Chaplain Dave Goodall
July 28, 2008
Chaplain Dave Goodall |
We have some other statistics. In the first six months of this year, we saw about 1450 individuals in the ECH offices, 1200 of who were new guests, most new to the street. That means that we have helped over 17,000 individuals in the past twenty years, 9590 of them since January 2005. In these last 3-1/2 years, with your generous support, we have obtained the following for them.
We’ve made over 1200 long distance phone calls, given out over 700 pairs of reading glasses, faxed hundreds of documents, and notarized hundreds more. We have been busy.
As many of you are aware, there are signs on our windows, which boldly say "Expect Miracles". Many of our guests expect just that, because they have tried getting I.D’s and birth certificates in the past without any luck. We have been successful with many people who have never been able to get their birth certificate, and many who’s at home birth was never recorded. Over the years I’ve been Chaplain, I have shared many of those success stories with you. We’ve even had a recent change in our relationships with the Motor Vehicle Division, which will enable us to help hundreds of people we would have turned away in the past. We at ECH love sharing those success stories with you, and telling you about the men and women who make the effort to come back years after we helped them to thank us and tell us how they’re doing. What I want to tell you about today is some who, through no fault of their own, may never be able to be helped.
We had a young man come to us to get his birth certificate. He gave us all the information and the application was returned, denied. I called the state Vital Records office and was told he gave the wrong first name. It seems that he had always been called a nickname, which bore no relationship to his given name. Because he is mildly retarded, he has no recollection of what his real first name may be, and he has no living family to ask. Without a birth certificate, he cannot receive any assistance or benefits, and we have nowhere to turn. To make it worse, if I could come up with a solution to the dilemma, I couldn’t even find him now to help him.
Recently, a man came to us who’s family worked in a traveling carnival. When he was about 4 years old, his mother had a nervous breakdown while the carnival was traveling and was hospitalized. Several months later, the father disappeared, leaving our man and 4 older siblings with the carnival. The carnival owner took all of them in and raised them as his own. One by one the children went off on their own. Now the man needs a birth certificate and all he knows of his birth parents is that their names were Mommy and Daddy. He has no idea where he was born. He never attended a school or had any form of identification. The carnival owner is deceased, and the brothers are in parts unknown.
Last week we saw a beautiful woman in her 80’s, born in the Midwest, delivered by a midwife, and her birth was never recorded. All the rural schools she attended are either closed long ago or burned down. We are struggling to find enough original old documents to establish her identity.
The point I’m trying to make is that while we have our miraculous successes, we also have our dramatic failures. These people come to us because someone told them that if anyone can get their birth certificate and ID, the Chaplain can, and we almost always do. The human cost of our failures is tragic. The most needy, the most helpless, the most desperate of our society are denied assistance, care, benefits, food, shelter, and even their identity. Our great shortcoming is that in this age of suspicion and fear, we have failed to get one state vital records office to understand the suffering inflicted on some of the poorest, most hopeless of our citizens. This is a tragedy of national proportions, affecting thousands of individuals all over the country, and apparently no one cares enough to address it. The stock reply is, "If they can’t prove who they are, we will not...".
It is my great hope that if you receive this letter and know someone who can help, you will forward or mail this to them. Legislators don’t respond, and bureaucrats certainly don’t, meanwhile, for lack of a piece of paper or information, people are sentenced to life, and death, on the street.
Once again I would like to thank you for your continued support. We have our annual friend raising dinner coming up in September. I hope to see many of you there. You can also make contributions through our web site. Recently I received a call from a person in another city expressing an interest in starting an office like the Chaplaincy, there. I offered to go there and teach them everything I know to get them up and running without the learning curve that all of our Chaplains have experienced. Her response was that she was sure she could learn all that without much trouble. She just wanted to know which government agency provided the funds for our services. When I told her that there was no public bankroll, and that all our funding came from donations, she lost interest and hung up.
Please forward this letter to any who might be interested in ending homelessness. If this was forwarded to you, I hope you’ll visit us at www.azhomeless.org and subscribe. While you’re there, check out our little movie and read about the great work we’re doing at Justa Center. If there are questions I can answer, my email address is: chaplaindave@azhomeless.org, and my phone number is 602-417-9853.
God Bless You All,
Chaplain Dave Goodall
Ecumenical Chaplaincy for the Homeless
1125 W. Jackson St.
Phoenix AZ 85007
Phone: 602-417-9853 - Fax: 602-258-2675
Website: www.azhomeless.org
E-mail: chaplaindave@azhomeless.org