Living simply while serving the needy is a trademark of the VSC, a program whose participants earn meager stipends while rooming with other volunteers and maintaining a focus on spirituality in their daily lives, said Sister Judith Schomisch, D.C., director of the Daly City, CA-based VSC West, one of three VSC components across the United States.Hundreds of lay volunteers have served since 1983
Since 1983, the VSC, a faith-based volunteer program inspired by the work of Society patron St. Vincent de Paul, has placed hundreds of lay women and men to work with the needy, she said. This year’s 15 participants in VSC West, which was formed in 1991, all are working in the Los Angeles area.
One of the program’s goals is for the VSC volunteers to develop habits of sharing and being sensitive to the less fortunate, Sr. Schomisch explained.
The participants live “in community,” which in the VSC sense involves sharing time together for meals and prayer, with lodging and health benefits provided through funds paid by the agencies for which the volunteers work, Sr. Schomisch said.
Interaction with homeless is enjoyable experience
Maria Loebach, 22, of Whittemore, Iowa and Alessandro Isola, 29, a resident of Udine in Northern Italy, both said they enjoy interacting with the homeless guests of St. Vincent’s, which is located in the Skid Row area of Los Angeles.
Despite their meager small stipends, which go to cover utilities, transportation, food, personal needs, co-pays on medical bills and medicine as well as other community needs, Loebach and Isola agreed that they enjoy the lives they are leading now, working with the homeless and living with their six fellow VSC members in a former convent in the Boyle Heights area of Los Angeles.
Wants to maintain focus on simple living after leaving program
“I’ve always lived simply,” Loebach said, adding that “when I move on, and once I start making money, I don’t want to lose that focus.”
Isola, a native of Sicily in Southern Italy and a former law student and carabiniere (his country’s paramilitary police component), said that while he is accustomed to a relatively privileged life, he too wants to continue living a simple life after his year of VSC duty ends in August.
“I want to leave behind the futile things,” Isola said, explaining that he joined the program partly because “I have had everything in my life that I have ever needed and I want to give something back” to help others.
He hadn’t seen so much homelessness before
Even though he worked for a year in enforcement, which usually exposes one to the seamier side of life, Isola said he had not seen homelessness of the sort that one witnesses in Skid Row before arriving here.
“I knew I would be working with the homeless, but I didn’t have any idea that it would be in an area like this, where so many people live on the streets,” said Isola, who works as a case manager for St. Vincent’s Transitional Men’s Program,
“In Italy, we have poor people, but few live without a home,” he said, shaking his head in amazement. “I thought that places like this existed only in India … I imagined the United States as the land of opulence and opportunity, and instead the reality is seeing these people, even women and children, without a home.”
Extent of homeless problem a real eye opener for volunteer
The extent of the homeless problem in Los Angeles was a real eye opener for Loebach, as well, she said. “Where I come from, a 600-population, rural community, we have a (small) homeless problem, but here in Los Angeles, it’s overwhelming … just the reality of it all,” she said.
