By Allison Li
1: May 8th
It is May 8th. Rain trickles through the blanketed darkness of Kensington Avenue as the unhoused sleep—some on the sidewalk, the lucky ones in tents. Lucky or not, the impending encampment resolution will soon shatter any semblance of peace.
Officers are going to be hands off. Services will be available, reassured Philadelphia Police Department spokesperson Eric Gripp.
5:30 a.m.: Wailing sirens light up the 3000-3100 blocks of Kensington Avenue. The hopeful people stay, trusting the city’s promised transportation services to shelters and treatments. Most flee.
6:45 a.m.: The police barricade the whole block, over an hour before the sweep’s scheduled start. Harm reductionists attempt to help people move their belongings before the police force them out of the barricades. “It’s a whole bunch of cops out here but it’s nobody to help us,” a community member complains.
7:20 a.m.: City workers begin throwing tents and belongings into garbage trucks.
7:30 a.m.: Outreach workers arrive. It’s too late. The 3000-3100 blocks of Kensington Avenue are a ghost town.
12:00 p.m.: Nine miles away, from my room in Rodin College House, I blink crusted sleep from my eyes. A grainy video from earlier that morning appears on my feed. Voices from the video rise in panic. “All the last few weeks we been signing up for shelters, we been signing up for rehabs. We been signing up for housing…for the past year…Where are the buses? Where are the buses? Where is the mayor?”
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In a CBS News article I read afterward, Adam Geer, the city’s first Chief Public Safety Director, says, “I’m proud to stand up here with these folks and say that it was a successful encampment resolution. We are going to meet them where they are at.”
Zane-na Jones, mother of three, spent hours that day walking down Kensington Avenue searching for a housing advocate, with her ID and housing voucher ready. She never found one. “They was going to help the homeless people with housing. But they’re not helping. It baffles me a lot.”
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How do you explain Kensington? Do you start with the suffering and grief that disfigures its streets?
There’s a third thing to Kensington, beyond the tainted public perception and ulterior political motives. I’m not exactly sure what it is — perhaps the byproduct of an obsession that there is more to supposedly ‘broken’ people than their pieces.
There’s H, always equipped with his helmet and bike, who helps clean up after outreaches and fist-bumps us when he passes. The first time I met H, he arrived to outreach late. I’ve never seen someone cry like that before. Instant waterworks, with all stops removed, all while I awkwardly stood there with my nearly empty pot of chili, apologizing.
There’s M, whose first word to me was China! He wears blue heart sunglasses, Crocs, and uses a wheelchair. He tells me about Sumerian tablets and that time he sold drugs an hour from my hometown. He tells me how he loves reading and writing, but someone told him he was trash and beat him up, so he tossed the manuscript he was working on. M tells me that his life is absolute hell right now.
There are too many faces. Two little boys eagerly come up to me for their freshly grilled hot dogs while their baby sister stares up at me from her stroller, big almond eyes boring into mine, silently gnawing on a sausage. A woman with brown hair asks me if I can see the worms she squeezes out of her wound (I can’t). Another woman pulls down the side of her leggings to show me the staple, half-in half-out of her hip, that doctors haven’t been able to remove post-surgery. Another woman looks twenty years younger as she gleefully picks out a new top from the pile. Someone else struts by with a tiny brown dog. “I don’t know how I would live without him,” she says.
Nicole and Wes, co-founders of the harm reduction nonprofit Operation in My Backyard (OPIMBY), know nearly every participant at their weekly street outreaches.
After a squad of thirteen police officers attempts to halt an outreach, Wes joins the huddle of concerned volunteers. “They got four 911 complaints that we were blocking the sidewalk,” he scoffs, as we stand on the unblocked walkway. “They asked if we have a permit. Of course we have a permit. We’ve been doing this for seven years.”
The city spent $780,000 minimum ($60,000 annual salary x 13 officers) to harass an outreach group that has been feeding the homeless for more than half a decade.
Kensington feels beyond understanding. I don’t know what all these pieces mean. What I do know is that nearly every week, this tantalizing secret third thing continues to beckon me back to Kensington’s streets, over and over and over again.
2: D
“I’m freaking out right now,” a woman with mousy brown hair and silver hoop earrings mutters under her breath. “Everyone’s looking at me.” She fiddles with her bags, frozen in place before I pause and gesture her toward the end of the table, out of the outreach line’s path.
It is May 7th. There’s a buzz in the air. Mayor Cherelle Parker is around the corner, delivering a speech in the church about her plan to dismantle all the tents in two blocks of Kensington, displacing people with nowhere else to go.
Despite this, the OPIMBY team sets up their tables outside Somerset Station as usual, against the chain link fence of what used to be an addiction recovery center. NA and AA are painted on the wall in large white letters. Beside it, LOVE NOT WAR, in vibrant blue and green.
A few minutes later, the woman begins to recollect herself. I learn her name is D. “I was just robbed of my last four dollars down the block,” she points at the end of the line. “I’m about to go into rehab at the Behavioral Wellness Center on 8th and Girard. Detox is gonna be tough. Their food is awful too. I need to get money out of my food stamps.” She leans closer to me surreptitiously with a playful glint in her eyes. Her eyes are a bright, beautiful green. “My nephew is a cop, so it helps me stay out of trouble. I don’t like telling people about that though.” I nod.
She frets about her anxiety and how the volunteers she normally has a rapport with aren’t acknowledging her as usual. “Don’t think too much of it,” I say, glancing at the “KNOW YOUR RIGHTS” flyers scattered on the table. “Everyone’s busy. It’s okay.”
D looks into my eyes and squeezes my hand. “Don’t stop what you’re doing. Not many people would stop to help me, but you did, and that really means a lot.”
“I’ll be back next week,” I say, a silent promise to see her again. But some promises are impossible to keep.
Harm reduction is a philosophy of unconditional care. It feeds people like D, keeping the door open for treatment until she’s ready. It looks out for her, with no preconditions or judgment, because no one deserves to die.
But once OPIMBY packs up and leaves, D and the others are left on the streets, forced to survive in perpetual crisis. The most difficult thing to accept as a new volunteer? Harm reduction is a bandaid on a splintering system. It cannot stand alone.
Around the same time, I spoke with a Penn Medicine addiction doctor. I wanted reassurance that perhaps alongside medicine, harm reduction could be enough to combat the perpetual crisis in Kensington’s streets. Maybe there didn’t need to be a secret third thing.
Halfway through our conversation, the doctor pauses to take a call. “Oh, it’s a panhandler. He’s been with me for 25 years,” he explains after hanging up, fishing a few bills from his wallet and leaving the office.
I soon learned that the panhandler was the doctor’s former patient. Although he had several health issues, he didn’t want to accept treatment, but a little bit of money “kept him going.” What kept him from accepting treatment? Financial constraints? Traumatic hospital experiences? The concept of a patient’s “readiness” for treatment is nebulous and uncertain. But it doesn’t make anyone more or less deserving of care. Bottom line? Research shows coerced treatment is dangerous, costly, and fatal.
The doctor confessed that he believed the pendulum was swinging too far in the direction of harm reduction. So what do we do if both medicine and harm reduction are not enough? How can you help people who are not ready to accept it? How can people find lost loved ones when they’re unwilling to be found? There has to be a third thing that fills in the gaps.
The second time I meet D, it’s over a month later. She stands outside the outreach van, holding a brown paper bag containing a safe injection kit. I stop by to say hi.
“Of course I remember you,” she says. “Do you remember me?”
“Of course.”
“I was just in the hospital recently,” she tells me. She recounts how she woke up, fresh out of an overdose, kicking and punching up a storm, then was immediately restrained and taken in by the police. Another volunteer nearby overhears and shakes her head. “They should know that that’s a normal reaction after overdosing.”
“Right?” responds D.
Some people might look at D and call it self-destruction, beyond saving. But at the end of the day, in the face of a crisis that dehumanizes, all you can do is look out for other people, the best you can.
I hope D completed the detox program and escaped Kensington for good. Still, a tiny selfish part of me wants to see her again, just once, and ask how she is. Every outreach since then, I’ve kept my eyes out for D’s head of mousy brown hair. Futile? Maybe. That’s alright. I’ll keep waiting.
3: Amanda Cahill
How can a death be so preventable, yet happen in excruciating slow motion before our very eyes?
In the early hours of September 7th, screams of pain from Amanda Cahill’s jail cell careen down the hallways. For hours, the other blockmates bang on their walls, trying to get the staff’s attention. By the time officers enter her cell at 7:30 am, Amanda Cahill is already dead. Cardiac arrest, likely due to drug withdrawal.
When I stumble across a photo of Amanda and her two sons, time wrenches to a halt. I peer into her little boys’ big brown eyes, one pulling a face and the other staring, somber, into the camera. I spend five minutes staring at Amanda’s wry smile.
Have I seen her before? I wracked my brain of blurry memories. Did she pass in a split second to grab water? Was she the woman with the sores, the dog, or the new sweater? It doesn’t matter. It’s not just single lives like Amanda’s dripping through the cracks. What about all the nameless mothers and fathers in Kensington, the sisters and brothers, who will never have headlines to martyr their memory?
Incarceration kills. There have been hundreds before Amanda Cahill, there will be hundreds after her – if nothing changes.
And Philadelphia’s City Council won’t let up. The punitive policies are not changing.
The War on Drugs has stretched on for half a century. Policymakers are caught up in treating the symptom – people abusing drugs – and not the cause of the symptom’s perpetuity – the drug cartels, limited withdrawal management, the lack of affordable housing, fragmented treatment centers, and the deeply rooted stigma and dehumanization of drug users (you don’t need a source for that – just look around you).
Politicians know that the American public has a short attention span. That is why they continue to use incarceral policies, as the city’s hospitals, jails, and streets bend under the weight of a system that bleeds from the inside out.
Will we allow ourselves to forget?
5: Again and Again and Again and Again
It is November 5th. When a police car pulls up, an outreach participant shouts, “Get the permit!” I brace for confrontation, but it doesn’t come. The politics of the sidewalk continue to evolve.
A pair of shoes hangs on the power lines. A heart shag is woven, dusty purple and red, on the fence behind us. A big white cross is nailed to a wooden pole at the end of the block. Early nightfall evolves surface-level appearances, but the people are the same. M approaches in his wheelchair and asks me how school is. At an Ivy League University, he says. So lucky. You must be so proud. I ask him how life is. He answers as usual: life is hell right now. It’s so hard to quit drugs. Mind over matter, he says.
A woman in distress tells me how her friend died in jail, with their other friends banging on their cells. I immediately know she’s talking about Amanda. A few weeks later, the same woman tells me she had a heart attack on the train – her eleventh one. She was rushed to the emergency room. But how’s school, she asks. When February rolls around, I see her again. She looks healthier. She mentions getting clean in jail, but here she is, still in Kensington. At least I learned her name this time. Names are how we remember. I tuck it away like a precious thing, close to my heart.
It’s one thing to sit in a Huntsman lecture hall while the professor explains how broken the US healthcare system is. It’s another thing to see the shards pierce the lives of people in front of you. When they ask about school, I wonder if I should answer as myself or as a Penn student, or if there’s a difference. Where does Penn fit into their narrative, where do we fit as students?
The more you search for third things, the more convoluted things become. So let’s keep it simple. When I think of Kensington, I think of a sign spotted from the subway car the first time I entered 19134:
“IN OUR STORY OF US,
THERE IS ALWAYS LIGHT HERE
WE ARE SHINING, DAZZLING
WE ARE BEAUTIFUL, HEALED.”
OPIMBY will continue to show up every week for its community. The community will continue to bear witness to the city’s absence of care. The city will continue to spend, incarcerate, and punish. Creation and destruction are two sides of the same coin. In the hollow center of it all? Human truth, if such a thing exists. If we bear witness to it, insist it does, so it shall.
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5 things you can do in <5 minutes:
- Register for an online training on overdose awareness and reversal. Narcan saves lives!*
- Follow OPIMBY, Prevention Point, Savage Sisters, The Everywhere Project, SOL Collective, and the Community Action and Relief Project.
- Join Prevention Point’s Email List.
- Take a look at Prevention Point’s Sunshine Stories,
- Volunteer or get involved with the Student Harm Reduction Coalition (Listerv Link, Instagram)
The Woodlands 