things go bad, we start again."

"We stick with our clients for as long as they need our help," Myles said.

Myles and Wenky check up on one of the neighbourhood's fixtures.

Gypsy is a homeless addict well-known to workers in the area. He is
holed up in a lean-to built of blankets and rubbish behind Pigeon
Park Savings. Gypsy's broken wheelchair is incorporated into the midden.

When I scare away the pigeons he is feeding, he shouts and throws
crackers on my feet.

The outreach team has been trying to find housing and care for Gypsy,
but because he is an addict the mental health authorities can't take
him. He shouts gibberish from under his shelter. The boys chat with
him for a while and tease him. They can somehow understand Gypsy's
personal dialect.

Eventually, they leave two rigs and move on.

Their bright red jackets are a beacon for people who need help. Tony
Walker stops Myles and Wenky in a crosswalk and asks for help through
his own bureaucratic hell.

Walker had hooked up with an outreach worker from another agency two
weeks prior to try to secure welfare, a doctor's certificate and an
agreement to rent so he could get a basic room. The worker had
another client and couldn't deal with Walker right then. His case
soon fell off the rails.

"I've been sleeping outdoors mostly since then," Walker said.

Wenky and Miles find a table at Carnegie and start making calls,
tracking down Walker's paperwork. Wenky is soon engrossed in a long
conversation, but can't get the outcome that he wants.

"Is there someone else there that I can talk to?" he asks. After an
hour of dialling and drilling for information, Wenky closes his
phone. The stalled paperwork is moving again and there is a room
available in a few days. Walker says he can sleep on a friend's floor
until then. Jessie is on the way and will take Walker everywhere he
needs to go to sort out his life.

The outreach is a temporary program coordinated by Bob Moss.

"People have trouble understanding us and what we do," Moss says. "We
don't keep daytimers or make schedules or set up appointments.

"The people we help need us right now. If you are sleeping outside
and it's freezing, you might not make it back tomorrow for an
appointment at 2 p.m."

The concept is called fast track. When a worker finds someone in
need, they stick to that client like glue until all the I's are
dotted. If that means taking that person to the welfare office, a
doctor's appointment and setting up a bank account, then finding a
room and going back to welfare for cheques to cover rent and a damage
deposit and delivering the client and the money to the landlord, then
that's your workday.

The program found housing for more than 400 people over the past two
years and much of the time that takes more than a simple phone call.

Moss is a shuffling character, who welcomes everyone into his dingy
program office opposite Oppenheimer Park. There is nothing antiseptic
or institutional about this place. Boxes of alcohol swabs, condoms
and syringes tower around the perimeter of the $500 office space.

Moss won a premier's award for service excellence earlier this year
for his part in a homelessness action plan. The large glass trophy
made its way to the only available shelf space in the office --
behind the toilet. It serves as a spectacularly ornate paperweight.

Moss doesn't talk so much as toss off remarks between fielding
relentless calls. The phone rings. "What's that? No, that's not
right. Let's fix that. No, I mean right now."

He closes his cellphone for a split second and then opens it and
begins dialling again. "I just have to fix this," he says.

A woman creeps in and unloads 200 used syringes into the sharps bin.
She takes a box of 100 with her. "Yup, as many as you need," Moss says.

Another woman sheepishly asks for tampons, "Yup, right there on the
shelf. You choose what you need, I'm not an expert in that stuff."

In this business, problems can't wait. But Moss can. He's rebuilding
broken lives and broken people and that takes time and patience.

Taking a person whose every cell is gripped by addiction, drying him
out, getting him stable housing and training him for a job takes
time. Months and years.

But that's just what the peer training program does.

"When we identify someone who is a leader in the community and ready
to make a change, we go full-on, working with them in all the
different aspects of their life," Moss said.

Some of the other peer training programs in the area pay on the day,
which tends to lead to next-day absenteeism. Even $25 can fund a
potentially debilitating party. Moss's peer workers get paycheques on
the same schedule as city workers.

The peers who make the transition successfully become city employees,
but more importantly they are pure gold on the street.

"To be accepted and effective in the [drug]-using community, you need
people that they recognize, friendly faces," Moss said.

"When you put on that red jacket you'd be amazed the reception you
get," Moss said.