HOSPITALITY HOUSE STORY
Hospitality House opened its doors one afternoon in early November, 2005. On that first day, seven guests, one staff member, and several volunteers gathered at our temporary welcome center at the Unitarian
Universalist Community of the Mountains Church in Grass Valley. As evening fell, we
took a bus to the United Methodist Church in Nevada City, and our nomadic
homeless shelter was born. Our numbers were few and no one knew each other
very well, but an extraordinary and deeply moving experience was awaiting the
hundreds of people-guests, volunteers, and supporters and helpers of all kinds--
who eventually decided to become involved with Hospitality House.
It took us a month to locate and move into our own digs, a cozy apartment on Colfax Avenue, where we gathered
every afternoon from 4:00 to 6:00. There our guests were able to shower, do laundry, receive nursing attention,
find services, store their belongings, and get to know one another.
Our guests relaxed, dried out, and defrosted with a cup of coffee and some hot soup and other snacks. There was often a movie playing on the living room VCR, and people also gathered to chat in the cheerful kitchen or on our well-ventilated smoking balcony.
Guests took only bedding and needed supplies to our host churches in the evening, so we made one of the welcome center's bedrooms into a storage room and loaded it with plastic bins where everyone could store their belongings.
From the pastor of one of our host churches:
"Our church is honored to be a part of such a wonderful outreach to the community..."
Every evening at 6:00 a bus arrived at the welcome center to take us to our hosting church, where we shared a wonderful dinner and spent the night. Hospitality House owes enormous gratitude to the Durham Bus Company, which donated buses and bus drivers every weekday morning and evening throughout the entire winter. We are also deeply grateful to Calvary Bible Church and Sierra Presbyterian Church for providing us with vans and drivers on the weekends. We could not have operated the shelter without their generous help.
Buses came to the host churches at about 7:00 every morning to pick us up again and return us to the welcome center, where guests gathered their
things together and headed into the day.
Guests, staff, and volunteers joined in a circle every evening before dinner at the host church to share in an expression of thanks-for the food and for the generosity of the many people who had taken a hand in preparing and serving it. We were thankful for the warm, loving welcome we always received at every church,
and for warmth itself, and for the companionship of caring people.
Some of our participating faith communities
don't have a facility appropriate for hosting
Hospitality House, so they bring meals and serve
them at host churches, relieving those churches
from having to provide dinner-a burden some
viewed as a privilege and were loathe to relinquish. By the end of our season, over twenty
faith communities were not only participating in
the shelter but vying among themselves for the privilege of doing so.
Every meal was absolutely wonderful, including the thoughtful, often portable breakfasts that guests could
snack on throughout the day. A great deal of planning, care, and real love went into each meal, which
became increasingly apparent as time went on and guests who had been thin and wan filled out and start
ed to look and feel healthy. Hospitality House exists for only two reasons: It came into being because of the
tragic poverty that exists in western Nevada County, and it continues to exist because of the many hundreds of
people who care enough to offer their time, talent, and treasure to help alleviate that poverty.
While many guests, exhausted from their day on the street, chose to retire soon after dinner, others stayed up watching a movie or enjoying a game of hearts, Scrabble, or Monopoly. One church even had a pool table. The comradeship and sincere mutual concern that developed among the guests was very important to some who had been isolated or who had thought no one cared about them.
Deep thanks goes to hair stylist Sara Quay, who showed her concern by coming often to cut and style people's hair.
Every night one of our staff monitors stayed awake to keep watch. Here's part of a farewell poem that one of them, Phyllis Day, wrote to the guests about that experience:
I thank you all for putting trust in me to watch over you
as an angel in the night.
I hope when the stars come out, as they seem to do,
You will all know I'm still thinking of you.
From a church volunteer:
"Hospitality House is . . . blessing our community on so many levels,
and we're thrilled to be a part of it. At our last dinner during
which I participated, it was wonderful to see the guests healthier,
more trusting, and genuinely grateful for all Hospitality House does..."
There are many remarkable stories-some heartbreaking and some heart mending--among the guests at Hospitality House. In all, a total of 133 people stayed the night with us, including 20 children (lots of babies), 19 veterans, 23 over age 50, and 43 disabled people. By the end of our season, guests, staff, volunteers, and board members had established a deep sense of community, recognizing that we all shared a common bond of profound, intense experience. Sharing food and rest in an atmosphere of peace and safety may well be the simplest and loveliest thing people can do together.
Not that everything was simple. There were plenty of difficulties and a great deal of suffering at Hospitality House, often in the form of illness and injury. Two of our guests had cancer; two had heart attacks; one 20-year-old boy was a survivor of brain cancer; one, a 73-year-old man, was so severely injured that had he been living outside, he would almost certainly have died. Indeed, we made several trips to the hospital, and several people might have died had they not been with us.
Deep gratitude goes to Drs. Jean and Craig Creasey, who performed emergency dental work, sometimes even late at night. And profound thanks to Dr. Frank Lang, Jr., who was our doctor in residence every Monday night.
[Picture: Man leaning over to put plastic around
boot] Seeing guests head out from the welcome center into the cold and wet every day was a painful vision of poverty. Some of our guests, including one who bicycled to the shelter at midnight after he fin-
ished work each night, had to wrap their shoes in plastic bags to keep their feet dry. In an effort to help, Hospitality House made 224 referrals to the various social services (both governmental and nongovernmental) that exist in this county to aid people who are indigent or in trouble.
From a guest:
"We all live in the house of the Lord. Why can't we share the
same table? Such is the beauty of Hospitality House."
Almost every night for the past five and a half cold, rainy, and often snowy months Hospitality House has provided homeless community members with a warm, safe place to sleep and a delicious dinner lovingly prepared. For some people, that has literally been the difference between living and dying.
For some, it has meant the opportunity to overcome addictions; for some, it has meant coming in from the cold of a disorienting, long-term sense of isolation to the warmth of human companionship; for some of the children, it has meant birthday parties attended by caring friends; for some families at risk, it has meant remaining intact; for one newborn baby boy and his family, it meant nourishment, care, and a safe place to be in this world.
We hope you will join us! Hospitality House needs volunteers to do a variety of different jobs, from sharing time at the shelter to bookkeeping to gathering food to public relations to...you name it. We need you, whatever you can do! And always, of course, we need money. Next season we'll be renting a new welcome
center, hiring a new staff, and paying for insurance and transportation. Our expenses will be great, and we need help now.
Please donate generously!
Join the special community of Hospitality House.
From a volunteer couple:
"Our association with Hospitality House has been
the best volunteer effort we've ever done."
Community Shelter for the Homeless
From a guest:
"Next fall when Hospitality is born again, many of the
same church members will be there with all their love and a
deeper understanding of the down and out. They will see
we are not invisible, not ogres, but that we have stories,
histories, pasts, and problems like everyone else."