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"We who care for the poor - we who care about the poor - live in exile. Our task is to maintain hope, to prepare for the eventual return of our nation to its fundamental purposes. Our hope lies in the new community that we create day by day." - David Hilfiker, MD
At the National Health Care for the Homeless Conference, he told the story of his family and his extended family in Joseph's House, a refuge he founded in Washington, DC, for men dying of AIDS.
© Rick Reinhard, 1992 A family physician, Dr. Hilfiker and his family shared their home for three years with formerly homeless men in the last stages of AIDS. In his keynote address to the HCH Clinicians' Network Annual Meeting on April 30, Hilfiker interwove these men's stories with his own to illustrate how practitioners of poverty medicine can sustain hope despite the growing incidence of homelessness and a chronic failure of political will to address it.
Howard - AIDS patient, former burglar, self-appointed handyman - found community in caring for others as they approached death. Ralph's difficult passing taught others that it is possible to love and identify with even the most broken and excluded of persons. PeeWee offered the unpitying acknowledgement that although some of our wounds will never be healed, we can still be there for each other. In community with his patients, Hilfiker found the courage to accept his own vulnerability to chronic depression.
"Our task as clinicians becomes much more than the provision of health care to homeless people," according to Hilfiker. "It is also the inclusion of the excluded, the puncturing of the mechanism that names the scapegoat guilty, and the re-creation of community on the basis of the one who has been excluded."
These are the gifts, given and received within a family of patients and caregivers, which Hilfiker offers his colleagues in poverty medicine:
Elements of Hope
- Moving into solidarity with the poor brings individual and communal healing.
- Re-creation of community is possible through inclusion of the excluded.
- We find in our work the chance to accept ourselves in all our woundedness.
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National Health Care for the Homeless Council, Inc.
HCH Clinicians' Network
P.O. Box 68019
Nashville, TN 37206-8019
Voice: 615.226.2292 | Fax: 615.226.1656 | Email: council@nhchc.org
