Work Woes

[Red Lion]

Sup Phoenix, I just had a day and I need to get some gripes off my chest.

For the past several months I've been working at a crisis center in the Special Victims Program and one of my duties involves making hospital care packages for victims of sexual assault. These packages include things like spare clothing (since clothing is often taken as evidence) hair brushes, tooth brushes, toothpaste, tissues and other sundry little things people might like to have for an overnight stay at the hospital. One thing our packages NEVER include is make-up. Particularly used makeup.

Today we picked up a box from a church in the area and it was full of broken and half empty make up items. Foundation powder that had the pan showing in the bottom, lipsticks worn down to nubs, crusted mascara with hair in it and all of it was smudged and dirty. This isn't the first time we've sent out requests for donations and gotten things that were completely unusable but today it's bothering me more than it normally would. Our relationship with the local churches is kind of hit and miss, we send them letters with lists of suggested items for them to collect, we call them to see if we can arrange for our Education and Outreach team to come and speak to their youth groups or adult Sunday school classes about domestic violence and sexual assault and I'd say about HALF of churches we contact are receptive. Part of the problem stems from a conflict in values. Our center is pro LGBT and offers resources to trans and gay individuals,  we work with the local Pride groups to make ourselves visible to the gay community as a source of counseling and aid. We don't ask that churches come out and openly support the gay community or participate in pride, all we want from churches is donations and to raise awareness regarding human trafficking, sexual assault and domestic abuse. Some churches are perfectly good with this. Other churches seem to be offended that we exist at all and it's not enough for them to just politely tell us "no". It seems like they always have to make an effort to be spiteful, wasting our time and then mocking us. One minister tried to bargain with us, basically saying that if we get to push our "agenda" at his church he should be allowed to come down to our support groups and spread God's word to all of the survivors there.  We made sure to blacklist his church. 

I don't hold anything against organizations that turn us down, there are always other places we can contact and after someone declines we can move right along to the next group. But when they tell us they'll have something for us then we get broken make-up, torn clothing or cut up wigs it's hard not to read that as a direct statement of malice. This isn't exclusive to Christian organizations but that's the majority of the people doing it and it's aggravating. 

[Faust]

Sounds like you have a lot of spiteful dicks around there. Maybe there's a missing book of the bible going around....

"Dickteronomy 4:28 - 'and lo, god didst see a lot of people doing things that made him bumhurt, and yeah, though it didst haveth not a bushel of pilchards to do with him, and neither nor didst it harm him nor his faithful, yet he did wax wroth most full mightily, and told all his people to act like they had brooms up their arses in revenge. And there was a groaning and a gnashing of teeth and people rent their clothes, only not so much as they'd show their nipples or god would be bumhurt again.'"