The Limits of Compassion : Helping the Homeless in L.A. Can Become an Unbearable Burden, Some Samaritans Find

Less than a block from where Chuck Teixeira counsels the homeless, two men huddle, sharing a drug-filled syringe, injecting each other in the neck. Around them more homeless men and women mingle aimlessly amid the sidewalk squalor and odor of urine from where they camped the night before on flattened cardboard boxes and newspapers wadded into pillows.

Day in, day out, Teixeira, a 30-year-old counselor at the Los Angeles Men’s Place, has seen more of everything he hoped to stamp out than when he came to rescue Skid Row nine years ago.

More people without a place to sleep. More drug use--crack, and heroin combined with crack. More hunger, violence, self-destruction.

Life in Its Rawest State

Like the broken spirits he works with every day, Teixeira’s spirit, too, has been shattered by the effects of witnessing life in its rawest state. He has been held up at gunpoint, slugged and threatened by the people he came to help after graduating from college in 1980 with a theology degree, unlimited optimism and the energy of a wild horse.

But now, after almost a decade of working with the homeless, the burnout has become unbearable, he says. It is time to leave the community he came to help heal.

In South-Central Los Angeles, Rita Russo, a tennis shoe-wearing former nun and defender of the hungry, experiences the same feelings. On this day, she faces a stack of unpaid bills chalked up by the nonprofit food bank she helped start six years ago. She was a parochial school teacher then and a nun with the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, an order founded to work with the poor.

Sitting in a hot, closet-size office with a desk fan blowing her face, Russo points to an ever-shrinking checkbook balance that will not cover the cost of providing groceries to the homeless lined up outside her door. Nearby, the pantry’s shelves are half-filled with cans of pork, bags of cornmeal and jars of honey, courtesy of Uncle Sam. The government staples are hardly enough to feed the 900 families who rely on the woman they affectionately call Sister Rita.

For Russo, the burnout has reached a boiling point. It is time for a recycling of her soul. So for the rest of August, Russo and her handful of volunteers will get away from the grind of trying to keep the Seedling afloat. They hope to return in September, refreshed in their battle for the hungry.

Teixeira and Russo are among Los Angeles’ newest casualties of a special kind of exhaustion: charity burnout. They are individuals dedicated to the plight of the homeless who often take on too much responsibility, set unattainable goals and allow their work to endanger their own health and emotional well-being.

It happens to many who work with the homeless and poor. Sometimes they can find ways to work through it. But often they cannot.

First Break in Years

Jill Halverson, founder of the Downtown Women’s Center, in November will take an extended break--the first in years--from her job’s stress and fatigue, much of which resulted from rebuilding the center after the October, 1987, earthquake. The quake destroyed the 17-year-old day-care facility for mentally disabled homeless women. Now that it’s back to business as usual, Halverson can look forward to some well-deserved rest.

For five weeks, she plans to travel throughout India, where she once served as a Peace Corps volunteer.

“I know some of the fatigue and frustration from my job will vanish as a result of having some time away,” she says.

Lew Oleson, a 42-year-old social worker with Skid Row Mental Health, will be leaving his agency permanently in the fall. Burnout--off and on over the past four years--and the belief “that it’s just time to move on” are his reasons for taking a new assignment with the UCLA Harbor General child psychology department.

Reticent About Stabbing

He downplays as a factor in his decision to leave a stabbing incident that occurred a few years ago. He was returning to the health center from lunch when a homeless schizophrenic man lunged at him.

“I’m still scared by quick movements at my left side and by loud noises,” he says. But that’s all he wants to say about the incident.

“Each person has his own reason for leaving,” he says. “I’m interested in counseling and want to learn other skills.”

John Dillon, executive director of the Chrysalis Center, a free employment service for the homeless, says, “All of us in this work are experiencing the weight of Los Angeles’ homeless problem.”

Dillon is concerned about burnout because without care-givers, the homeless--now an estimated 40,000 people in Los Angeles County, excluding the 12,000 on Skid Row and another 40,000 families living in such substandard housing as garages--will have no hope. And he already views the city as the West’s new Calcutta with no end in sight for the ever-increasing homeless population. And no end to the burnout for those who try to help.

Why the Burnout?

Psychologists and other care-givers who have escaped the trap agree that more and more cases of charity burnout are turning up.

Why? Because, experts say, those who try to help the homeless often do not have a social work background, and, as a result, do not keep a therapeutic distance from their jobs, set too many unrealistic goals, lose their sense of humor and become guilt-ridden when they can’t save the world they work in.

Burnout--which in most cases is not attended with a job respite or discussion--persists until total collapse, emotional and physical, takes over, says Marianne McManus, a USC psychologist and clinical associate professor of psychiatry.

“They (care-givers) make their mission for the homeless their whole life,” she says. “Some even take the homeless into their own homes. But what they are doing is sabotaging themselves.”

How Survivors Do It

McManus says many people survive burnout or do not experience it because they can keep their work and personal lives separate. And they have outside interests.

She says burnout also persists when there isn’t a self-help group or support system a care-giver can turn to.

Jack Shakely, president of the California Community Foundation, a grant-giving group for nonprofit agencies--several of which deal with the homeless--says charitable organizations have not looked at ways to deal with burnout because they lack the money to do so. He has never received a proposal to address burnout as an issue, though he adds: “We should generate a national concern about it because without care-givers and volunteers, the work with the homeless will not get done. And the homeless situation is not going to disappear.”

Gwen van Servellen, a registered nurse and associate professor with the UCLA School of Nursing, says burnout among those who help the homeless is not much different from burnout experienced by nurses, doctors, oncologists and emergency medical technicians.

Hopelessness, Helplessness

“As a care-giver you run into resistances,” says the nurse now studying burnout among AIDS health care providers. “And when you continually run into resistances, that can lead to an intense feeling of hopelessness and helplessness.”

For years those feelings were swelling in Teixeira, he says while sitting on a bed on the second floor of the Los Angeles Men’s Place. And for nine months he struggled with the decision to leave his work on Skid Row.

“In the beginning, I thought I was going to ride in here on my white horse and within a couple of years all these problems among the homeless were going to get solved,” he says.

Instead, through the years, his tangible successes with the homeless have been few. Frustration, and at times, anger, over that have led to a lack of energy and enthusiasm.

A Sudden Realization

“All those feelings were churning around and got reinforced day after day,” he says. “Then all of a sudden I realized I was really exhausted, that I was burned out and couldn’t do this any more. It’s like being in a war zone.”

Citing the need “to do something a little more creative with my hands,” Teixeira says he is looking forward to the start of a new life this month as a carpenter’s apprentice even though it will pay less.

But he plans to return to the work that, ironically, is sending him away, he says. “My heart is basically here, and in some way, I hope to return with those carpentry skills to do repairs, or to even do workshops and teach others the skills to develop self confidence and self-esteem. For the time being I’m closing the door, but not all the way.”

Russo, who was a nun for 28 years before leaving her religious community and who now works with the homeless in the heart of Los Angeles’ gangland with its drive-by shootings, calls her time off this month a “temporary break.”

Wolves at Door

The 48-year-old champion of the poor attributes her burnout to the continual pressure of raising $3,500 a month, every month, to feed the 4,500 people who depend on the Seedling’s pantry. “A couple of weeks ago,” she says, “I had to call the bank and tell them to turn over our savings account because our bills were going to bounce. It made me really scared.”

She called the Seedling’s board of directors. She called her congressman, her councilman “and everyone else I could think of. It was a very stressful day.”

On top of the day’s mounting tension, Russo and volunteers also had to deal with the physical and verbal threats directed at them from some homeless people who became abusive when they could not get more food than allotted.

“Some guy came in here and threatened to kill one of my volunteers because he didn’t get enough food,” Russo says. “Last week there was a guy out there with a knife--that was scary, real scary.”

Because of such incidents, Russo says she has learned to be less trusting and more street savvy.

Selling Food for Drugs

“There have been so many numbers run on us. People who need the help and come in with stories that can just turn your heart over, and then you find out that they’re selling the food for drugs.”

The environment at the center also sometimes depresses her, Russo says. “There’s trash all over the area, garbage, crap in the street, dirty plates and broken bottles.” On this day, there were even two dead rats splattered on the street nearby.

But three months ago, the last straw came when she saw graffiti on the walls of the Seedling. “I was madder than hell,” she says.

During her time off, Russo will tend to a garden, visit family and friends and continue teaching adult English and amnesty classes in the evening. She started teaching last year to supplement her income.

“Teaching has balanced me,” she says, then admits it has done more than that. “It has saved me from burnout.”

But she knows that one day--maybe even sooner than she imagines--the Seedling will run out of prayers to keep it alive.

“Sometimes people tell me to give it up. But there’s a part of me that says ‘It’s not time yet,’ ” she says, standing in a room full of people who have come to Sister Rita for sustenance.

“You can only do so much and then you can’t do any more. It hurts to say that, but it’s reality.”