Previous Page How Did I end up here? Dion Oxford How Did I end up here? By Dion Oxford Director, The Salvation Army Gateway People often ask me, “Dion, how is it that you are working amongst folks who live on the street in the inner city of Canada’s largest city, when you grew up in a very calm rural town of 3500 people in Newfoundland? How did you end up here?” And I have to admit, I quite often find myself asking the same question. “How on earth did I end up here?” After having lived the 2nd half of my now 40 years of existence in Toronto, I have grown quite accustomed to urban living and do not miss small town life in any way. In fact, whenever I go anywhere outside of Toronto these days and find myself in the country, the air starts getting pretty thin for me and I crave getting back to the big smoke so I can breath again. (As an aside, there was this one time when we took a bunch of guys from our shelter on a camping trip. There was one guy there who hadn’t left the inner city of Toronto in over 20 years. We barely saw him during the 1st 3 days we were there except for when we ate and even then he looked barely awake. He couldn’t keep his eyes open the entire time as the air was so clean his body had no idea what to do with it and he only wanted to sleep. Then the 2nd last day we were there he begged me to start up the van we were driving so he could wrap his mouth around the tailpipe so he could breath again and enjoy the trip.) But I digress. One time when I asked myself ‘How did I end up here’ was when I was doing a leadership training course in Vancouver. The folks leading this training thought it would be a good idea to take us to some mountains for a ‘trust building’ exercise. As I’ve mentioned, I don’t do well in the country. I’m far more nervous out in the woods in broad daylight than I am walking through the inner city in the middle of the night. I’m always wondering if something is going to pop out of the trees and eat me or something. Anyway, as a trust exercise, they thought it would be ‘fun’ to each repel down the face of a 50 foot cliff. Now for me, a more appropriate way to start building trust with someone I’ve never met before would be to perhaps fall backwards into their arms and trust that they’d catch me, not place my very survival in their hands by repelling down a cliff and assuming they’d hold on to a rope or else I’d plummet to a horrible disfiguring death. So as I went over the edge of this cliff, I asked myself not for the first time, “How did I end up here?” The shelter I provide direction to, The Salvation Army Gateway, has 108 beds for men who are homeless. Oftentimes we have men who have severe mental health issues. One of those men, Henry, has a very serious form of schizophrenia. One of the symptoms of this disease is that a person doesn’t often know what is safe to eat and what is not. Our shelter is located near The St. Lawrence Market, an establishment that sells pretty much every different kind of food imaginable. On Fridays you can go to the market and buy things at a very discounted rate so that they can fill the shelves with fresh stuff for Saturday. This one day they had a serious deal on a raw pig’s head. Henry had a few bucks on him and so bought the pig’s head, recognizing a deal when he sees one. He then brought it back to our shelter late that night and asked our staff to put it in the freezer for later. Our staff, not knowing exactly how to respond and trying to care for Henry in the best way they knew how, did in fact put the pig’s head in the freezer in the kitchen. For those of you who have ever worked where there is a large kitchen that serves a lot of meals, you’ll know that the kitchen staff can often be very picky and just plain grumpy and often even irrational about the state of their kitchen. They often view this little space as their own private kingdom and no one has any right to touch anything without possible dire consequences. Well, needless to say, when the kitchen supervisor found the raw pig’s head in the freezer, they nearly exploded and Hell pretty much did break loose in our place. When I got to work later that day I walked into a tornado of activity and needed to go straight into damage control mode. I found myself writing a memo to the staff that went something like this. “To all staff, Please do not store raw pig’s heads in the freezer in the kitchen. Thank-you.” I found myself asking this question again, “How did I end up here? They didn’t teach me how to deal with this situation in university or Bible College.” Well, after 20 years of asking this question over and over again, I still really don’t know the answer to it. But I do know that I’m glad I’m exactly where I’m at. It is amongst the Henry’s of the world that I have found God in more profound ways than I ever would have anywhere else. And while I don’t think I’ll ever know the exact answer to my question, I do know that God had a hand in it. And that’s good enough for me. Dion Oxford is the Director of the Salvation Army Gateway , a shelter for men experiencing homelessness. Dion, along with his wife, Erinn and daughter Cate, live in Toronto and are committed to journeying alongside people in the margins of society. He and Erin have spent a combined thirty years working amongst folks who are living on the streets of Toronto. Dion is also the Chair of StreetLevel: The National Roundtable on Poverty and Homelessness.