Let's Talk About Rules

If you’ve never been in a homeless shelter you may not understand my annoyance at all the rules and regulations that were suddenly being placed upon me. It’s not that I expected the place to be a free-for-all by any means, I understood there would be rules but I felt the rules at Project Redirect were really strict. Granted, I found out later that there were different shelters in the area that had stricter rules than the ones we had to abide by but I was still annoyed. And it may take me a couple of days to get through all the rules so please bear with me. I have a lot to say about them all.

Before I get into them, though, let me just tell you about the rest of the house so you’ll better understand my annoyance. The upstairs was similar to the downstairs – a common room with two sofas, a TV, and even a coffee table, three more bedrooms, another bathroom, and a kitchen. All the bedrooms in the house were of different sizes and could only accommodate a certain number of people in each room. Two of the bedrooms were for two people, a parent and child; two of the bedrooms were for four to five people, one or two parents and children; and the last two bedrooms were for six people.

The kitchen was set up with four refrigerators: two families got an entire fridge to themselves and the last four rooms had to share refrigerators. When I say share I literally mean two families had to put their food in one fridge side-by-side. If the room I shared a fridge with was unoccupied you could open my fridge or freezer and see my food lined up completely on one side of the fridge. That doesn’t offer a lot of room when there are four people in my family. And each family got one cabinet to store dry goods. Just to clarify, look at the cabinet under your sink. It’s one cabinet with the double doors on it? Well that’s the size of cabinet we all had. How they expected us to be able to utilize the space effectively is beyond me.

But that brings me to the house rules. Not only were we not given much space to store our food but we weren’t allowed to leave any food on the counters or on top of the refrigerators. I guess that’s because they didn’t want to draw bugs or have families taking items from other families. Unopened food needn’t be left out in the open anyway but we couldn’t even store extra canned goods on top of our fridges just for extra space.

Each family was also allotted only one hour for dinner. Yep, I said one hour which included cooking, eating and cleaning. We couldn’t go in before our dinner hour started – we had 5:00-6:00 – and we had to be out as the next family was coming in for their dinner hour. Do you have any idea how hard it is to cook, eat and clean in just an hour? There are very few meals that can be prepared and cooked in such a short amount of time much less eaten with all dishes, pots and pans cleaned afterwards. I was told that we were permitted to start cooking earlier in the day, before dinner hours began at 4:00, so all we’d have to do is reheat the food when it was time for us to eat. That was fine but it would change later.

So we had a short dinner hour, I wasn’t happy. We also had chores to do twice daily. There were six families in the house so there were six different chores to be done: kitchen, upper bathroom, lower bathroom, upper common room, lower common room, and the front entryway. We each had to do our chore before 10:00 in the morning and after dinner hours were complete at 10:00 but before 11:00 at night. Technically the kitchen was the only one that had to be done after dinner hours ended because whoever had that chore had to wait for the family to finish eating and cleaning first.

Regardless, doing the chores twice a day made no sense to any of the residents. We understood having to do them in the evenings because people were in and out of the house all day long. But doing them in the mornings was stupid because we were all in our rooms by midnight so nobody was walking around or making messes during the night. We understood that the people who set the rules wanted the house to be kept clean but there isn’t one person I know who cleans their entire house twice a day.

We also had to keep our rooms cleaned and that was fine but I was also told that staff could go in and inspect our rooms whenever they felt the need. That was not fine. I don’t like anyone coming into my private space without asking me first. There was no food or drinks allowed in our rooms, to prevent bugs; we had to keep our stuff from blocking the windows and stored neatly in the closet or under the beds. That wasn’t an easy task. Our room had a set of bunk beds and a trundle bed. Nothing is going to fit under a trundle bed and the space under the bunk beds wasn’t that big. We had two dressers, one with five drawers and one with six, and we had one closet. That shouldn’t be a problem, right, since we only brought ten days’ worth of belongings with us? It wasn’t when we first got there. That changed later and you’ll find out why.

H got past the cleaning rules and moved on to the curfew rules. Curfew? Seriously? Yep. There was a curfew for children and parents alike but I’ll get into that tomorrow. Right now I’m going to enjoy my freedom and the peace and quiet of the house with my kids upstairs in their beds. Besides, thinking of all the crap aggravates me all over again and I want to stop it before it starts tonight. It’s much easier to fall asleep with happy thoughts.

Until next time…peace to all.