Comfort on Difficult Days

I officially made it through my first week of work at Alliance of AIDS Services - Carolina, my first professional job. It was a whirlwind of a week as I met everyone in the office, met some awesome volunteers, some interesting clients, and began to take over the food pantry. Just to give everyone a quick idea of my job, I am the client services assistant at AAS-C in Raleigh. My primary responsibility is to run the food pantry at which clients can shop up to twice per month for both perishables and non-perishables including fresh fruits, vegetables, and bread. I am responsible for going to the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina once a week to gather up new food, as well as order fresh produce from a local distributor. On top of my pantry duties, I will be helping with intakes, updates, and financials. I will work directly with clients to see what resources they need, how they are living, and how HIV/AIDS is affecting their lives.


Most of the week was spent in training sessions, both at AAS-C learning how to do intakes and updates and at the Food Bank doing safe food handling training (after all of the years I have spent in the food industry). My supervisor, Miss Jeanette, is a fantastic woman who I am sure is going to teach me so much. She already has a great deal of respect for me, which I truly appreciate. She is a woman full of joy and faith, and her personality really radiates. The funniest thing, though, is that she loves to go off on tangents. Her thought process can often times be very difficult to follow because she'll be explaining the intake paperwork to you one minute, be talking about her family the next, then all of a sudden be talking about the intake paperwork again. I am slowly catching on to her way of explaining things, but I sense she won't care if I ask her the same question 5 times.


I really enjoyed spending time in the pantry this week and getting acquainted with how everything is set up, what kind of foods are usually stocked in there, and learning how to keep track of food distributed, etc. On Wednesdays, which is Food Bank day, I work with three awesome volunteers who are also clients. The previous JV left me a note telling me not to let them walk all over me or convince me to get certain food items just for them, so I was a little apprehensive in meeting them. But I made a joke right at the beginning about how things were gonna run my way, and then we laughed all afternoon. They are fantastic guys, and I'm so excited to get to work with them. They have great senses of humor and love football...how does it get any better than that?!


Though most of the week was filled with positive experiences, I did have my share of difficult times throughout my first week at work. On my very first day, I had to call back a woman who's boyfriend was sick again, causing them serious financial hardship. They will be evicted any day now, if they haven't already been. Unfortunately, she had already used up all the money in her pot at AAS-C and there was nothing we could do to help her. This was all on my first day, and I had to handle the phone call on my own. I know that there are going to be many times over this year when I cannot help, especially financially, and that is a little scary. HIV has a domino effect on people living with the virus - If someone doesn't live in a stable housing situation and is out on the streets, they will probably stop adhering to their treatment or don't even have the money to afford their meds. As that happens, nothing is fighting the HIV and they will probably get more and more sick.


Thursday and Friday mostly consisted of going through inactive files - those clients who have not been to AAS-C in over a year. It was my job to go through the files and get rid of any who hadn't been to the agency in over 7 years. As I was flipping through the papers, reading about the lives of others, I realized that we had no idea what had happened to these clients - if they'd moved, if they had gotten a good job and no longer needed our financial assistance, if they are incarcerated or if maybe they'd died. Each time I threw a file into the box to be shredded, I felt like I was throwing a person away without getting to know them, without even knowing where they were now. It was as though I was saying, "Goodbye. You are now forgotten forever." I am still struggling to wrap my head around this one and wondering if there is another way to approach these inactive files or if we can take the time to find out what happened to these clients.


Through the difficult times though, I always knew that there would be true comfort when I arrived home at the end of the day to my four community-mates. Each of them has also had challenging experiences in just one week of work. We spend our nights sitting around the dinner table discussing, offering advice, giving support, but mostly reminding each other why we are doing what we're doing. It is a truly unbelievable feeling to come to four people who understand you in a different way then many others who you love. Samii, Maryann, Kate, and Hanna are amazing young ladies and I am so excited for the coming year alongside each of them. I know I am going to learn so much from each of their experiences, as well as my own.


Here's to us remembering that we each have people who love and support us. We each have people who can provide us with comfort on those difficult days. We are lucky.