"We Keep People Alive": As Summers Get Deadlier, a Tiny Church Is Fighting Back

[marmar]

“We Keep People Alive”: As Summers Get Deadlier, a Tiny Church Is Fighting Back
In a South Phoenix neighborhood struggling with homelessness, addiction, and environmental racism, climate change is just the latest crisis.

STORY AND PHOTOS BY AUDREY GRAY
7 MINS AGO


(Mother Jones) Pinch the skin on the top of your hand and then let go. It should drop back into place, a nursing student told me as we stood in a dim Sunday School room at Wesley United Methodist Church in South Phoenix last summer. If, however, the skin stays up, “tenting” as nurses say when they’re testing skin turgor, then you’re in some trouble—seriously dehydrated, headed toward the kinds of physical heat response that would kill 425 people in Maricopa County before the year was out.

That day at the Wesley UMC Cooling Center, all sorts of people were trying to keep the death count from rising higher. The nursing students putting in their community health hours, a handful of senior church ladies, the pastor herself, and people who lived on the streets—they were all moving in and out of two cinderblock rooms that the church’s beleaguered rooftop heat pump was able to keep down to about 80 degrees. Wesley was one of nearly 100 designated sites in Phoenix open to the public for daytime refuge during heat season. City-funded spaces like libraries or rec centers had certain restrictions—no bathing, no lying down to sleep, no pets—but self-funded sites like Wesley had the freedom to create their own rules and culture.

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By 2022, plenty of cooling centers in Maricopa County’s sprawling Heat Relief Network offered life-saving basics—air-conditioned rooms and cold water. But the pastor and parishioners of Wesley, a historically Black church in a historically vulnerable neighborhood, understood that the needs around them went far beyond AC and a freezie pop. People were struggling with homelessness, hunger, and addiction—all things that extreme heat made so much worse. Though the church was small, drawing only about 30 people to Sunday services, its members decided last year to help in any way they could on their limited, offering-plate budget. They asked neighbors, many of whom lived in Section 8 housing, and local nonprofits to donate snacks, water, hygiene kits, and time. The church had a washer and dryer, so they decided to offer laundry services. Aspen University agreed to send the nursing students. On June 1, they set up a “Cooling Center” sandwich board sign out front on Southern Avenue, and soon, 15 to 25 unsheltered, exhausted, and often addicted visitors were showing up each day, frequently with dogs.

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Phoenix is stupid hot, but a lot of people came for that. It can be hard to understand why, in a time of homicidal heat domes, they still come. Journalist David Knowles called the hottest major city in America “a dystopian dare.” But the winters are still real nice, and the place has enchantments—wildly shaped buttes and a blossoming array of Sonoran-adapted plants. Palo Verde trees line streets with grass-green trunks, a symbol of the tree’s ability to draw back its life force and keep photosynthesizing in drought years. Southwest-hip boutiques sell small bundles of creosote, an herby shrub people hang in their showers because to many Arizonans, it’s a comforting scent—exactly what the desert smells like in summer rain. ..........(more)

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/09/phoenix-heat-deaths-climate-change-church-wesley-united-methodist-sunbelt-apartheid-addiction-unhoused-housing/