Looking up my Past

 I realized that our time in Colorado was more mixed than that.  We did get our grad degrees and I also loved working with the Boulder safehouse and then the Longmont safehouse.  I was gradually forming an attachment that I loved with the people in the safehouse community. I learned many things:  how to keep a safehouse safe, how to respond to the clients in an appropriate manner, what to say and what to do.  I learned a tremendous amount about what works with the women and what doesn’t.  My out-of-print book describes it all.  I had first helped in the Santa Cruz safehouse, as a person who looked for people who can be talked to without endangering the people outside.  I felt like that worked out well for them.  In the Boulder safehouse I learned practical stuff, and in the Longmont one I had my choice of what to do when.  One of the things I felt that was most important was treating everyone with respect and dignity.  Many people thought the clients were there to be argued with, but I did not.  When that happened, I countered with basic dignity, and I often made sure that the children’s food situation as well as their diet was not an object of our concern.  They had enough on their plates, they did not need lectures about diet and other internal Situations.  I intervened only when it was medical.  We had a client who gave cough syrup preventatively, because her parents were nurses, and she got the stuff free.  I told her not to do so, because it could end up with the antibiotics not being effective any longer.  She understood.  I also counseled clients to keep no records, and I had to tell them we had no privilege, so people could take any records away from us.  I tried to keep their lives as confidential.  I also Ignored a lot of welfare overtures because they would turn it against us in some cases.  And then I had to ignore people who I wished would give up their parental rights, like the mother who kept returning to her abusive husband because then he laid off her and beat only his diabetic stepson, who would have been better off with a pediatrician who wanted to take him.  It was too involved to be able to negotiate.  That boy was a wedge between his mother, his stepfather, and the one man who cared for him.  I have no idea what happened to him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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