LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

When a guest speaker at her suburban Philadelphia church told stories of the work she did for Broad Street Ministry (BSM), a nonprofit dedicated to helping Philadelphia’s homeless, something clicked.

      “I could have served food or something like that, but it didn’t engage me,” Barb says. “But I do know how to sew, and maybe they had things that needed to be sewn up and mended.”

      When she pitched the idea to BSM staff members, they didn’t know if there was a need for mending but invited her to run the idea past the guests during lunch someday.

      “As lunch was served, I would go to a table and say, ‘We’re thinking of starting a mending project here,’ and I got the most blank-looking faces. Finally someone said, ‘What is mending?’ I said, ‘It’s repairing your clothes.’ And this one guy had on a jacket and he pulled it open and he said, ‘You mean like this?’ The whole lining of the jacket was ripped, from the wrist down to the waist. I said, ‘That is exactly what we could mend for you.’ Another man said, ‘You mean like this?’ and he pulled a button out of his pocket with some thread hanging from it. I said, ‘Absolutely.’ ”

      Just about everyone had something that needed to be mended, and thus the mending program got its start.

      Barb didn’t waste any time recruiting other seamstresses, almost all of them fellow grandmothers. “Every woman I asked about this said yes. I didn’t have to beat the bushes. I thought that was God’s hand. I had the idea, but I think God was guiding all of us.”

      With a crew of six menders in place, they turned their efforts to gathering the tools and materials they needed.

      “People donated a lot of sewing stuff, but what we still needed were some good machines—ones that weren’t forty years old,” Barb says. “But we didn’t have any money. So we had a pity party, and then one woman opened her pocketbook, took out a twenty-dollar bill and put it on my coffee table. She said, ‘This is a start to a new machine.’ Every single woman followed her lead.”

      When Barb’s church found out about the menders, members began donating money, and the church included the group in a Christmas fundraiser. Between that and the menders’ thriftiness—“We always save our coupons for JOANN!” Barb says—they soon had enough money for the sewing machines.

      Over time, the group has grown to thirty menders. Five or six of them show up to work at BSM every Thursday, and a second crew shows up every week at Hub of Hope, another homeless engagement center in Philadelphia. In the morning, guests drop off items that need mending, and they usually get them back the same day.

      “Homeless people have to wait for everything,” Barb says. “They aren’t used to being served, and so that is one of our guiding principles: to get that garment finished and back to the person in the same day. In the beginning, if they had pants that we shortened, I’d press them and put them over my arm like a valet and go out and find the person and say, ‘These are your pants. They’re all ready.’ They’d look at me like ‘What? They’re ready and they’re pressed and you’re bringing them out on your arm?’ ”

      For people used to being treated as if they’re invisible, it’s no doubt a rare pleasure to come to BSM on mending day and be offered a seat where they can relax and talk to someone who cares. The fact that the menders can fix a favorite shirt, whip an outfit into shape for a job interview or reinforce all-important pockets and backpacks is the icing on the cake.

      “We mend about twelve or thirteen items every Thursday,” Barb says. “And some things are more complicated than others. The backpacks come in there and you would just cry if you saw them, but we fix them. Everything they own is in their backpacks and their pockets, so pocket mending is a big deal, too.”

      It may sound corny, but these menders really are mending hearts as well as clothes. They learn the names of their guests, offer hugs and reassuring pats on the back and—maybe in a way that only a grandmother can—remind the guests that they’re important. It’s no wonder that some of the guests leave with tears in their eyes.

      As one homeless man said, “Everyone appreciates them. They are amazing, great seamstresses, and they care. It’s so nice to be recognized and treated like a person.”

      Another guest came back two years after the menders had fixed his backpack to thank them. He wanted them to know that he was employed and off the streets and that he hadn’t forgotten what they’d done for him.

      After ten years, the work inspires Barb as much as ever. “When we walk to the train at the end of the day to head home, we look at each other and say, ‘I’m really tired, but what a good tired it is.’ ”

       NO MORE KNOTS

      While Barb’s guests thrived on the fact that the menders didn’t treat them as if they were invisible, there are those who want to be invisible. Sometimes the smallest thing we can do to help them to achieve that is the biggest favor we can do for them.

      Jimmy, a kid from Flint, Michigan, wanted more than anything to blend in. Every morning before school, his mom tied his shoes in a jumble of knots in hopes that they’d stay tied all day and he wouldn’t have to ask his teacher to retie them. Jimmy hated how conspicuous the big loopy knots were, but he really hated having his teacher retie them in front of everyone. Although tying shoes wasn’t a problem for any of the other third graders, Jimmy was different from them in a significant way: he had only one hand.

      His teacher, Don Clarkson, never made him feel embarrassed about needing help, but for Jimmy, not being able to tie his own shoes was just one more reminder that he wasn’t like his classmates. As if the shiny metal prosthetic “hook” hand that he tried to hide in his pocket weren’t enough. It looked so foreign and threatening that it once even made one of his classmates cry.

      One day when Jimmy got to school, Mr. Clarkson greeted him with a big smile. “I’ve got it! I figured it out!”

      Jimmy had no idea what he was talking about.

      “I know how you can tie your shoes,” he said.

      After turning on the film projector to keep the rest of the class occupied, Mr. Clarkson dragged two chairs into the hallway, where he invited Jimmy to sit and taught him how to tie his shoes with just his left hand.

      Whether it had taken Mr. Clarkson twenty minutes or all night to figure out, it had a profound effect on Jim Abbott’s life. “I know it doesn’t sound like a big deal,” Jim says decades later, “but he had two hands. And I think of him at night . . . with a clenched fist and working with those laces and pulling them tight, and then coming that day and pulling me out of class and saying, ‘We can do this.’ ”

      Jim says Don Clarkson’s gift was a turning point. It instilled a belief in him that he’d always be able to find a solution for whatever problems he faced. This attitude that there wasn’t anything he couldn’t do would go on to fuel a stellar career. Jim won an Olympic gold medal as part of the American baseball team, played Major League Baseball, pitched a no-hitter, wrote a best-selling memoir and touched the lives of thousands of people through his inspirational talks and volunteerism.

      When Jim had signed his first contract with the California Angels, he became an instant point of curiosity and inspiration for children who looked different from their friends. Suddenly, children who were born with visible congenital anomalies or had suffered permanent injuries had a hero and a role model.

      The letters from children and their parents started arriving during spring training. “First, there were a couple letters at a time,” Jim says in his inspiring autobiography, Imperfect: An Improbable Life, “and Tim Mead (then director of media relations for the team) would bring them by my locker and we’d write back something supportive and personal.”

      By the time the season started, a couple of letters a week had turned into dozens, and soon there would be hundreds. “I read every letter,” Jim writes, “and Tim and I answered every one because I knew these kids and I knew how far a little boy or girl could run with fifty words of reassurance.”

      Before

Скачать книгу