By Rita McInerney

On Wednesday, Oct. 2, the Saint Vincent de Paul Society’s central office on Howell Place was robbed again, for the fourth time in three months. Case worker Sharon Maddox arrived that morning to find the place a shambles; contents of desk drawers strewn all over the floor, files dumped out, office equipment, payroll checks and meats stolen. Entry was gained through a window in the office.

“I don’t mind people breaking in and taking food, I would like to think someone needed it,” Betti Knott, executive director, said. “It’s senseless vandalism that hurts.”

Amid the shambles, the phone rings constantly and people wait patiently in the front room until they can unload their burdens.

The police are sympathetic to the frequent break-ins and burglaries, but there is not much they can do about the shabby old bungalow on the cul-de-sac that is difficult to secure.

The thieves in the night can steal typewriters, calculators and hams from the old dwelling place around the corner from St. Anthony’s Church in the West End. They can ransack rooms and cause a lot of extra work for the overburdened staff, but they can’t stop St. Vincent de Paul Society from helping others.

Vincentian Rule No. 4 reads: “No work of charity is foreign to this Society. Vincentian helping can include any person to person assistance that promotes human dignity and integrity.”

And the SVDP working out of Howell Place pays rent, provides funds to keep the heat and lights on, gives food to the hungry, clothes to the poor. Its clients are young and old, migrants and homeless, the poorest of the poor and people down on their luck for a temporary season.

Sometimes it’s hard to categorize the kind of assistance people seek from the SVDP. Ms. Knott has a few good examples of the “person to person assistance that promotes human dignity.” There was the elderly woman confronted with a water bill of $1,000! “The pipes had sprung a leak and she was being charged for that water leaking all over the place,” Ms. Knott recalled. The society bought some pipe and rounded up a plumber to install the new pipe. And a woman found some people who cared.

There was the abused wife who came to Atlanta from a distant state -- with her nine children. A family of 10 took them in and that meant 18 people packed into a two-bedroom apartment. The women’s children caught scabies, she had no money to move out or get her youngsters treated. Everything was pending; food stamps, Aid For Families with Dependent Children.

Working with Central Presbyterian Church, an apartment was found, furniture and clothing (all the children’s clothes had to be burned because of the scabies) were provided by the Saint Vincent de Paul thrift shops. “What do they do in the meantime, sitting and waiting,” Ms. Knott said of the family’s plight. The state does what it can, but it all takes time. So the SVDP and Central Presbyterian bring housing and hope into the lives of a mother and her children trapped in a tragic situation.

Helping a man who had lost his ear get a plastic replacement is a little out of the ordinary for most but not for SVDP. It wasn’t the cost of the artificial lobe so much as the expense of getting him to Duke University Hospital that the society could help with. Right now there is a need to replace front teeth for a high school senior who lost hers in an accident.

“Sometimes we come up against utterly impossible situations. We do the best we can. We don’t always make people happy. We are not into immediate gratification. That’s not our goal. Every once in a while we can perform miracles but not every day,” Ms. Knott admits.

But to a person who must bury an indigent family member, the society performs a miracle when it calls upon an empathetic funeral director to provide a decent funeral. And a miracle can be providing fees and doing the paperwork so birth certificates can be obtained for people who must produce this document before receiving aid.

Miracles can take many forms -- a food basket made possible by Five for Food, a check toward an overdue rent or utility bill, MARTA fare to get a man to a job interview, shoes for the children from the thrift shop, a voucher for needed medicine.

From Oct. 1, 1984 until Aug. 30, 1985, the central office of the Saint Vincent de Paul Society disbursed $105,566 in direct aid. This aid helped families; 1,405 families received food boxes, 722 financial assistance and 408 furniture, household items and clothing. In addition, approximately 20,000 meals were served at St. Anthony’s. (The society gives St. Anthony’s $1,000 a month which enables them to send the hungry to the parish daily lunch program.)

During the period 5,519 requests for assistance came from people in the inner city alone. The society was able to assist 2,585 of this number. “In some cases, we just can’t help,” Sharon Maddox says. When a person comes in asking for help with an overdue gas bill of $1,000, “it’s hard to justify putting $50 toward such a large sum out of a monthly allotment in the neighborhood of $4,000.” Then there are people whose stories don’t check out when verification is sought from landlords or former employers.

Sometimes, Ms. Maddox says, the poor can be very demanding. Sometimes “they treat us real bad. But we try and help.”

“We try and help” is the daily rule on Howell Place. Once a year, people throughout the Archdiocese of Atlanta can help. It’s that time of year when collections are being taken up in churches for the central office of SVDP. Last year the collection contributed $72,000 for the work among the poor. This year Ms. Knott is hoping for at least $80,000 with which to ease the despair of poverty and misfortune in the Vincentian way.