Children at our shelter

I dropped in to the shelter early this morning to tie up some loose ends before my days off. I had been talking this week to a couple of Moms about whether some of their children’s artwork could be used in a fund-raising project (a calendar) and I wanted to make sure they understood the public exposure this would create for them, to get the releases signed by the Moms, and to choose which pictures might be suitable. I looked through the house for Mom L and found her, in the kitchen, looking a bit frazzled. She’s had so much to do in the past week, as she gets ready to move on. She’s had to have her social assistance cheque re-issued, as the worker sent it to an address that Mom L cannot access. This delayed her move by a number of days. With 3 small children in tow, she’s collected used furniture from various donors in the community, as well as from the local furniture bank. Her only new furniture is beds for herself and her three children, which required that she travel twice to the local big box store to price bunk beds (a good choice, as when her children are older, she can stack the beds, saving space in an otherwise small apartment) and then return to the shelter to fax the information to her social assistance worker.

She has also been in touch with our Household Coordinator about the many kitchen, laundry, bathroom and bedroom items she will need to start up again. When I think about how it must be to start again from scratch, I marvel at how much organizing it takes for our women to set up a new household. She’ll also qualify for two boxes of food from the Food Bank, to supplement the meager amount of social assistance she receives. I won’t see her again before she moves (during my days off) so we give each other a hug, and I remind her she can call me any time for support.

I admire the painting I have from her oldest, a preschooler: it’s so full of colour, all mixed together. He has been building house after house from Lego in our playroom. This is a common activity for children who are in transition from one home to another. He doesn’t really pretend to “live” in the Lego houses (maybe that would come later, once his own new housing is settled and he feels at home there), but he loves the task of building them, usually requesting lots of help from us. He’s also a “fixer” and a problem-solver, who loves to watch and preferably help anyone in the shelter who’s there to repair our century-old building. Last week he was the chief sweeper after the dining room ceiling had been replaced (too many overflowing toilets and showers from the bathroom above), and the (female) carpenter appreciated his help.

I look at the second set of pictures, from a younger child, and I smile at the stick figures of “Mummy & me” that he drew. When he first came in he wasn’t drawing people, just circles, and now he’s adding dots (eyes, nose) and lines (mouth, arms legs) and the occasional small circles (earrings), and declaring who those people are. He drew one picture last week on both sides of a sheet of paper, with all sorts of people who are in his life now: Mummy, Daddy, himself, two of my colleagues, me, two other children from the playroom, and another Mom who has a small baby in the shelter. I wonder if that day we were the people who he considered his “community”, or just the ones close at hand (he was about to visit his Dad, and was talking about that all morning). I don’t know, but I hope that the safe, child-centred support we’ve offered him in our playroom sessions will be an experience that builds his sense of being precious and worthy of love and respect. He will likely still be there next week when I return to work, since his Mom has a number of legal questions she has to pursue before she can safely move on and be settled in her new place.