Friday Nights: Jun. 1

L is shuffling around outreach, not sure where to go or what to do next. A few months ago I remarked on how tough she is and hearing her joke with the other women at Outreach made me think things might be okay for her. I make eye contact and ask her how she is,...

Friday Nights: May 3rd

I’m late and the party is in full swing when I arrive. Several volunteers sorting through donations of clothing, accessories, but shoes go to the front of the line. Tonight one of our generous volunteers sent three shoes without mates. If you are reading this and find them, we’ve set their mates aside please feel...

Men on Bikes

Grown men on bikes are a marker in neighborhood like the War Zone. I’m not talking about the brightly colored spandex clad ones with padded bottoms and rear view mirrors attached to their helmets. You've seen those, the ones who congregate at coffee shops and stomp around in their clunky special order pedal shoes. These...

The victory of three serial rapists

On the surface, the three most recent serial rapists added to the Bad Guy List have few similarities. One is a white man in his 60s with salt-and-pepper hair. One is a tall African-American man in his 40s. And one is short, fat African-American man in 20s. Yet they do have several key things in...

A room of her own

Bella is happy. She has a lock on her door. For the past few years, she had been sleeping in abandoned houses, under bushes or occasionally in a hotel room — all with groups of people. She had moved from place to place, never able to stay anywhere for too long before she and her...

Friday Nights: Feb. 17

We’re setting up, heads and hands buried in the back of the car pulling donation items out and we have a woman asking urgently about bus passes.  Do we have any? When are we giving them out? and who is doing the survey? She’s got somewhere to be tonight. If you haven’t seen the shocking...

Friday Nights: Feb. 9

“Oh yeah. That guy,” she says. Her hand is steady as she holds the Bad Guy List. I had just finished my recap of this week's scariest of the scary. She tells me how she was attacked, with what and how she escaped. She doesn’t finish shopping and walks off alone. A few minutes later...

Things that are not okay

I’m standing on a street corner, asking a group of 20-somethings if they’ve seen a woman from San Felipe Pueblo. Her family is worried. They haven’t heard from her in two months and last week a cousin saw her in a pink-hued drug house in the War Zone. Her grandmother had called Street Safe, asking...

Friday Nights: Jan 19th

Sometimes men wander into our set-up. They peer into the bins from a distance and usually shuffle away when they see all the pads and tampons. They might ask us what we’re up to and many times they know a woman who could use some help. Some men stay and chat with us for a...

The deaths of three women

Within 10 days over the holidays, three of our women died. All were under age 35. Audra was murdered and dismembered. Crystal overdosed on Christmas Eve. Nicole was shot. We knew all three. Audra had only been on the streets a short while, so we hadn’t had the time to get to know her well....