Beautiful Vancouver

The place to see and be seen in Vancouver, energetic Robson Street boasts over 200 shops, cafés and services. Spend a day on the strip - spoil yourself in trend-setting fashion boutiques or sip a latté as you relax and people-watch from a sidewalk café. With a weekend average of some 80,000 streetgoers, there are plenty of people to watch!

And when you walk down towards Pender and then take another short five minute walk towards Carrall, you will witness the transformation in the atmosphere. You have entered the oldest, the most exclusive neighborhood in Vancouver, the Downtown East Side! With a day`s average of some 5,000 people inhaling or injecting drugs, there are plenty of people to watch!

This may as well be on the tourist guide book along side the previous one because soon, foreigners will witness for themselves the myth of beautiful Vancouver and its "Corner" and say, wtf?

A few of us from Galiano; Peggy, Neelam, and Angela, were reunited today in the distant land of Downtown East Side at a workshop on homelessness, hosted by 4REAL.
Liz Evans from the Portland Hotel Society, was our "tour guide" in the DTES. As Liz told us about her experiences and life in DTES, she described the mindset of many volunteers that come down to help. They come, expecting to make a difference and helping people get out of their harmful lifestyle, and when they don't see the change, they get frustrated.
People have to be realistic about what they can and can't do. And because the recovery process in a hurt place as this is painfully slow, sometimes all you can do is listen and be open minded.

After our short session with Liz, we visited the Portland Hotel, the low-income apartment for DTES. One thing I loved was the residential Garden project; gardening is so theraputic and it also builds a sense of community.
Then we visited Insite, North America's very first safe injection site. The injection site supplies clean needles for people to use (people bring their own drugs) and not only, they have a rehabiliation program in the same building, consisting of a few different levels, each stage closer to recovery.
This was followed by a visit to the DTES Pigeon Bank. I'd never really even thought of a bank as a need for homeless people but most locals are on welfare programs that send cheques and it seems obvious now, that most are homeless, but not penniless.
Then last but not least, we visited the DTES dental office. Most doctors volunteer their hours there. I was pretty amazed to see the very basic needs met for the locals.

However, there is only ONE of each in the whole of DTES. There are many food and clothing banks run by various charity groups but the big money projects such as the ones mentioned previously (safe injection sites, low-income buildings, dental clinics), lack the support of major organizations like... hmmm the government. For a while now, I've refused to believe the bad things people say about the government; having come from a country of political corruptance, the politics being one of the reasons my parents decided to leave the country, Canadian government gives an illusion of being pretty damn supportive. And here, we have become so spoiled that we blame our littlest problems on the government. But this workshop made me cynical!
We learned that 85% of the funds going to "help" the DTES goes to enforcement (police, criminalization of drugs, etc), something like 10-15% on prevention, and less than 1% on harm reduction (Injection Sites). That sounds pretty ridiculous considering the numerous studies having proven the effectiveness of safe injections sites and facts, not opinions, on the positive effects of legalizing drugs.

The DTES area is being victimized to gentrification rather than being helped and treated as a whole. The government is building bigger and nicer buildings that people of DTES don't need and raising housing prices that they can't afford.