Countdown clock to Olympic homelessness unveiled

Wendy Pederson is no slouch as an organizer. The thirty-something mother of two, with flaming red hair, has previously organized everything on the Downtown Eastside from the Whitecaps Stadium to a Block Party outside her Downtown Eastside apartment for the entire neighbourhood. From a family of gill netters – Pederson Hill in Surrey is named after her family – Pederson is now organizing on behalf of Vancouver’s homeless.

Pederson and a group of about 50 demonstrators shadowed Premier Gordon Campbell on the lawn of the Vancouver Art Gallery this afternoon as he unveiled a giant clock to countdown to the Olympics just three years away. Pederson and her crew unveiled their own hand-made clock on the lawn, a clock for the “Countdown to Olympic Homelessness”.

The clock identifies the year 2010 as “Doomsday”, a time when homelessness will have tripled since 2006.

Pederson was recently hired as an organizer against homelessness by the Carnegie Community Action Project at Main & Hastings. Indeed many of the people who showed up at today’s demonstration are familiar faces from the Carnegie Community Centre.

Today, Pederson not only took a political approach to the issue of homelessness but a spiritual one. Developers are driven by “a factor of greed”, she explained, and promised repeatedly that developers and politicians would experience “true happiness and love” if they housed the homeless.

But Pederson wasn't without concrete steps for achieving this true happiness and love. "We need legislation from the city to protect the existing housing" from being converted to condos which are unaffordable to low income people, she says. She also wants a committment from the federal and provincial governments to fund more low income housing. And she wants welfare rates jacked up.

Of course not everyone agrees with such taxpayer-funded meddling in the free market. The opposition was summed up by a recent caller to the Bill Good radio show who challenged anti-homlessness advocates: he pointed out that most working people can’t afford to live in Downtown Vancouver, so it didn’t make sense to him for government to provide apartments in that core for people on welfare.

But the left-leaning Carnegie Community Action Project and their supporters are, Pederson believes, “on the logical high ground”. What's more, Pederson is not without a plan. She figures if she can get 20 people to each organize 20 more people to work for action on homelessness, she’ll be rolling.

[This posting may be updated as Mayor Sullivan has been asked to respond to claims made by Wendy Pederson.]

More members kicked out of Carnegie Centre

The Republic newspaper has picked up on some of the themes raised by the Downtown Eastside Enquirer about unfair barring practices at Carnegie Centre and whether Carnegie staff genuinely promote "community" on the Downtown Eastside. The author of the article, Tavis Dodds, specifically mentions the Downtown Eastside Enquirer and it's exposure of the barring of homelesss man Bill Simpson.

Peter Haskell and Ricky, two other men who have been barred from Carnegie Centre, are quoted in the article. Haskell's case is particularly interesting as he provides evidence that after being barred for free speech, he became the target of political psychiatry by a Carnegie staff person. The Downtown Eastside Enquirer has in the past pointed to emerging signs that Carnegie staff were participating in the epidemic of political psychiatry on the Downtown Eastside.

See The Republic article: Celebrating 104 years at Main & Hastings

Memory of alleged Pickton victim Sereena Abotsway

I met Sereena Abotsway not long before her face appeared on the poster of missing women on the Downtown Eastside, long before her face appeared on the pages of newspapers around the world as a victim of alleged serial killer Willie Pickton. I have not made much of my contact with Sereena; I don’t want to come across like a person in a Joni Mitchell song who has brief contact with a famous person and goes on to portray them as “a very good friend of mine”.

Sereena Abotsway was not a very good friend of mine. I met Sereena through Carol Romanow, in the 2nd floor cafeteria of the Carnegie Centre at Main & Hastings. Carol, who was then in her mid fifties, knew lots of people in the neighbourhood, including street-involved people. She ran a Hepatitis C group at Carnegie and had been on the Board of the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre. She was always helping people; she would load her van with clothes that somebody was throwing out and give them to people who could use them. She was kind, too often brusque, but consistently trustworthy. I don’t know where exactly she met Sereena.

I would sometimes sit with Carol on the 2nd floor while having a coffee or a meal. One day Carol walked in with Sereena; she brought her to my table and introduced me. Carol left for a few minutes then to go to the counter where you order food or coffee, and I was left to make small talk with Sereena. When Carol returned, the three of us sat and chatted for about half an hour.

I’ve been told that I have a good memory for social detail, yet when I try to recall what the three of us talked about, I draw a blank. What I do recall is what was going through my mind as we sat talking, maybe because I went over it in my mind again shortly afterwards when I saw Sereena’s face on the Missing Women poster, and a couple of times over the years when mentioning it to friends.

What I was thinking while chatting with Sereena – not in hindsight – was that there must have been a stretch in her childhood where she had been treated with some love and respect. She just didn’t have the heavy layer of psychological armouring that so many street people have, she didn’t have a coarse way of talking. She lacked the hostile edge. When I made small talk with Sereena as we waited for Carol to come back with coffee, I recall initially being taken aback by her undefended demeanor: she smiled, she was respectful, unpretentious, and put out the effort to carry her end of the conversation. She was nice. The entire time, I kept thinking that there must have been a period when somebody raising her had treated her ok and formed this personality that was now treating me ok. You could see it; it was like a light that was still on in Sereena.

Another thing that was running through my mind as we chatted – not in hindsight -- was that even though Sereena was nice, I wouldn’t be naïve enough to trust her because you can’t trust anybody into drugs or street life. Not that Sereena was on drugs that day; I’m virtually certain she wasn’t. It’s just that I have never forgotten what a street-smart Cree man told me over a decade ago: “The thing to remember about street people is that they’re always hustling.” It’s not that Sereena came across as hustling while she chatted with me. She didn’t. Not at all.

It is my overall impression of Sereena taken from that chat that has stayed with me over the years, as concrete details of her have faded. Like the fact that she was missing her front teeth. It took a photo of Sereena on the front page of the Vancouver Sun at the start of the Pickton trial to jog my memory of that fact, even though her missing teeth were not obvious in the photo. Such a detail is always easy to forget on the Downtown Eastside, where lack of dental upkeep is more common and standards of female beauty are more forgiving than in other neighbourhoods.

Just two or three weeks after that first meeting with Sereena, I saw her again at Carnegie. It was a sweltering hot afternoon, a Sunday I believe as I recall Carnegie having that deserted feeling it often has on a summer Sunday afternoon. I was sitting at a table on the 2nd floor when Sereena walked in. She said hi to me and seemed to be in an upbeat mood. She was wearing knee length, stretchy, black leggings and a matching black tank top. The top was very short; her entire midriff was showing. She was a bit puffy around the midriff but the thing I noticed at the time – not in hindsight – was how unselfconsciously she moved in her far from perfect body, a trait I've noticed amongst Downtown Eastside women whose bodies get plenty of use in the sex trade.

After saying hi to me, Sereena walked toward the counter where coffee and food are sold. I had the impression that she was going to come back and sit down. I wasn’t paying much attention but she seemed to be talking to someone near the coffee counter. Suddenly she took off. It was then that I noticed a light summer top, red with black dots if I remember correctly, slung over the back of a chair at my table. I remember commenting to somebody that I thought Sereena had left it. But she was gone.

Sereena's happy-go-lucky air that day, coupled with the fact that she appeared to have left her top behind, has left me wondering in hindsight if she was a bit high – addicts act scattered and shed things; there are always clothes dropped on the sidewalks on the DTES – but then again she may have been straight. She was certainly lucid; she remembered me.

About six weeks after this last encounter with Sereena, I was in the lobby of the Carnegie Centre, standing by the bulletin board gazing at the rows of faces on the missing women’s poster. I saw Sereena’s face. I knew it was her. It looked exactly like her. Sometimes I look at women’s faces on that poster and think, “She looks like somebody I’ve seen around, but I can't be sure.” In Sereena’s case, I was sure.

I remember being amazed at what a small gap of time there seemed to be between my meeting Sereena and her face turning up on the poster of missing women. I wondered why I hadn’t heard Carol mention it. I hadn’t heard anybody mention it. In fact, I don’t recall ever hearing the missing women discussed by regulars at Carnegie over coffee or dinner.

Long after meeting Sereena and seeing her on the missing woman’s poster, a year or two later, maybe more, I stumbled across something about her in the Vancouver Sun. The article – I don’t have a copy so I’m relying on memory -- did not start out being about Sereena. It was about a controversy involving two foster parents, a married couple. Government social workers were planning to remove two girls, sisters I believe, around 12 years old, from their home. But the girls didn’t want to be removed as they had been happy with this couple for some time. And the couple wanted to continue raising them. But social workers claimed that the couple, who may have been in their early 70s, were too old now to be foster parenting young girls.

Toward the end of the interview, the reporter asked this couple about the years they had spent as foster parents to Sereena Abotsway. A lot came out. By the time these foster parents had gotten Sereena, she had been chronically abused, sexually and otherwise, by a guy raising her whom I believe they said was her father or uncle. She had been taken from him and placed with these foster parents at the age of four. Too late, I remember thinking; almost irreparable damage would have been done by that time.

These foster parents raised Sereena until the age of 17, at which point they could no longer keep her as she had gotten out of control and was influencing younger children in the home. But they took an interest in what became of her: they impressed upon social workers that Sereena should not be moved into a group home where she would be influenced by other troubled teenagers. They were ignored. That group home would prove to be a gateway for Sereena into drugs and the sex trade.

But from the age of 4 to 17, these foster parents had given Sereena a stable upbringing. As a child, they had taken her to church where she had liked to sing. Even after she had moved out, they had remained bonded with her, speaking almost daily to her on the telephone and meeting her regularly for dinner. They had a reputation for being two of the best foster parents in the province.

That’s it, I thought. That’s the light I saw.

Potato thief strikes Cobalt Hotel

Jim trudged up the four flights of stairs to his room at the Cobalt residential hotel on the Downtown Eastside last Sunday night. After setting down his bag of potatoes, he darted down the hall to the washroom. He didn’t bother to lock the padlock he has on the outside of his door.

He knew better.

Jim has lived at the Cobalt Hotel for almost a decade. He is occasionally bothered by other tenants knocking on his door to ask for a light for a crack pipe. Once he returned to his room to find a woman rummaging through his things. She took off and his large collection of tapes of Art Bell radio shows took off with her, even though she would get nothing for them on the street.

Jim would like to move from the Cobalt Hotel, although he has enjoyed the view of the False Creek sunset until it was obscured by a new condo building that went up. He’s been on the waiting list for social housing at the Downtown Eastside Residents Association for six years but his name has never come up. He lacks the real politik prerequisite: he sits for example at Carnegie, within earshot of DERA people, loudly complaining, “That gaaaaaaad dammed Libby Davies; she’s destroyed this neighbourhood.” His name will never come up.

I know about Jim’s potatoes because he told many of people at Carnegie what had happened. Knowing Jim, he may have spent the last few dollars in his pocket for the potatoes. Smoking and knocking back a few beers at the Pacific tend to take priority over food.

For Jim, potatoes are a full meal. He cuts them into long strips, bakes them in the toaster oven. As he waits for them to bake, he smokes cigarettes and listens to Art Bell or George Nori on Coast to Coast radio. When the potatoes are ready, he sprinkles them with a little oil, salt, pepper, and garlic.

After returning to his room from the washroom, “I was looking forward to having some potatoes,” Jim later recalled. He looked around for the potatoes. He kept looking. The potatoes were gone.

Sarti Party for leftists leaving Carnegie

"What will Cuba do without Castro?" Those words were written in orange icing on top of the humongous carrot cake at the going away party for Bob Sarti and Muggs Sigurdson.

After 20 years of involvement with the Carnegie Centre, Sarti and Sigurdson are moving to Hornby Island. A party was held for them in the theatre of the Carnegie Centre on Saturday night.

See article on NowPublic.com

Hacker leaves another harassing comment

A hacker has once again left a message on the Downtown Eastside Enquirer, which he or she referred to as, "YEASTSIDE ENQUIRER".

The message was:

"DRUNK EITH (sic) PUSSY PISS POWER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!