The 8-Week, No-Stop Bus Ride
By Tess Nelligan, University of Notre Dame
I spent my Shepherd internship working eight weeks this past summer with Caritas of Austin, a nonprofit that works to both end and prevent homelessness in Austin, Texas. My role there involved helping case managers within the Permanent Supportive Housing Department work with formerly homeless clients who Caritas had rehoused across the city. This usually involved ensuring clients did not violate their leases, helping them schedule various appointments, and ultimately serving as a source of support for the clients to lean on as they transitioned off of the streets and into housing.
To ensure my fellow Shepherd interns and I were able to get from place to place, we took the bus to work every day. The bus provided me an affordable way to get around Austin as well as made it a little bit easier to understand and empathize with my clients. When my clients complained that the city had changed all of the bus routes for no good reason, I could relate to their frustration. When my clients talked about the inconveniences they faced on public transportation, I echoed their sentiments. Though not every single one of my clients used the bus as their main form of transportation, the large majority of them did.
Despite the little inconveniences that come along with public transportation, conversations with my clients revealed how necessary public transportation is to so many people, especially those in poverty. Although many might see this form of transportation as a restriction on their summer, I truly believe that the bus provided me with a way to better understand one aspect of the reality of poverty: reliable transportation.
On the journey of my bus-ride of a summer, I experienced both smooth and bumpy parts of the ride. Each day at Caritas brought new victories and alongside those often came new challenges. It seemed that every time one client started to make progress, another client found themselves deteriorating. I saw new clients enter the program from off the streets and experience the joy of having stable housing. At the same time, I saw clients that had been with Caritas for years relapse into old, harmful habits or struggle to follow their leases and keep their housing.
What kept me going through these ups and downs were the little victories. I witnessed multiple clients obtain housing vouchers, which guaranteed them stable housing for the rest of their lives. I watched one client apply and be accepted for a class at a local community college. I even got to observe one client confront a problem that he had with hoarding and work towards solving that problem with the full support of Caritas behind him. Every time I found myself bogged down in the bumps that occurred along the road, I had to take time to remember all the good that Caritas had already accomplished and continues to accomplish every single day.
What I believe to be the best part of public transportation, as well as what I also believe to be true of my time at Caritas, is that it makes us better understand our common humanity. Not one person who rides the bus is better than the person sitting next to them. The bus and its accessibility levels us and creates common ground between strangers.
Before I started my internship, I definitely had some preconceptions about the population that I would be working with that might have inhibited my ability to see this common humanity. I assumed many of my clients would have had struggles with mental illness, or possibly had problems with an addiction, and that most of them wouldn’t have had access to higher education. These preconceptions created a fear that the differences I assumed were present between my clients and myself would prevent us from forming genuine connections. Yet, these preconceptions failed to encompass the humanity of my clients.
As I got further into the experience, the differences between us rarely seemed to matter. After only a short amount of time at Caritas, I realized that those who I was fortunate enough to work with definitely did fit some of the preconceptions that I had created before I arrived at Caritas. Some of my clients did struggle with mental illness, others had problems with addiction, and some never had the opportunity to pursue higher education. What stood out to me about my own preconceptions of my clients was how little they mattered once I got to know them. It turned out that often the one trait about them that would allow them to be grouped into a category or a statistic, or allow people like me to form preconceptions, also happened to be the least important thing about them.
For example, one of my clients named Tim struggled with an addiction to narcotics and he proved that a person’s dignity and humanity is more important than their struggle with substance abuse. During my time at Caritas, Tim had been in the midst of becoming sober, so I got to know him throughout a very difficult and vulnerable time in his life. Even though his drug addiction had been a large part of his life and his path to sobriety had also been quite difficult, these aspects of his life did not define him. His personality and his passions defined him. He was warm and enigmatic, the type of person who always insisted on calling someone by their first name. He was also passionate about family. He constantly talked about his mom and his sister and how much they both meant to him.
This client and so many others taught me the importance of looking past our preconceptions and embracing the diversity and humanity of each individual. I am so fortunate that I had the opportunity to work with people like him this summer, and I hope going forward that I can remember that people are so much more than the labels we assign them.
The metaphorical bus that I boarded when I began my Shepherd internship ended up dropping me off at a new and unfamiliar stop. As I transition back to my life at home and look forward to my last year at Notre Dame, I can’t help but think about how much my time at Caritas has altered my plans for the future.
Before leaving for my internship, I had hoped that this summer would be an opportunity for me to figure out whether I wanted to pursue my master’s degree in social work after I graduate this upcoming spring. What I found was that the internship didn’t give me a clear-cut answer to what I should pursue after my time at Notre Dame comes to an end. Instead, it provided me with more to think about when it comes to my future.
Now, I have even more questions about what comes next for me. Yet, whether I go on to graduate school, join an organization like Americorps, or enter into a direct-service job immediately after graduation, what the Shepherd internship has undoubtedly provided me is a passion to work in an industry or field that focuses on lifting people out of poverty.
Tess Nelligan is a psychology major at the University of Notre Dame, class of 2019. She was one of 130 students selected for the Shepherd Higher Education Consortium on Poverty’s 2018 Internship Program. Each summer, SHECP interns are placed with nonprofit and government agencies that work on the front lines of poverty and serve as co-educators to students. The views and opinions expressed in this reflection are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Shepherd Higher Education Consortium on Poverty.
