travel vouchers

One of the services we offer at Community Meals is travel vouchers for clients to take Greyhound buses to go home to their families or take a job in another city or go to a rehab program out of state and so on. Lunch was hectic today (and just about all week) because our student nurse and MSW intern volunteers all had midterms, and the number of clients at lunch shot up from sixty-something to almost a hundred overnight (the numbers start out low at the beginning of the months when people receive disability and unemployment checks). After lunch during office time, I was helping a man with a request to go to Atlanta to live with his mom. He was in the hospital in Connecticut for some reason and he was desperate to get a ticket home. So I filled out the form, copied his IDs, and then called his mom to verify that she's in Atlanta waiting for him. I said who I was and that I was just calling to verify, and she sounded like she was about to cry. She said that hearing that her son was getting help to come home was the best thing anyone could tell her and the best present I could give her, and she told me that I must love all people to do what I do and that I should never stop doing it, that she loves me even though she's never met me, that I'm going straight to heaven and God bless me, and on and on. She was so grateful and sweet and said so many nice things in just five minutes. It made my month I think.

The past few days were rainy (we needed it badly) but it's beautiful now. This is the first weekend in five weeks that I'm staying in Hartford, and I'm really happy about it! Tonight we're going to La Paloma for a fundraiser for the Hartford International Film Festival, and they're having free food and showing a documentary made by Hartford filmmakers.