On the morning of Friday, March 13th, Mary Beth Appel and Johanna Berrigan, two health-care workers who run a free clinic in North Philadelphia, were preparing for the morning rush. Their clients are experiencing homelessness, and sleep in abandoned buildings, shelters, or on the street nearby. “We see the same things that an urgent-care clinic does,” Appel, a sixty-year-old nurse practitioner, told me. The most common ailments included colds, wounds, chronic illnesses, and some frostbite. Today, though, they were bracing for the arrival of covid-19.
“I fully expect we’ll both get it. Don’t you?” Appel asked Berrigan, a sixty-four-year-old physician assistant. The women were seated on the first floor of the clinic, a converted row house, discussing how to contain infection among their clients. “The protocol now, if you feel sick, is go home and isolate,” Berrigan said. “Where are our people going to go? We’re going to isolate them under a tree in the park?”
The health-care clinic is one of two or three in the country that are part of the Catholic Worker Movement, a loose-knit social-justice organization started by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, in 1933. Appel and Berrigan had been running the clinic for almost twenty-nine years, and had treated patients through the AIDS crisis, the crack epidemic, and, more recently, widespread addiction to opioids. They were well-acquainted with the difficulties of meeting human needs during a crisis: Berrigan travelled to Iraq, in the nineties and early two-thousands, to document the impact of economic sanctions on its people, and helped provide care in Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake that devastated the island in 2010.
Still, they had never seen anything like the coronavirus. When I arrived, Appel had just spoken to a fellow Catholic Worker, in New York, to ask for advice on how to pray for the protection of their patients. “I was looking for the patron saint of spit,” she told me, only half joking. “There is one for bed bugs”…
To read the entire article from The New Yorker, click https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/how-do-you-shelter-in-place-when-you-dont-have-a-home