By Mira Thomas
I have been in Beauty Night for several months now, and Moose has become sort of an unofficial mentor for me in the Downtown Eastside. She teaches me to look for things I had never noticed or fully understood. As we walked down the streets together at night, Moose teaches me what the Downtown Eastside is really about.
She explains how the woman in the corner flailing her arms and uncontrollably turning around in circles is coming off of a drug. She points out how the atmosphere changes instantly as soon as a cop enters the scene. She explains how the presence of a group of male cops in a battered Women’s Shelter does not work well for the women there; there is often a lot of distrust and animosity in those situations.
She points out the good in the people living in the Eastside. She talks about how people who have never been to the DTES think the worst of the people there, that they are rude, violent, uneducated and lazy. But she shows me how wrong that is as a man comes up to us one night and offers us a tulip on the first day of spring and thanks us for smiling at him because he hasn’t seen a smile for awhile. I asked Moose who the flower could have been for. She told me it was probably for his girlfriend. I remember asking her, “Oh Moose! Does this mean his girlfriend’s not going to get a flower?” , she replied, “Oh no, he’s the kind of guy that’ll go out and buy another one for her.”
A few days later we were heading home from another Beauty Night session. We were on board a bus heading out of the DTES when a passenger got into a scuffle with the bus driver. As the scene unfolded in front of us she asked me to identify who had started the fight. I looked up and saw a pretty well-off looking man wildly gesturing and yelling at the bus driver, who was East Indian. He hurled insults at the man, telling him he was illiterate and to go back to his country. I was shocked. Suddenly a voice yelled from the back of the bus, “Hey! Stop talkin’ to him like that. Cut it out, or I’ll come over there n’ you don’t want that, trust me!”
I craned my head back to see who had come to the bus driver’s aide. It was a homeless man. He had a pretty bad limp n’ walked with a cane. One of his legs was badly hurt and bandaged up and he carried a bag over his shoulder. He was not afraid to stand up for what was right. The rude man at the front muttered something under his breath but he backed down instantly. Moose looked at me and said, “People think the one’s causing the problems are always the homeless ‘bums’, but it’s not like that. These people have big hearts, they are extremely caring and they look out for each other.”
I stopped to reflect and realized that a lot of people assume that affluent, well-off folks are also more well-mannered and caring than those that live on the streets. By volunteering at Beauty Night I have learned to take my presumptions about the women and check them at the door before going in to meet them. (I learn so much more about people when I do that.) The women I meet at Beauty Night don’t fit into the stereotypes I have made for them in my head. They are a diverse group of women; each of them as unique as their story.
