Working With Women In Vancouver's Downtown Eastside

The Traded Sex - Working With Women in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside

People sometimes ask me what I do, and they’re usually not asking how I waste my days and read Wikipedia entries and water my lemon tree. They are asking how I pay my rent, or more specifically, my job.

I have two jobs, but my major position, which I’ve held for a year, involves working at a drop in with a clientele of mostly female survival sex workers. (My other job is also at a drop in, but that one mostly houses a lovable bunch of older men with mental health issues…kind of like the characters of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest as they would appear today.)

Those that are not scared off sometimes ask what exactly I do, or how I fill my time at the centre. This question is much harder to answer, and it varies greatly depending on the night. I wipe tables and mop floors. I am kind of a janitor, I guess. I call shelters and make referrals to community agencies, sometimes. I sit down and talk to women and joke about the clothes they’re wearing and try to build rapport. I hand out band-aids, I watch volunteers do dishes, I clean up various bodily fluids…This is my life.

A coworker answered the question after a particularly heinous week: “Apparently, I help street people clean out abscesses for a living.”

On busier or more difficult nights, I often call 911.

Medical emergencies happen and people have seizures or vomit blood. Abscesses grow to the size of baseballs and threaten to cut off breathing. The suicide rate is high, and sometimes it’s a mental health emergency that prompts the call. Other times, it’s violence.

It’s here I must add that I am not the bulkiest or beefiest of women. I am short, and gaunt, and wholly miniscule. Many of the women who use the centre are not much bigger - they are malnourished and fighting various illnesses. Still, almost every woman in the centre could tell a harrowing story about how they left some guy lying unconscious in a pool of his own blood, and I’d believe them. They are toughened and hardened; I am not even scrappy. This makes me a most incompetent bouncer, but that’s a role I take on, too.

Unlike a few of my coworkers, I have been lucky. I haven't even been punched.

Why, Ivy, who is small and sick, would you choose to work in such a place?

The answer deserves much more attention than I can give it at the moment, but most people have known at least the tiniest urge of wanting to change things that aren't working, to sit with someone when they are sad, and to do one's part to make the world appear a little more like the utopia you would like it to be. This urge, unleashed, can draw people to the darkest corners of the universe, or at least their own city. Luckily, once there, people often discover that those they are "helping" are beautiful and worthwhile human beings who just want to be loved, supported, housed, bandaged, kept safe, etc., etc..

And that is what I try to do.