Cafe Catholica

This afternoon we had a new guy show up at the House of Hospitality, although we've encountered him on Street Outreach 2-3 times. We've spoken about him in a previous post. Today he expressed wanting to go to rehab for his problem with alcohol.

The first time he was drunk was when he was 13 years old, and that was with his father. Throughout his teenage years he was more into smoking pot (marijuana) then he was into alcohol. He explained it was until he was about 19-20 years old that he really started drinking heavily. Over the past 20 years, the longest he's ever been sober is 10 months and that was with the help of AA. Part of today was spent phoning different rehabs to see who had room available; the best rehab that Nathaniel prefers to send people to denied him because he is HIV positive. So that was pretty unfortunate.

A lot of the men Emmaus encounters talk about getting jobs, going to rehab, or following through with this or that; but it's the following through part that's the problem. So although this guy says he wants to go to rehab and get back to a normal life, we're trying not to get our hopes up too much because in this type of ministry it's pretty common for people to fall back into their old habits.

This evening, Roger went to a young people's meeting (20-30 years old) called Cafe Catholica to recruit people to volunteer and to promote Emmaus. Several people signed up for information on volunteering and to be put on the Emmaus mailing list.