Evansville Rescue Mission leads to special friendship

EVANSVILLE, Ind. (AP) - The human heart can be a vast ocean of empathy, capable of feelings so tender they threaten to spill over at the mention of a single word.

This is what brings Holly Ann Byers back to volunteer at the Evansville Rescue Mission week after week, year after year. It's what moved her to respond with more than a courtesy smile the day a scruffy older resident named Harold said hello.

Harold, who readily acknowledges he has lived a hard life, was cleaning a meal tray in the rescue mission's kitchen. He had a colorful way of saying hello.

"He goes, 'If any of these sons of bitches messes with you, you tell me because I'm not going to tolerate it!'" Holly recalled with a laugh, silently mouthing the offending word.

Over nearly a decade of serving lunches, making sandwiches, washing dishes, bringing her dog to visit residents and doing just about anything else needed, Holly has met and cultivated friendships with hundreds of people at the rescue mission. That Harold would greet her with a thunderous announcement wasn't necessarily unusual.

Forty-something and single, Holly lives with her 12-year-old son and her dog in Newburgh. She works as an office administrator in Evansville. She was at the rescue mission because she wanted to help. She wasn't looking to get emotionally involved.

"We just automatically clicked," she said. "I didn't know Harold's story yet, but I just felt like God sent him to me to be his friend and for him to be my friend."

As Harold unspooled his backstory and showed himself, again and again, to be tender and protective of Holly, he touched a bottomless well of compassion she hadn't known she had.

Harold's story as told to Holly is hard to hear. It begins with abandonment.

Sitting in the rescue mission dining area, with chairs, trays and silverware clanging and banging and voices louder than hers all around, Holly spoke in low tones frequently interrupted by her own tears.

"He was in a grocery store with his mom and he was around 5, and his mom told the cashier she had to go out and get money out of her car," she said, choking out the words. "And she left."

Harold, 53, spent his formative years bouncing from one foster home to another. He told Holly he was abused, turning to drugs and alcohol as he got older. In one particularly dire moment, he said, he seriously contemplated suicide.

"He had a really close friend that he watched die of a drug overdose," Holly said, nearly whispering. "He told me when he saw his friend and knew he was dead, that he didn't want to live like that."

The story Harold tells puts him behind bars - because that's where he wanted to be.

Harold marched into a Houston police station with illegal drugs in a front pocket and a knife in a back pocket. He was trying to get arrested so he could get clean. The police accommodated, and Harold did time.

Harold told Holly he suffers from multiple-personality disorder, claiming 14 separate personalities. Holly doesn't know what the truth is. Sometimes when she talks to Harold, she said, he responds with a blank stare.

It's all right. Empathy is the answer, she said.

"I realized God knew that Harold needed love," she said. "I believe I was brought into his life to love him and show him that he's cared for. And God brought him into my life to show me what it's like to look at someone through the eyes of God and not look at them from their mistakes and the past - to love them anyway."

Holly said Harold got to Evansville from Texas as a result of a dream several years ago. In this dream, he was in a different city. So he decided to actually make it happen, pointing at a map and closing his eyes. He landed on Evansville.

A niece sent him a bus ticket - but when Harold arrived here, he didn't know where to go or what to do. So he took to sleeping on a bench. This went on for three nights, until a stranger woke him and pointed him to the rescue mission.

Harold likely has never known what it feels like to be loved, Holly said.

"And I think that's why we formed such a bond - because he knows I care about him. I bring him candy bars and snacks to make him feel special because he was never made to feel special his whole life," she said.

Every day that Holly visits the rescue mission, Harold walks her out to her car when she leaves. He accompanied her to her table in the rescue mission dining area when she went there to talk to a Courier & Press reporter and a photographer. She showed the reporters a long stream of tender Facebook exchanges between them.

Holly loves Harold, she said, and she tells him so. He does too.

Holly has volunteered at other places, she said, but she is inexorably drawn back to the Evansville Rescue Mission.

"It's where I feel God has called me to be. I feel like it has made me realize that my purpose is here and that is my passion for the homeless population," she said.

Holly's passion for helping people is extraordinary even in a field that attracts compassionate people, said Josh Nichols, senior vice president of the Evansville Rescue Mission. Holly said she works at least one day a week at the shelter, but Nichols said it's more like two or three days.

"She gives away something that's very valuable, and that's her time," Nichols said. "Just a smile, a warm face, helps change somebody's day. Just a hello '“ and Holly is that."

It wasn't always like this.

She wasn't thinking about volunteering some 10 years ago when Tom Montgomery, now deceased but then a co-worker at ITT Technical Institute in Newburgh, goaded her to help him take Easter baskets to the Ronald McDonald House. Montgomery also asked her to go with him to the rescue mission's annual Gobbler Gathering, a Thanksgiving food basket giveaway, but she couldn't go.

The next week, she did go. As she served lunch on the line and saw the smiling faces, Holly felt something inside her change.

"At the beginning, I felt like I was coming to help fix other people, but then after some time, I knew that God was fixing me," she said, quietly weeping.

Terri Rich, a former co-worker of Holly's in ITT Technical Institute's financial aid department, recalls admonishing her tender hearted friend not to give money to panhandlers.

"She's always willing to help anyone," Rich said. "When we were working together, if there was a student struggling she would always find a way to help them get by or give them some suggestions what to do."

"Holly is great with people of any kind. She's got no inhibitions at all."

Holly said she has to help panhandlers. She has to.

"I feel like if someone is presented in front of me and they're in need, then it's my job to do the right thing," she said. "What they do with (the money) is on them. What I do with it is on me."

Cautioning that he was feeling the effects of his personality disorder, Harold spoke briefly to Courier & Press reporters.

"She is a wonderful and dear person," he said of Holly. "I respect her."

At this, Holly turned reflective. She said the rescue mission's residents are genuinely grateful for her work and her time. They work hard, too. As she spoke, Harold applied himself a few feet away to cleaning tables and a nearby floor, taking evident pride in the work.

Don't scuff Harold's floors, Holly said. He'll tell you about it.

"Harold said to me once, 'Why do you love the rescue mission so much?'" Holly said. "I love to help others. I don't like to call it volunteering because I feel like that's a selfish word. Like volunteering is saying I'm doing something for you. I call it opportunity, actually, because they're doing something for you, too.

"It's an opportunity to make a difference and show them that they matter and that people do care about them."

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Source: Evansville Courier & Press