ReInventing Life & Work Blog

At seven minutes before the hour, Diana lines up for a spot at one of the four computers that takes a floppy disk.  Tanya’s right behind her.  Before I have all of the computers booted up and at the ready screen, the women at The Gathering Place are waiting for their thirty-minute opportunity in the computer lab. 

The Gathering Place  is a daytime, drop-in center in Denver, offering women and children who are homeless or in poverty a wide variety of resources with which to rebuild their lives.  The computer lab is my little window on the lives and experiences of the guests.  The clicking keyboards and whoosh of ventilators suggest a computer lab at any community college.  But there are obvious signs that’s not the case.  Although the center offers storage space while the women are in-house, many carry along their lives in plastic bags and shopping carts stuffed with assorted clothes, papers, bits of this and that, material and emotional necessities.

Many women use their thirty minutes of on-line time to search for work and fill out applications. A woman who has lost custody of her children follows their lives on Facebook and MySpace and joyfully prints out a picture her daughter has posted of herself.  An elderly Chinese woman who comes in regularly sits smiling through her half-hour of finding and looking at photographs of flowers, sunsets and fireworks.   Sometimes, the session runs out before an on-line job application is complete.  The woman might ask for a little more time or, looking at the waiting list, decide to give up her station and return later to complete her task.  They are generous with each other in ways that we comfortably domiciled often are not. 

Watching the women, I realize that we’re all doing the same stuff:  searching for work, subsistence, connection, distraction.  Some of us are carrying home in plastic bags; some enter a building by a front door and call it home.  A fortunate few carry home within them, a place to which they return again and again, no matter where the body is or what it is doing. Home is a place in the heart, built from the bricks and mortar of relationships, commitments and values.  As they leave the lab, many of the women say “thank you.”  I return the thanks.  Thanks, ladies, for helping to furnish my home.