Let The Night Ministry take you by the hand and show you souls in hell. Virgil to your Dante, a View-Master of the Damned, forcing your well-fed face against the eyepieces and clicking through scene after awful scene.
The old woman, covered with huge MRSA sores — methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, a hard-to-treat staph infection — slumped on a Humboldt Park bench. Those aiding the homeless deal with MRSA all the time. But police don’t, and seeing her so rattled a pair of District 14 cops that they hurried over to a nearby Night Ministry medical bus making a scheduled stop.
“Can you help us please?” one officer said.
The teenage girl ejected from The Night Ministry shelter, The Crib, because there wasn’t enough room for all the young adults with nowhere else to sleep that November night to curl up on foam mattresses on a church basement floor. Her housing plan for the night was a CTA fare card with $2.50 on it.
“What am I going to do?” she cried, tears rolling down her cheeks, standing on a windswept Addison Street L platform. “I don’t know where to go.”
And the three abject crack cocaine addicts huddled in a nest of blankets on Lower Wacker Drive. I was tailing a Night Ministry nurse carrying a backpack to get to the cut- off places where the medical bus couldn’t navigate — there are always hells below this one, lanes and narrow subterranean warrens below Lower Wacker Drive.
I asked the trio if they minded my taking their photo. But honestly, they didn’t care about anything other than getting drugs into their bodies as quickly as possible. Nearly a decade later, I’d be surprised if any of them are still alive.
Why was I there? The Night Ministry is not only the last strand in Chicago’s fraying social service network, caring for all those people too lost to even try to avail themselves to what scant aid is available.
But they’re also very good at letting the Sun-Times show the public the work they do. They’ve helped me write dozens of stories over the past 30 years, ever since I called them in 1995 to talk about sex workers the Cook County sheriff’s deputies were arresting along Cicero Avenue. Whenever I’ve reached out to the Night Ministry for insight, they rise to the occasion.
That’s rare. Many organizations do good work but botch the communication part. They don’t respond to inquiries, or they answer three days after the story ran. Or don’t understand the assignment. Last week I reached out to Catholic Charities for a column on medical anxiety among the needy, asking to be put in touch with one of their social workers.
What I got was self-promoting boilerplate beginning, “As a cornerstone human service provider and trusted partner within our region, Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Chicago provides vital services, including food, direct financial assistance, housing, counseling, and other support for more than 370,000 vulnerable people across Cook and Lake counties …”
All true but never addressing the matter at hand, therefore useless to me.
I’m writing this today because the Sun-Times has joined with The Night Ministry for a joint cup rattle. The paper, itself a struggling 501(c)3 charity like The Night Ministry, has a goal of drawing 1,500 new donations to help keep the newspaper going. A small portion of each donation to us in March will go directly to The Night Ministry.
You can donate at Suntimes.com/donate. Of course, you can give directly to The Night Ministry. But the reason I decided to write this, beyond a general awe at The Night Ministry and a desire for the newspaper to live to fight another day, is I like the idea of our two organizations working together.
It reminds us of our shared destiny, as fellow Americans, as people who love Chicago, as caring human beings living in a time when performative cruelty and vigorous exclusion is becoming too acceptable. The Sun-Times is based on the principle that each person — everybody — has a right to a steady stream of accurate, relevant, interesting news. To feed their minds.
And The Night Ministry believes that everyone, no matter their mental health, immigration paperwork or housing status, has a right to clean water, medical care and dry socks — and the occasional appearance of someone who actually cares about them, no matter how many bad life choices they’ve made. To feed their bellies and their hearts.
So are we helping The Night Ministry? Or are they helping us? I like to think it’s a little of both.