Guest Blog and Photos By Alexis Stickel
Let me set the scene for you: insulin syringes of various sizes, muscle syringes, cookers, vitamin C, tourniquets, cotton balls, and sterile water. All of it scattered around with a bunch of 20-something college students on spring break. In any other circumstance most people would assume that we decided to take our partying to the next level; however, a drug overdose was hardly in our future.
These were the supplies strewn about the room as Mimi Cove explained the dangerous reality of intravenous drug use. Mimi works for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation as a Logistics Associate for the HIV Prevention Project. Her conversation with the group was the first time on the trip that I felt like I was being talked to, as opposed to talked at. Mimi was drawn to this line of work because she was an intravenous drug user until two overdoses finally convinced her to get clean. During all the information she shared – from explaining why Vitamin C is important for heroin users to how HIV/AIDS can get passed through a crack pipe if a woman exchanges oral sex for drugs to why speed users are the best people to have around during an overdose – I experienced chills throughout my body. So this is what it’s really like. These are the concerns and thought processes of people addicted to drugs and living day-to-day on the streets of San Francisco. It seemed ugly. And unfair.
At another point we were walking the very same streets in the poorest area of San Francisco, the Tenderloin district. I was irritated as we walked these streets and a couple of big African American men eyed our group of ten white girls walking down the block. I grew even more irritated as we passed the group and they began blatantly pointing at various girls and commenting: “That one” and “Yeahhh and that one” and “That one” and “Humm uh and those two.” Once they had passed our entire group, the ringleader finished his train of thought with: “Yup those girls. They’re the ones I’d fuck.” Dirty. Ugly. What am I doing here? I thought.
Yet at another point we were walking on our way to an organization when a man named Daryl approached us. He wanted to know why we were together, what we were doing. His eyes sparkled as we conveyed our plans for the week. In the middle of downtown San Francisco I did something I would have never expected. Daryl called a huddle. Think of a football team gathering together to figure out their final play. Yes indeed: a seemingly homeless man asked a service group of complete strangers to huddle. As we embraced each other in our huddle Daryl told us that we “are a spark in a dark city” and that together “a spark could ignite a fire.”
Later, I reflected on his words as we passed countless murals speaking of the power of love, respect- calls for social change. We stumbled upon a community garden run by Project Homeless Connect in the middle of the Tenderloin. Half of the space rented from the city was used for the garden where artwork covered every wall and the other half was used as an art museum. Hope. Strength. Beauty. Sparks of passion in a city filled with pain and desperation. So I began to notice the contradicting words running through my head to describe this journey into a land so foreign and yet so close to my own home.
Learn more about Ethos’ weeklong series, My Alternative Break.
