Sorting files

I spent most of today at what was, till 2020, Sisters of the Road Cafe. It’s now an unheated empty shell of a building full of file cabinets, chairs, fifty or sixty boxes of papers, stacks of art, photos, lyrics for folk songs from the 70s, clumps of dust, and yoga mats. I’ve been interested in Sisters of the Road since 2013, when I first mentioned it in my all-time most popular blip.

Sisters was started in 1979 by Genny Nelson, who was influenced by Dorothy Day. Genny died in 2020, and her obituary in the local paper shows her standing in the cafe when it was in its heyday. Everything must be out of the building by the end of this month, and my purpose today was to see if any of the boxes of papers contained speeches or statements written by Genny, and if so to save them from being recycled or shredded. 

Fortunately someone else has already combed through the records and filed Genny’s papers at the Oregon Historical Society, so there was almost nothing of hers in the files. I did find photographs, meeting notes, and old calendars which I marked to be saved; and many pounds of paper on which were written and filed the City of Portland’s Plans To End Homelessness by 1980, 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005…. I dropped them all into the recycling bin.

Every Mayor of Portland since 1975 has promised to “solve the problem of homelessness,” most of them claiming to do that in the next five years (the mayor’s term is four years). All the city’s feasibility studies and plans have given steady employment to hundreds, perhaps thousands of middle-class workers, “the Homeless Industrial Complex.” An unhoused friend of mine told me, “They need us to be homeless so they can have jobs.” 

As everyone waits for a plan that works and capitalism funnels money upward to oligarchs and plutocrats, Sisters has been collaborating with houseless people for 44 years to relieve suffering and to change the systems that cause suffering. The work goes on.