August 2, 2011
1. The Good Samaritan Shelter, Barre VT/A correction regarding its involvement with the United Way/Abuse at the shelter
On Saturday, July 30, 2011, on my blog page, "4. Newblog2011: 07/30/11 The computer is gone from the shelter as of last night/United Way/NFL/Microsoft/Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation/E-Bay MissionFish/NASCAR/UPS/MERCK/This has nothing to do with me, the war on women and children has been going on for a long time," I wrote:
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“There’s a sign in the window of the shelter that says it’s a United Way agency. The
United Way in Vermont was very involved in the harassment of me last year, and it has continued on in support of all of the bad issues.”
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Then I went on to talk quite a bit about the United Way, did research starting from the United Way website, and completed the blog page that way.
There is a sign in the window of the shelter that says “United Way: Participating Agency.” However, it doesn’t seem as if the United Way runs the shelter; it seems as if the Good Samaritan Shelter is affiliated with the United Way.
Here’s some information that I found on the website for the Good Samaritan;
“In 1982, a planning meeting for the first homeless shelter in Central Vermont was held, with involvement from a number of local community organizations and area clergy. A board of directors was formed, and the search for a location began. Nonprofit and tax exempt status was acquired for the new organization, the effort to provide shelter evolved into a special ministry of local churches working with area businesses and state agencies.”
Churches, area businesses and state agencies; that is NOT comforting information. It’s not any better than if I had found out that it was completely run by the United Way. No wonder so many of the churches that I’ve been to as recommended by the shelter had things around that showed support for harassment and for child molestation.
Saturday night when I got back to the shelter after having written that blogpage, there were several cans of Skintimate brand “Raspberry Rain” shaving cream distributed throughout the 2 bathrooms and the basement shower room. The upstairs bathroom also had several packets of rainbow-colored, individual tissue packets.
Perhaps it had been there before, but there was a strand of pearls in the top desk-shelf of one of the desks in the staff office that I hadn’t noticed there before.
When a lot of people were in the common area, one of the residents started talking about yogurt, and how someone had taken one of the yogurts he’d left in the fridge. Another resident, a female one, said to him “It’s too bad, because it’s one of the only things you can eat, isn’t it?” Then the male resident said, loudly, “ Lena , it wouldn’t be you (who took my yogurt), would it?” I said “No,” because it hadn’t been.
There was some very loud coughing, notably by the former Marine.
That night, things got really terrible. The former Marine’s girlfriend (or wife, I still don’t know which) said something about how she couldn’t wait for someone to get kicked out. Then it went on to be the second night in a row that she did the “loud, fake cough-wait for a reaction-loud, fake cough if there is no reaction-wait for a reaction-loud, fake cough—“ routine. After several minutes of it, I finally got upset. I went to the edge of my bed at the top of the bunk to which her bed is now perpendicular, and said “You’re not going to get me kicked out with your behavior. There was a group of people when I first got here a few months ago who tried to put me through the same thing, and I’m the one who’s still here.” I tried to explain to her that sleep is one of the things that’s the most difficult to get in the shelter. It all got bad quickly; she called me a bitch and told me to get down out of my bunk bed so that she could beat me up and she called me a chicken because I didn’t do that. We called each other stupid for a few minutes, until I said “I’m going to talk to staff” and left the room.
The overnight staffperson was already in the doorway of his room. I told him that the female resident had been doing the loud, fake coughing and I asked him to speak to her. He said “I can’t talk to her; there’s nothing I can do.”
As I was objecting to his statement that there was nothing he could do, the female resident walked out of the room and over to where the staffperson and I were standing. She said that she couldn’t help the coughing, that she’s sick. I said “That’s not true.” She said “There are other people here who deliberately cough, but I don’t.” I said “You know that you’re doing it on purpose.”
She told me “You’re lucky that I’m not kicking your ass right now.”
She and the staffperson and I were standing within a 3-foot radius. I looked at him and said “She’s threatening me. You need to put a stop to this.”
He hemmed and hawed some more, and then the female resident pushed me.
It wasn’t some little push; she turned her body completely toward me, put her hands on my shoulders and pushed me. It was a “start a fight” push, where the person being pushed is supposed to push back as a preliminary to actual fighting.
I didn’t push her back; I stepped back and absorbed the impact of her push. Then I stopped stepping backward, with her a few inches from me, still ready to fight me.
I looked around her to the staffperson and said something along the lines of “Are you going to do something about this now?”
He said “If I call the police now, you’ll all be in big trouble.”
I said “You can’t be serious; you just saw her assault me.”
The female resident’s boyfriend and another male resident were at the top of the stairs by then; they had walked up from the first floor, probably after hearing the commotion.
Everyone started talking at once, and the staffperson still had made no move to try to get the woman to back away from me. The door to the upstairs bathroom was open and in front of me, so I went into that bathroom and shut and locked the door.
A few minutes later, it seemed quieter. I left the bathroom and saw that, at the bottom of the stairs, the male staffperson had the phone out and was dialing. I said “What are you doing?”
He stopped dialing and said, again, “If I call the police now, you’ll all be in big trouble.”
The male resident who had walked up the stairs with the ex-Marine apparently gave the female resident who had pushed me some Benadryl while I was in the bathroom. The staffperson said “She’s now had some medication so that she won’t cough. She’s gone back to bed; just go back into the women’s dorm, don’t communicate with her, and get some sleep.”
I said “I’m not going back in there. Once things get to the point that somebody’s pushing you like that, you need to be separated from that person. I’m going to sleep outside on the porch.”
He didn’t want me to do that, but I insisted that I wasn’t going back in the room to try to sleep. I got a blanket and a pillow from my bed and went out onto the porch, where there’s a couch.
He called the assistant director; then he walked back out onto the porch and said “You can sleep out here, but I need to shut the door.”
The front and side doors are always locked; they get left open during the hours when residents are there in the evening and the morning, and get closed at night. Whenever you go into or leave the house, you’re supposed to leave the door partially ajar so that other people who are outside the house can get back in. At night, the doors get closed, but the side one has certainly been left completely open during hot nights this summer. Also, when residents go out in front of the shelter to smoke at night, they leave the front door ajar so that they can get back in.
What he was saying was that if I wanted to sleep on the porch, I wouldn’t be able to get back into the house at all until the morning; not to use the restroom, not to get away from someone who walked up onto the porch to hassle me. I said “I have no idea what you’re talking about. That resident just assaulted me, and you saw it happen. I’m not going to the police to press charges, so why don’t you be reasonable about this and make sure that I can get back into the house if I need to do so.”
He agreed to leave the door ajar; then he went back to bed.
The day after the pushing incident, I went to the Barre police station. The orange “Caution” road cone was still on the lawn in front of the police station. The bulletin board in the entrance still has all of the same posters on it. The dry erase board on the back wall of the office still says “Chelsea” on the left side, and then has two “hydrant” notices on the right side, one for Spaulding High School. Also, since the last time that I visited that police station, a large, red box of Milk Bone dog biscuits had been placed on the top of a cabinet directly behind the window in the entrance, where people have to direct their first communication into the office of the police station.
I talked to a police officer and told him what had happened the night before. I explained to him that I hadn’t spoken to him the night before because it’s a rule that residents can’t leave the shelter after 9:00 p.m., and that if I had tried to go the police station, I would most likely have had to be out for the night.
I also explained that I had wanted to talk to the police before I went back to the shelter for something of the same reason; residents of the shelter can get back into the shelter somewhere around 6:30 p.m., but often, once they’re back, they can’t leave the shelter premises again until the next morning, and everyone has to be back by 9:00 p.m. every night. I didn’t know what I was going to walk back into when I went back to the shelter that night.
I also was wary of going back to the shelter without talking to the police first, myself, in person, because the night before, the staffperson had been saying “If I call the police now, you’ll all be in big trouble.” I didn’t want to get assaulted and then also arrested, so I thought I should talk to the police first and explain during a calm moment what had happened during the night before.
I told the police officer what had happened. I said that there was a lot of fake, deliberate coughing as part of my being harassed, and I told him about being threatened and then pushed in front of the shelter staffperson. The police officer said “The resident who pushed you is guilty of at least a disorderly conduct. It’s not assault because you didn’t feel pain, but it’s definitely disorderly conduct. The staff shouldn’t be allowing that to happen. They should all be on the same page about that. You should talk to the shelter manager about it; I can also try to call her this week and talk to her about it.”
He also said that if something like what happened happens again, I should say “Go on and call the police.” He said that I’d told him what had happened, so the police know who the aggressor was, and that I shouldn’t worry about the staffperson who had said “If I call the police, you’ll all be in big trouble,” or anybody else who works there who talks that way.
I thanked him, and I told him that I didn’t want to charge the woman who pushed me with anything. I said that it seemed wrong to me that she was being allowed to be abusive, and that it would be too bad if the shelter’s negligence resulted in her taking things farther and being arrested for assault because of another incident.
Here’s the thing, though; as I described at the beginning of my discussion of the “Caution” cone and other things around the police station, the Barre police station is encouraging the harassment, too. It’s encouraging everything that I’ve been protesting. I appreciate what that police officer said to me; I felt safer because of it when I went back to the shelter. However, why should citizens who otherwise would most likely be law-abiding if they weren’t being encouraged to be abusive by the government and other big harassers get themselves into situations where they do commit crimes that cannot be negotiated with, such as assault?
I’ve made this argument before.
I went back to the shelter. The assistant director was the overnight staff volunteer. I told him everything that had happened. He said that he hadn’t heard the details of what had happened from the staff volunteer. He also said “It seems to be a pattern with you that you think people are coughing deliberately around you; that causes me some concern.”
I’ve often written on both of my blogs about having a psychiatric history. I’ve also written about the way that staff at the Vermont State Hospital harassed me more or less around the clock for 4 months straight and then said that none of it was happening and that all of my objections to it were a result of my being delusional.
What do you want to bet that he was considering trying to tell me that I was delusional, that I was imagining all of the harassment?
The first page of the website for the Good Samaritan Haven homeless shelter in Barre, VT has a link that says “Learn more through the Volunteer Network at the Green Mountain United Way.”
At the top of the page that the link goes to, there’s an ad for the United Way. The last sentence of the first paragraph on that page is this:
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“Currently our maximum guest capacity at the Haven is 26. Hedding United Methodist Church is currently serving as an overflow shelter site for up to 14 additional homeless people when needed.”
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A few sentences after that, there’s the name and phone number of the assistant director.
It’s not as if he’s unaware of everything else that’s going on.
He suggested to me again that I should at least consider that the coughing isn’t deliberate. I said “That’s such a lie,” and I got up and left the room.
Within an hour, one of the female residents walked out into the common area, pointed at me and said loudly, “Nobody make fun of her or cough behind her back or we’ll all get kicked out. I’m passing the word around.”
My impression from that announcement was that the assistant director had decided to give another ultimatum, such as the manager did a few months ago, that if there were more problems everyone would have to do.
Since the announcement seemed to have an immediate, positive effect on people, I went upstairs to the women’s dorm. When the former Marine’s girlfriend walked into the room, I did what I wished I had done the night before, which was to show her my sound-blocking ear protection, such as one might wear in any very loud situation, and to tell her that the band connecting the two earpieces had been rubbing my hair thin on the top of my head because I wear them so much.
That’s true; I had noticed that earlier the night before, which was why I hadn’t worn them. The fact that I hadn’t been wearing them the night that she pushed me was probably part of the reason that I had ended up arguing with her in the first place. I wear them to sleep in anyway, now; they block out other noise such as people getting up at night, moving around in their sleep, snoring, and noise from the rest of the shelter and the street. I also have worn them in public quite a bit; for example, I wore them at the Department of Labor for a long time, I’ve worn them at Another Way, and I also have worn them consistently at the Department of Libraries.
She thought it was funny, which was my intention. She apologized and then told me that she wasn’t a mean person, which I said I knew.
I went and told the assistant director that things seemed to be improving already because of whatever he’d done.
Unfortunately, on Monday, August 1, 2011, when I went back to the shelter after having documented the “Kilz” Home Depot ad and other issues on my blog that day, things were definitely getting bad at the shelter again. I walked in the door and saw that the assistant director was in the shelter office with some other people. Either he or another man in the office gave a cough.
I saw the manager in the common area and said “Hello” to her. She didn’t say anything back, and gave me a hostile look.
A few minutes later, I walked by the open door of the office and saw and heard a male resident saying loudly “At least it didn’t leak all over the floor, did it?” He was talking to the shelter manager, who laughed, said “No,” and was very encouraging of him.
The girlfriend of the former Marine did some coughing last night, and then she started again with the repetitive, loud coughing at about 5:30 a.m. this morning.
There was more coughing from male residents who have been doing that sort of thing all along.
I went into the first floor bathroom that’s off the common area, a minute or two after one of the male residents sat in a chair in the common area. After I’d been in the bathroom for a few minutes, he started the loud, repetitive coughing.
When I say that the harassing coughing is loud; it is LOUD. It can be heard all over the house, and I think that’s the intention. I’ve walked by the window of the women’s dorm before and immediately heard the loud coughing from male residents on the sidewalk outside the shelter.
I yelled from the bathroom; “Yeah, I hear you, I get it already.”
He yelled at me, louder than I had at him “No, you don’t get it. I’m sick of your…….shit.”
What do you know, a moment of seeming hesitation from someone who has mostly dedicated himself to being horrible to me.
(I'm adding a note here a few hours after I first wrote this. The resident from the shelter whom I've described just above most likely reads my blog. Here's what I wrote on the blog page "Another Way Drama" on July 30,2011:
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July 30, 2011
The coughing has been going on since I got to Another Way at 9:00 a.m..
I finally got upset and yelled "Shut the fuck up!"
A guy goes "You can't swear here," and I said "You know what? Shut the fuck up!"
A female staff worker who harasses me here constantly said about me to someone "She needs to fucking go."
I said to her "I need to "fucking" go, because I can't swear here? Is that what you just said?"
Another guy who visits here but who is NOT staff hassled me for 10 minutes, as the female staff member said something about all "the shit" I give people
@ 12:00 p.m.
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When I document things that happen, sometimes people are sickened by how brutal and unfair it is right away, and sometimes there's a time when however I was abused by one person gets taken up and passed around as part of the fad of my being bullied. I feel as if documenting things is still important. 08/02/11 @ 10:06 p.m.)
Then I heard him complaining to someone “She thinks it’s about her when people cough.”
He saw me go into the bathroom. It’s not as if he’s the first person who has sat, stood, or walked by the closed door of a bathroom that I’ve been in and done the loud, repetitive coughing; that’s happened both at the shelter and in public. I’ll go into a public restroom, a stranger will see me go in and will walk by the closed door to the restroom and do the coughing.
That male resident is also someone who has harassed me almost nonstop since he moved into the shelter a few months ago. Trying to be nice to him doesn’t help the situation at all, getting angry often prompts more abuse, and to say that it’s been dicey to ask people who are supposed to be promoting a safe and respectful place to live for help is putting it mildly, to say the least.
1. The Good Samaritan Shelter, Barre VT/A correction regarding its involvement with the United Way/Abuse at the shelter
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman August 2, 2011 @ 5:35 p.m./I need to do one other thing and then I have to go, so if there are typos or other errors, I'll have to get back to them later if I have time.
edit @ 6:18 p.m.
1. The Good Samaritan Shelter, Barre VT/A correction regarding its involvement with the United Way/Abuse at the shelter
On Saturday, July 30, 2011, on my blog page, "4. Newblog2011: 07/30/11 The computer is gone from the shelter as of last night/United Way/NFL/Microsoft/Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation/E-Bay MissionFish/NASCAR/UPS/MERCK/This has nothing to do with me, the war on women and children has been going on for a long time," I wrote:
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“There’s a sign in the window of the shelter that says it’s a United Way agency. The
United Way in Vermont was very involved in the harassment of me last year, and it has continued on in support of all of the bad issues.”
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Then I went on to talk quite a bit about the United Way, did research starting from the United Way website, and completed the blog page that way.
There is a sign in the window of the shelter that says “United Way: Participating Agency.” However, it doesn’t seem as if the United Way runs the shelter; it seems as if the Good Samaritan Shelter is affiliated with the United Way.
Here’s some information that I found on the website for the Good Samaritan;
“In 1982, a planning meeting for the first homeless shelter in Central Vermont was held, with involvement from a number of local community organizations and area clergy. A board of directors was formed, and the search for a location began. Nonprofit and tax exempt status was acquired for the new organization, the effort to provide shelter evolved into a special ministry of local churches working with area businesses and state agencies.”
Churches, area businesses and state agencies; that is NOT comforting information. It’s not any better than if I had found out that it was completely run by the United Way. No wonder so many of the churches that I’ve been to as recommended by the shelter had things around that showed support for harassment and for child molestation.
Saturday night when I got back to the shelter after having written that blogpage, there were several cans of Skintimate brand “Raspberry Rain” shaving cream distributed throughout the 2 bathrooms and the basement shower room. The upstairs bathroom also had several packets of rainbow-colored, individual tissue packets.
Perhaps it had been there before, but there was a strand of pearls in the top desk-shelf of one of the desks in the staff office that I hadn’t noticed there before.
When a lot of people were in the common area, one of the residents started talking about yogurt, and how someone had taken one of the yogurts he’d left in the fridge. Another resident, a female one, said to him “It’s too bad, because it’s one of the only things you can eat, isn’t it?” Then the male resident said, loudly, “ Lena , it wouldn’t be you (who took my yogurt), would it?” I said “No,” because it hadn’t been.
There was some very loud coughing, notably by the former Marine.
That night, things got really terrible. The former Marine’s girlfriend (or wife, I still don’t know which) said something about how she couldn’t wait for someone to get kicked out. Then it went on to be the second night in a row that she did the “loud, fake cough-wait for a reaction-loud, fake cough if there is no reaction-wait for a reaction-loud, fake cough—“ routine. After several minutes of it, I finally got upset. I went to the edge of my bed at the top of the bunk to which her bed is now perpendicular, and said “You’re not going to get me kicked out with your behavior. There was a group of people when I first got here a few months ago who tried to put me through the same thing, and I’m the one who’s still here.” I tried to explain to her that sleep is one of the things that’s the most difficult to get in the shelter. It all got bad quickly; she called me a bitch and told me to get down out of my bunk bed so that she could beat me up and she called me a chicken because I didn’t do that. We called each other stupid for a few minutes, until I said “I’m going to talk to staff” and left the room.
The overnight staffperson was already in the doorway of his room. I told him that the female resident had been doing the loud, fake coughing and I asked him to speak to her. He said “I can’t talk to her; there’s nothing I can do.”
As I was objecting to his statement that there was nothing he could do, the female resident walked out of the room and over to where the staffperson and I were standing. She said that she couldn’t help the coughing, that she’s sick. I said “That’s not true.” She said “There are other people here who deliberately cough, but I don’t.” I said “You know that you’re doing it on purpose.”
She told me “You’re lucky that I’m not kicking your ass right now.”
She and the staffperson and I were standing within a 3-foot radius. I looked at him and said “She’s threatening me. You need to put a stop to this.”
He hemmed and hawed some more, and then the female resident pushed me.
It wasn’t some little push; she turned her body completely toward me, put her hands on my shoulders and pushed me. It was a “start a fight” push, where the person being pushed is supposed to push back as a preliminary to actual fighting.
I didn’t push her back; I stepped back and absorbed the impact of her push. Then I stopped stepping backward, with her a few inches from me, still ready to fight me.
I looked around her to the staffperson and said something along the lines of “Are you going to do something about this now?”
He said “If I call the police now, you’ll all be in big trouble.”
I said “You can’t be serious; you just saw her assault me.”
The female resident’s boyfriend and another male resident were at the top of the stairs by then; they had walked up from the first floor, probably after hearing the commotion.
Everyone started talking at once, and the staffperson still had made no move to try to get the woman to back away from me. The door to the upstairs bathroom was open and in front of me, so I went into that bathroom and shut and locked the door.
A few minutes later, it seemed quieter. I left the bathroom and saw that, at the bottom of the stairs, the male staffperson had the phone out and was dialing. I said “What are you doing?”
He stopped dialing and said, again, “If I call the police now, you’ll all be in big trouble.”
The male resident who had walked up the stairs with the ex-Marine apparently gave the female resident who had pushed me some Benadryl while I was in the bathroom. The staffperson said “She’s now had some medication so that she won’t cough. She’s gone back to bed; just go back into the women’s dorm, don’t communicate with her, and get some sleep.”
I said “I’m not going back in there. Once things get to the point that somebody’s pushing you like that, you need to be separated from that person. I’m going to sleep outside on the porch.”
He didn’t want me to do that, but I insisted that I wasn’t going back in the room to try to sleep. I got a blanket and a pillow from my bed and went out onto the porch, where there’s a couch.
He called the assistant director; then he walked back out onto the porch and said “You can sleep out here, but I need to shut the door.”
The front and side doors are always locked; they get left open during the hours when residents are there in the evening and the morning, and get closed at night. Whenever you go into or leave the house, you’re supposed to leave the door partially ajar so that other people who are outside the house can get back in. At night, the doors get closed, but the side one has certainly been left completely open during hot nights this summer. Also, when residents go out in front of the shelter to smoke at night, they leave the front door ajar so that they can get back in.
What he was saying was that if I wanted to sleep on the porch, I wouldn’t be able to get back into the house at all until the morning; not to use the restroom, not to get away from someone who walked up onto the porch to hassle me. I said “I have no idea what you’re talking about. That resident just assaulted me, and you saw it happen. I’m not going to the police to press charges, so why don’t you be reasonable about this and make sure that I can get back into the house if I need to do so.”
He agreed to leave the door ajar; then he went back to bed.
The day after the pushing incident, I went to the Barre police station. The orange “Caution” road cone was still on the lawn in front of the police station. The bulletin board in the entrance still has all of the same posters on it. The dry erase board on the back wall of the office still says “Chelsea” on the left side, and then has two “hydrant” notices on the right side, one for Spaulding High School. Also, since the last time that I visited that police station, a large, red box of Milk Bone dog biscuits had been placed on the top of a cabinet directly behind the window in the entrance, where people have to direct their first communication into the office of the police station.
I talked to a police officer and told him what had happened the night before. I explained to him that I hadn’t spoken to him the night before because it’s a rule that residents can’t leave the shelter after 9:00 p.m., and that if I had tried to go the police station, I would most likely have had to be out for the night.
I also explained that I had wanted to talk to the police before I went back to the shelter for something of the same reason; residents of the shelter can get back into the shelter somewhere around 6:30 p.m., but often, once they’re back, they can’t leave the shelter premises again until the next morning, and everyone has to be back by 9:00 p.m. every night. I didn’t know what I was going to walk back into when I went back to the shelter that night.
I also was wary of going back to the shelter without talking to the police first, myself, in person, because the night before, the staffperson had been saying “If I call the police now, you’ll all be in big trouble.” I didn’t want to get assaulted and then also arrested, so I thought I should talk to the police first and explain during a calm moment what had happened during the night before.
I told the police officer what had happened. I said that there was a lot of fake, deliberate coughing as part of my being harassed, and I told him about being threatened and then pushed in front of the shelter staffperson. The police officer said “The resident who pushed you is guilty of at least a disorderly conduct. It’s not assault because you didn’t feel pain, but it’s definitely disorderly conduct. The staff shouldn’t be allowing that to happen. They should all be on the same page about that. You should talk to the shelter manager about it; I can also try to call her this week and talk to her about it.”
He also said that if something like what happened happens again, I should say “Go on and call the police.” He said that I’d told him what had happened, so the police know who the aggressor was, and that I shouldn’t worry about the staffperson who had said “If I call the police, you’ll all be in big trouble,” or anybody else who works there who talks that way.
I thanked him, and I told him that I didn’t want to charge the woman who pushed me with anything. I said that it seemed wrong to me that she was being allowed to be abusive, and that it would be too bad if the shelter’s negligence resulted in her taking things farther and being arrested for assault because of another incident.
Here’s the thing, though; as I described at the beginning of my discussion of the “Caution” cone and other things around the police station, the Barre police station is encouraging the harassment, too. It’s encouraging everything that I’ve been protesting. I appreciate what that police officer said to me; I felt safer because of it when I went back to the shelter. However, why should citizens who otherwise would most likely be law-abiding if they weren’t being encouraged to be abusive by the government and other big harassers get themselves into situations where they do commit crimes that cannot be negotiated with, such as assault?
I’ve made this argument before.
I went back to the shelter. The assistant director was the overnight staff volunteer. I told him everything that had happened. He said that he hadn’t heard the details of what had happened from the staff volunteer. He also said “It seems to be a pattern with you that you think people are coughing deliberately around you; that causes me some concern.”
I’ve often written on both of my blogs about having a psychiatric history. I’ve also written about the way that staff at the Vermont State Hospital harassed me more or less around the clock for 4 months straight and then said that none of it was happening and that all of my objections to it were a result of my being delusional.
What do you want to bet that he was considering trying to tell me that I was delusional, that I was imagining all of the harassment?
The first page of the website for the Good Samaritan Haven homeless shelter in Barre, VT has a link that says “Learn more through the Volunteer Network at the Green Mountain United Way.”
At the top of the page that the link goes to, there’s an ad for the United Way. The last sentence of the first paragraph on that page is this:
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“Currently our maximum guest capacity at the Haven is 26. Hedding United Methodist Church is currently serving as an overflow shelter site for up to 14 additional homeless people when needed.”
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A few sentences after that, there’s the name and phone number of the assistant director.
It’s not as if he’s unaware of everything else that’s going on.
He suggested to me again that I should at least consider that the coughing isn’t deliberate. I said “That’s such a lie,” and I got up and left the room.
Within an hour, one of the female residents walked out into the common area, pointed at me and said loudly, “Nobody make fun of her or cough behind her back or we’ll all get kicked out. I’m passing the word around.”
My impression from that announcement was that the assistant director had decided to give another ultimatum, such as the manager did a few months ago, that if there were more problems everyone would have to do.
Since the announcement seemed to have an immediate, positive effect on people, I went upstairs to the women’s dorm. When the former Marine’s girlfriend walked into the room, I did what I wished I had done the night before, which was to show her my sound-blocking ear protection, such as one might wear in any very loud situation, and to tell her that the band connecting the two earpieces had been rubbing my hair thin on the top of my head because I wear them so much.
That’s true; I had noticed that earlier the night before, which was why I hadn’t worn them. The fact that I hadn’t been wearing them the night that she pushed me was probably part of the reason that I had ended up arguing with her in the first place. I wear them to sleep in anyway, now; they block out other noise such as people getting up at night, moving around in their sleep, snoring, and noise from the rest of the shelter and the street. I also have worn them in public quite a bit; for example, I wore them at the Department of Labor for a long time, I’ve worn them at Another Way, and I also have worn them consistently at the Department of Libraries.
She thought it was funny, which was my intention. She apologized and then told me that she wasn’t a mean person, which I said I knew.
I went and told the assistant director that things seemed to be improving already because of whatever he’d done.
Unfortunately, on Monday, August 1, 2011, when I went back to the shelter after having documented the “Kilz” Home Depot ad and other issues on my blog that day, things were definitely getting bad at the shelter again. I walked in the door and saw that the assistant director was in the shelter office with some other people. Either he or another man in the office gave a cough.
I saw the manager in the common area and said “Hello” to her. She didn’t say anything back, and gave me a hostile look.
A few minutes later, I walked by the open door of the office and saw and heard a male resident saying loudly “At least it didn’t leak all over the floor, did it?” He was talking to the shelter manager, who laughed, said “No,” and was very encouraging of him.
The girlfriend of the former Marine did some coughing last night, and then she started again with the repetitive, loud coughing at about 5:30 a.m. this morning.
There was more coughing from male residents who have been doing that sort of thing all along.
I went into the first floor bathroom that’s off the common area, a minute or two after one of the male residents sat in a chair in the common area. After I’d been in the bathroom for a few minutes, he started the loud, repetitive coughing.
When I say that the harassing coughing is loud; it is LOUD. It can be heard all over the house, and I think that’s the intention. I’ve walked by the window of the women’s dorm before and immediately heard the loud coughing from male residents on the sidewalk outside the shelter.
I yelled from the bathroom; “Yeah, I hear you, I get it already.”
He yelled at me, louder than I had at him “No, you don’t get it. I’m sick of your…….shit.”
What do you know, a moment of seeming hesitation from someone who has mostly dedicated himself to being horrible to me.
(I'm adding a note here a few hours after I first wrote this. The resident from the shelter whom I've described just above most likely reads my blog. Here's what I wrote on the blog page "Another Way Drama" on July 30,2011:
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July 30, 2011
The coughing has been going on since I got to Another Way at 9:00 a.m..
I finally got upset and yelled "Shut the fuck up!"
A guy goes "You can't swear here," and I said "You know what? Shut the fuck up!"
A female staff worker who harasses me here constantly said about me to someone "She needs to fucking go."
I said to her "I need to "fucking" go, because I can't swear here? Is that what you just said?"
Another guy who visits here but who is NOT staff hassled me for 10 minutes, as the female staff member said something about all "the shit" I give people
@ 12:00 p.m.
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When I document things that happen, sometimes people are sickened by how brutal and unfair it is right away, and sometimes there's a time when however I was abused by one person gets taken up and passed around as part of the fad of my being bullied. I feel as if documenting things is still important. 08/02/11 @ 10:06 p.m.)
Then I heard him complaining to someone “She thinks it’s about her when people cough.”
He saw me go into the bathroom. It’s not as if he’s the first person who has sat, stood, or walked by the closed door of a bathroom that I’ve been in and done the loud, repetitive coughing; that’s happened both at the shelter and in public. I’ll go into a public restroom, a stranger will see me go in and will walk by the closed door to the restroom and do the coughing.
That male resident is also someone who has harassed me almost nonstop since he moved into the shelter a few months ago. Trying to be nice to him doesn’t help the situation at all, getting angry often prompts more abuse, and to say that it’s been dicey to ask people who are supposed to be promoting a safe and respectful place to live for help is putting it mildly, to say the least.
1. The Good Samaritan Shelter, Barre VT/A correction regarding its involvement with the United Way/Abuse at the shelter
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman August 2, 2011 @ 5:35 p.m./I need to do one other thing and then I have to go, so if there are typos or other errors, I'll have to get back to them later if I have time.
edit @ 6:18 p.m.