The following is a story told by Dave Andrews in the book Australian Stories for the Heart.<\/p>\n
Some of our most marginalised neighbours are\u00a0 people who have been institutionalised.\u00a0 They have been put out of psychiatric hospitals in the hope that, by being placed in a community rather than in an institution, their lives will be normalised.\u00a0 When our family started visiting the hostels, it became painfully obvious that the vast majority of the people living there had no significant reciprocal relationships with people living outside the hostels\u2014other than with those, like case workers, who are paid to relate to them.\u00a0 So Evonne, my daughter decided to try an befriend\u00a0 a few people in a local hostel.<\/p>\n
Rita was pretty much friendless because no one who knew her wanted to be her friend!\u00a0 She was difficult to relate to and I confess I\u2019ve occasionally described her in jest, as \u201cthe grumpiest woman in the world.\u201d\u00a0 I first met Rita when she came up behind me and pushed me off a chair saying, \u201cThat\u2019s my chair mister!\u201d – even thought there were\u00a0 60 or 70 empty chairs.\u00a0 When I took the people from her hostel out on picnics, I noticed that no one wanted to sit next to her on the bus, maybe because she would scream at them, push them aside and barge her way though.\u00a0 It was not uncommon for outings to begin or end with the bizarre ritual of everyone chanting, \u2018We hate you, Rita! We hate you!\u201d<\/p>\n
Now Evonne has always had a love for stray dogs, and indeed for underdogs of all kinds and because everyone we knew avoided Rita like the plague, Evonne went out of her way to get to know her.\u00a0 Rita wasn\u2019t impressed until Evonne invited her out for coffee and cheesecake.\u00a0 Rita loved cheesecake and I think that is how Evonne won Rita\u2019s heart.<\/p>\n
They made an odd couple: a happy twenty-year-old girl with a bounce in her step, walking down the street with a crabby seventy-year-old woman shuffling beside her, muttering every step of the way.<\/p>\n
On occasion Rita was known to jump the gun and grab a slice of cheesecake sitting temptingly on a plate in front of another customer at a nearby table.\u00a0 Evonne would then have to restrain Rita while trying to calm the irate customer whose cheesecake had been eaten; but as time went by, Rita began to trust Evonne.\u00a0 If Evonne said Rita\u2019s cheesecake would come, it would come – Evonne would make sure of it.\u00a0 So Rita started to relax and learn to enjoy her coffee while waiting for her cheesecake.<\/p>\n
As the weeks passed, bit-by-bit. Rita began to share her story.\u00a0 When she was nineteen she was sent to a local psychiatric hospital where she was confined for the next forty years, loosing all contact with the family and friends\u2014the only one she could count on to look after her was herself.\u00a0 So she learnt the skills she felt she needed to survive.\u00a0 To push and shove, to fight and grab.\u00a0 Suddenly, everything made sense.\u00a0 Evonne understood, and Rita knew Evonne understood, and they became good friends.\u00a0 Rita even learned to smile again.<\/p>\n
Evonne and her sister were with Rita when she died a few years later.\u00a0 A few months after the funeral, Evonne and I went for coffee and cheesecake for old times sake.\u00a0 As we walked in, the waitress greeted Evenne like a long lost friend.\u00a0 She said, It\u2019s so nice to see Evonne again.\u00a0 We miss her so much.\u00a0 When she used to come we love it, because she used to bring her grandmother.\u201d<\/p>\n
Obviously Evonne had related to Rita with such reverence that everyone in the caf\u00e9 believed that Rita was actually a respected elderly member of our family.<\/p>\n
And so, I guess, she was.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The following is a story told by Dave Andrews in the book Australian Stories for the Heart. Some of our most marginalised neighbours are\u00a0 people who have been institutionalised.\u00a0 They have been put out of psychiatric hospitals in the hope that, by being placed in a community rather than in an institution, their lives will … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[10],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/edmonton-adventist.org.au\/wpcontent\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/edmonton-adventist.org.au\/wpcontent\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/edmonton-adventist.org.au\/wpcontent\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/edmonton-adventist.org.au\/wpcontent\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/edmonton-adventist.org.au\/wpcontent\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=174"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/edmonton-adventist.org.au\/wpcontent\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":175,"href":"http:\/\/edmonton-adventist.org.au\/wpcontent\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions\/175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/edmonton-adventist.org.au\/wpcontent\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/edmonton-adventist.org.au\/wpcontent\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/edmonton-adventist.org.au\/wpcontent\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}