Battling Burnout : Homelessness: The Orange County Rescue Mission workers confront despair on a daily basis, but they manage to hold out a bit of comfort to hundreds while trying not to sour on the human condition.

It’s 9:30 a.m. and the shaky, cadaverous men in grime-caked clothes who live on the pump islands of the former Buy-Rite gas station on East 1st Street have not yet arisen from their filthy mattresses.

Some, if their bodies will respond, will try to walk the few steps around the corner to the Orange County Rescue Mission by 11 a.m. for the free showers and clean clothes offered each morning.

But if they don’t make it by 11, Joe Furey must shut them out. They may not have bathed for many days, and their clothes may be in tatters and soiled with the shiny, indelible grit that comes from living on the streets, and they may be full of stories of fearful nights and quavering days, but the free showers end at 11, and those are the rules.

Furey must do it, he says, to keep the fragile world of the mission from unraveling. If one person bends the rules, the word instantly spreads on the street and soon, Furey says, the mission’s atrium would be filled with angry homeless people, telling even more desperate stories, demanding showers, or clothes, or food, or an extra night’s free lodging.

“They’ll give you a nice story,” said Furey, 34, an associate chaplain at the mission who has worked there for 1 1/2 years, “and when I first started here, I had the tendency to buy it and let them in. And they might have a legitimate story. But once you do that, make it a habit to bend the rules, it’s amazing; in another 20 minutes, there’s two guys wanting the same thing and then it’s all chaos. You cannot let them know that you’re easy.”

Too many needy people. Too much desperation. Too few beds. Not enough food and clothing. Not enough time.

It was in just such a tightly strung atmosphere--where workers walk an emotional tightrope between compassion and the knowledge that many lives are unsalvageable--that Mitch Snyder, the nation’s best-known advocate for the homeless, hanged himself last week in a Washington homeless shelter. A firebrand known for his intensity and passion for his cause, Snyder was characterized at the time of his death as a man who had exhausted his inner resources and simply had nothing left to give.

And now, in the center of one of the wealthiest counties in the nation--a social contrast that makes the hardscrabble world around the mission all the more shocking--Furey and his co-workers must face down the same demons that haunted Snyder.

Every day, they must descend into the gray netherworld of the helpless, the hopeless, the sick, the filthy, the broken, the drug-ridden, the alcohol-poisoned. The long, grim litany of the ignored and the forgotten. And each of those homeless people, in some way, has the potential to gnaw at the workers’ emotional marrow.

“You have to be called to do it,” Furey said. “Because if you’re not, you’ll burn out real quick. It’ll just get to be too much, because people come in here and treat you like dirt. They ask for something and if they don’t get it, they’ll start calling you names. You just have to try to separate yourself from it and not take it personally. You have to have a real desire in your heart to help mankind, because the rewards just aren’t there, not the financial rewards and not the prestige. To do this, you have to believe in something. It’s literally a life-and-death situation.”

Robert Magluyan, administrator and head chaplain and a veteran of nearly five years of work at the mission, said that during his first two years there “the frustrations mounted and I would seek ways to get out. My temper would fly. I’d feel the hairs on my head rise in anger. Here you are trying to do something good for some fellow and he gives you a sob story and you don’t know whether to believe it or not and you give him the benefit of the doubt and he turns around and he’s laughing at you. It used to get my goat really, really bad.”

Today, both Furey and Magluyan say, their commitment to the work has deepened with their religious convictions (the mission is a Christian enterprise, funded solely by private donations). And both say that without those convictions, their jobs would quickly overwhelm them.

“When I first started working here,” Furey said, “it was a lot harder on me. There was the pressure of dealing with so many people and everybody’s hurting. And there’s a lot of con out there. If I were to get involved with everybody’s problems personally and take it upon my shoulders, it would drive me nuts.”

Still, those who work with the homeless cannot help but face the unsettling fact that however much they do, it will not be enough, said Susan Oakson, coordinator of the Orange County Homeless Issues Task Force.

“Homelessness is an issue that is amorphous, almost impossible to get your hands around,” Oakson said. “It’s really a symptom of some very chronic problems in our communities, like mental disability, like lack of affordable housing and child care, medical care, substance abuse. Any of those things, in and of themselves, could be all-consuming if you spent your life’s work on them. Taken as a whole, they’re overwhelming.

Mark Zetin, associate adjunct professor of psychiatry and human behavior at UC Irvine, said that people who work with the homeless, particularly if their clients are mentally ill, must make an effort to separate themselves from those they serve. The workers’ mental well-being “depends on their ability to keep some professional distance and perspective,” he said. They must remind themselves that the homeless have a choice of “working within the system . . . or going out and blowing their money.”

Perhaps the best strategy for avoiding burnout, he said, is for the workers not to look on themselves as saviors, but to place the primary responsibility for behavioral change on the homeless themselves.

Still, Zetin said, when workers see the homeless that surround them lapse again and again into destructive behavior, “they’re dealing with a tremendous amount of frustration.”

Oakson agreed.

“You have to be satisfied to claim very small victories,” she said. “It’s not like other jobs, where the people you turn away can get the service you provide somewhere else, and the situation is not life-threatening. With the people we deal with, it is life-threatening. . . .

“Once you’ve put a name and a face and a life with a homeless individual and had contact in trying to assist that person, the issue is never the same for you again. And (the workers) see that face of homelessness day in and day out.”

At 2:30 p.m., there are only a few men sitting, or slumped asleep, on the 12 wood and ornamental iron benches located in the atrium of the mission, all facing the north wall where signs in English and Spanish announce the availability of free clothes on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.

It is the mission’s quiet time, between the morning crush for the showers and the evening line of men wanting food and beds for the night.

It is a kind of safe haven, however temporary, from the nightmare world just outside the door, where drug dealers squat on curbs, addicts make buys and shoot up in Center Park across the street, alcoholics wracked with nausea stumble aimlessly and prostitutes loiter in anticipation of the evening’s business.

Furey, himself a recovered cocaine addict, knows them and points them out with the detached manner of a man who knows the routine and grudgingly accepts it as part of life in a dangerous neighborhood.

He is used to looking over his shoulder. He has seen bullets crunch through the walls of the mission, heard shotgun blasts outside in the night, seen a drunk die in the mission atrium, picked up used syringes in the park. He had to confront a man wielding a knife on his first night on the job.

“I’ve been sick a lot in the last year and a half,” he said, “mainly because we deal with so many people who have diseases. You get everything that comes in here. And you have to be careful because there’s a lot of AIDS everywhere because of drug-users sharing needles.”

He remembered a night when “we had a guy break in through the front door. He sliced his arm because he punched through the glass and he was swinging his arm around. That was a scary thing, because the blood’s flying and it’s fresh.

“When I used to work nights, I’d walk past the window and I’d feel like I had a big ‘Shoot Me’ sign on. As soon as you say no to people, you become their enemy. It’s a heavy drug area and people get killed around here all the time.

“It’s the law of the jungle. It’s a zoo.”

The solution, Magluyan said, is only partial, but it involves a single, inflexible rule: “Your No. 1 responsibility here is to uphold the rules of the mission. You have to be involved and yet detached. You’ve got to set responsibilities. I’ve got mine and I’ll do everything I can do, but if you’re not willing to meet me halfway, we can’t go anywhere. If they don’t make it because they’re not carrying their part of the load, there’s nothing I can do for them.”

At 5 p.m., Ritchie Hartsock, 37, a live-in staff member manning the mission’s desk, begins calling out the names of men who have put in for a bed for the night. The mission’s doors have just closed for the evening and the atrium is full of men sitting on the benches and the floor. The rule: Be inside before the doors close (or call to let the staff know precisely when you’ll arrive) or spend the night on the street.

Hartsock calls the names of two men who have shown identification and signed in, but who do not respond when the names on the ID cards are called. He says he suspects they are underage and are using false IDs. He finally ferrets them out and tells them to leave. He holds the door and watches them walk out.

Those are the rules, he says without apology, and following them to the letter is one way of maintaining equilibrium in his job.

But it is hard, he says, to see people slip away.

“My biggest frustration,” he said, “is when you get to know somebody and see them get back into the alcohol or the drugs and they’re all strung out and they look like they’ve been rolling around in a mud puddle somewhere and you just really want to reach out to them but you don’t know how.”

Said Kurt Lewis, 27, another live-in staffer: “You see the same people every day, and they tell you they’re trying, they’re trying, they’re trying. Then you see them down drinking on the corner. They’re trying to make it until the next bottle shows up. They’re burned out on life and they can’t handle it any more.”

But despite all this, Lewis says, “I think we’re winning. I think we’re helping a lot of people.”

How long can they keep working at the mission? None of the workers knows. Burnout, they say, could come at any time. The problem is immense, the resources are few and the rewards are often intangible, infrequent and small.

“Today,” Furey said, “I just didn’t even want to come in. You get beat. It just takes a lot out of you. You can’t take it home with you. If you become one with it, like Mitch (Snyder) did, it’s destructive. It becomes hopeless after a while, because everyone you see needs help and is in trouble. And if you think you can save everybody, you’re in fantasyland. It doesn’t work that way.”