Joy Estill is a listener.
As the office manager at the St. Martin de Porres Shelter on Alaskan Way, she has kept her door open during the coronavirus pandemic to shelter residents who want to talk — though now, they wait outside her office to abide by social distancing guidelines. The men have case managers to help them get into housing or other social supports, but Estill is there to listen.
Since the pandemic began, Estill, 67, still goes to work five days a week. After a colleague fell ill from the virus, Estill kept coming in.
But some days are harder than others, like when one of the men, most of whom are over 55, gets sick or hurt. Estill already prays three to four times a day, but when that happens, “I go outside and kick some dust and pray some more,” she said. Sometimes she’ll close the door and cry.
When the pandemic started, those days began to happen more often.
People working in homeless services like Estill, part of a largely invisible, low-paid workforce, have been shouldering not just the burden of coronavirus in city shelters and services, but also a longer-running crisis the pandemic has only magnified over the last two months. As services have shut down and shelters have stopped taking in new clients to comply with social distancing rules, front-line homeless service providers have been witnessing suffering that, with fewer resources, they are too often unable to ease.