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REV. SUSAN BRANDT: Servant of the Poor
Various Authors
Ottawa's Mother Teresa finds joy in ministering to the homeless
Dennis Buekert Associated Press 2001
OTTAWA (CP) - A few years ago, when Susan Brandt was feeling exhausted from her work among Ottawa's homeless, she wrote to Mother Teresa of Calcutta for advice. Her subsequent correspondence with Mother Teresa may not have contained any divine revelations, but it did provide her with some inspiration.
"What I found out was she worked till she fell over and they took her off to some rest home for a while, then she got up and started working again, which seems to be the style I've adopted," Brandt chuckles.
The comparison with Calcutta's famous nun comes naturally. Some time ago, the Ottawa Citizen ran a front-page story about Brandt under the headline: "In Teresa's footsteps - Mercy for Ottawa's miserable."
She has spent more than 20 years working with the homeless, a rare record in Canada. Her organization, Ottawa Innercity Ministries, has more than 80 volunteers and a $140,000 budget entirely raised from non-government sources.
Brandt's rosy cheeks and laughter proclaim wholesomeness but in the 1970s she was living like those she now serves, in a wilderness of poverty and drugs.
"I know every crack in the sidewalk," she says. "In those days it was crystalized speed and we shot crystal. I was directly on the streets and in and out of flophouses."
The turning point came when she met some young people who convinced her of her worth in God's eyes, and helped her to enter drug treatment. "Once the drugs cleared my brain, I discovered I wasn't stupid."
Today, Brandt is a trained nurse, a certified addiction therapist and an ordained chaplain. She recently won a scholarship to study restorative justice at Queens University in Kingston, Ont.
Brandt estimates there are 5,000 homeless people in Ottawa. That estimate includes those in what she calls unstable housing - rooming houses so squalid "that it's barely more adequate than sleeping under a bridge."
The numbers are growing, largely due to an influx of aboriginals from the North and unemployed from the Maritimes, she says.
"The city is full of scallop fishermen. Many have left wife and family behind. They're going to head west, they're going to seek fortune, they're going to send money back, and Ottawa is the first English-speaking city west of Quebec.
"Many get stuck here. If they take to drinking, well that's a slippery slope. They'll find a lot of partners here, a lot of drinking companions."
She does not believe any sane person would live on the streets by choice.
"It's minus 20 degrees out there and Joe is saying, 'I'd rather be out here than someplace warm.' He's telling you something about his mental health, because that does not make sense."
Brandt estimates 60 to 70 per cent of street people have a psychiatric condition. Many would have been confined to a psychiatric institution a few decades ago.
There were good reasons for shutting down many of the institutions, but alternative services were never provided.
"I think we have to realize that the options are very limited and they're not altogether safe," she says. "We have shelters, but not nearly enough. If you don't book into a shelter by morning, you're not going to get a bed that night.
"Every shelter in town is operating at over 100 per cent capacity. Some of the shelters have become surrogate prisons in the sense that Joe might be mandated to serve his time in a shelter rather than jail."
She says that 37 homeless people died in Ottawa last year, a lower number than usual due to the mild winter. Freezing deaths tend to get media attention, but overdoses are much more common.
Brandt disdains church-run shelters that apply "the three S's: soup, soap and salvation. You can't get anything to eat unless you listen to a sermon, which I find an affront."
But that doesn't mean she views homelessness as a purely sociological problem.
"I have found that those who have been able to move away from the street scavenger existence, the majority of them have done that once they have made some peace in their heart with God, themselves and one another."
Due to her unabashed biblical approach, Brandt's organization is not eligible for government funding, although she was recently able to get some blankets through a federal program.
"We're Christians," she says wryly. "It's a problem, a human rights problem."
Brandt is also controversial because she rejects the currently popular philosophy of harm-reduction, under which addicts will be given alcohol or drugs in a safe setting rather than sent into treatment.
"My sense is that the addict cannot go to controlled using, not when you're talking about addiction at this level. What harm-reduction tells me, and what it tells street people, is, 'We've given up.'
"We want to make these people disappear, and if that means putting them in a shelter and feeding them alcohol, then we'll do that."
Brandt says people are continually urging her to get a life - but she's not about to change.
"I don't think there's anything extraordinary in what I do, but I have great joy in doing it. For me, it is not so altruistic. I get so much back.
"First of all, on a spiritual level, I'm entering into the mystery of Matthew 25, which is something Mother Teresa knew about, which is seeing Jesus amongst the poor. I meet great saints, sinners and prophets that march to different beats."
Starting Anew;The Mustard Seed Street Ministry Calgary
by Susan Scott ; 2003
[Calgary]Within days of arriving at the Mustard Seed this summer, some of Ottawas street folk had followed her out West just to be with her.
The registered practical nurse and addictions counselor has come to The SEED to set up professional, on-site nursing and counseling services that will encourage health and wellness through consultation, empowerment, education and appropriate referrals.
"We are most fortunate to have Susan. I have known her for 15 years and have always been impressed with her ability to see the whole person and to deal with the issues -- mental, physical and spiritual -- simultaneously," says Executive Director Pat Nixon.
"She is a woman of peace, although she as happy to speak her mind on behalf of the worlds less fortunate." There was a time when Susan herself could be counted among the homeless; she knew the cracks in the sidewalk all too well.
Susan grew up in an immigrant family where addictions wreaked their havoc. By the age of 13 she was already turning to the streets for solace. By 20, she was homeless, addicted and into "earnest" self-destruction.
Like many turn-around, it took time -- "two steps forward and one back" -- and love.
In the early 70s, Susan met some members of the Jesus Movement, Flower Children who had become Christians. That was the beginning of the "blood, sweat and tears" of her recovery. She finished high school and then after six applications was finally accepted to nursing school. Along the rocky road many people gave her a boost, only to withdraw again.
"I had the sense God didn’t leave me. I was nudged toward life by His presence inside of me and then another saint, willing to stick with me, would arrive," she says. "What helped me wasn’t that I believed in myself, but it was seeing the spark in the eyes of others that helped me take the first steps."
Soon she found her temporary destiny and became a public health nurse. "I thought I had arrived, but I never forgot where I came from."
Then God called again, asking Susan to resign in order to minister to people on the streets of Ottawa. She helped a church run a drop-in centre for homeless folks called Center 507, but a few years later, realizing many people are frightened of institutions, she and a friend, started what was to become the Ottawa Innercity Ministries (OIM).
Rather than expecting people to come to them, they went out into the nooks and crannies where the homeless were to be found. "I began to move amongst the wounded, offering hope and practical care to those who call the streets home," she recalls.
I walked with Susan around the nation's capital and met a very different array of people from the expected politicians and civil servants -- the couple, he with AIDS and she pregnant, whose home was under a bridge near the National Arts Center, the two Rons cheerfully intoxicated near the Chateau Laurier and the man in a wheelchair on the corner of the Byward Market.
They call to her from across the street and beckon her into the most unlikely places, happy and honored for her to visit. They tell her their joys and sorrows as though no one has heard them before. If asked, she offers each practical help and prayer.
"Bless you," she says as she leaves.
Along the way, OIMs executive director certified as an addiction therapist, was ordained as a street chaplain and began a degree in restorative justice at Queens University in Kingston, ON, which should be wrapped up next summer. When she felt the need for a holiday she was as likely to end up helping the prostitutes in Amsterdams Red Light District, or watching restorative justice in action in Soweto South Africa, rather than lounging on a Florida beach.
Then God called Susan again.
She had been at OIM for 15 years and realized it needed a fresh person at the helm and she wanted to concentrate more on her writing. Enter Pat Nixon with an offer.
Susan had always been deeply impressed by the staff and volunteers at The SEED and their commitment. It took her a year to make up her mind, but now things are moving fast.
At OIM she taught non-violence, choices and consequences, and took the hard path of making the clients genuinely involved in the day-to-day running of its street clinics, mobile street outreach programs and its ministry to street teens.
"It wasn't about them functioning according to my expectations, it was about helping them discover their optimum level," says Susan.
Illness and homelessness are intertwined, she points out. Illness, mental, physical, social and spiritual, can cause homelessness, but homelessness itself both causes illness and complicates it. For example, many homeless people out of fear delay seeking care until they are driven to a hospital emergency department, the least effective and most costly approach.
"SEED guests will be invited to participate in the development of health services, programming and in its subsequent evaluation," she says, noting there is a need to increase access to quality healthcare, simultaneously reducing costly and ineffective service duplication.
Already she has started washing the feet of SEED guests, a symbolic and practical service that not only helps take care of their feet, but also involves the healing power of touch that can salve wounded hearts and souls.
"Spirituality has to permeate everything we do as people feel crushed in spirit," she says.
A support group to help people in recovery has also begun and she will open a full-scale nursing clinic in November.
"No one is beyond hope as long as there is air in their lungs, including people we may not find desirable," says Susan. "Anyone can change their life and enter into a process of healing and find peace."
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