Shopping Carts Change Lives

The other night I was heading to Trader Joe's to pick up a few things.  Parked out in front of the store was the shopping cart repo man truck.  This guy has the unenviable task of driving around and corralling wayward carts from all over and then returning them to their rightful homes.  That there is a person (actually lots of well organized people) who make this job their livelihood speaks to the cart culture that exists in LA.  There are a LOT of homeless folks and shopping carts are a useful way to store and move stuff, so they're in demand.  Trouble is, stealing them from the stores is illegal of course.  So periodically, the carts are rounded up and the belongings dumped out.  This is actually pretty shitty for the homeless who just need a way to contain and mobilize their stuff.  There've been lots of press about this over the years.

When I was working for Friends, I learned about the availability of legal shopping carts from Catholic Worker.  The article here is old, but the practice still continues.  I learned about this from my co-worker who was the prevention case manager.  He was telling me that he had succeeded in getting one of these carts for a client.  I teared up a little thinking about the impact that something as simple as this would make on this guy's life, particularly with respect to helping him manage his HIV.  It was really something.  My co-worker shared this really awesome quiet moment, each of us appreciating how huge this was and acknowledging that it might not seem like it to most folks.  It was a sweet, shared, wordless couple of seconds of just being together, but it was so huge.