Paul Bass Photo
Almando Clarke took a cloth and bucket inside a van parked on the New Haven Green Tuesday as empty stages and tents all around him awaited another afternoon and evening crowd for the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.
Clarke wasn’t working for the festival. He was spraying and scrubbing the third of four stalls inside “Power In The Shower,” a mobile van parked on the Green every Tuesday from April through September from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Clarke was getting the stall ready for Patricio Ramirez, the 13th homeless person to have arrived by 9:40 a.m. for a free shower and take-home bag of soap and shampoo and clean underwear.
“When we do this it gives them a sense of dignity. It makes them feel good,” Clarke said.
It makes Clarke feel good, too: He sees it as part of his calling as an active member of the Seventh Day Adventist church.
“I feel good that I am able to help my fellow human beings,” he said during a conversation on the “Word on the Street” segment of WNHH FM’s “LoveBabz LoveTalk” program.
The Green is one of three locations where the shower van stops each week; the others are on Dixwell and Grand avenues. A “one-stop pop-up,” it’s often the only place homeless New Haveners like Ramirez can clean up as well as check in with the Yale Community Health van if they want.
Clarke, 57, worked in construction before signing on to work the shower van. He has had the same boss in both jobs: Walter Harris, a fellow Seventh Day Adventist who started the nonprofit shower operation as a sideline to his Bronx-based LaWalt Home Improvement construction company.
City government’s homeless coordinator, Velma George, first came across Harris’s operation before the pandemic when he donated the van to a local church. Last year the city formally requested bids for mobile showering for the homeless in multiple locations: Harris’s bid was a “drop in the bucket” compared to other companies looking to cash in on pandemic-relief dollars. One even sought to have the city pay to construct the van, which the bidder then intended to keep. The city is paying $150,000 this coming fiscal year, which includes plans to add evening hours on the Green.
Clarke said he doesn’t push the seven-minute time limit if people want a few extra minutes to appreciate the privacy. He does knock to make sure they’re OK.
Paul Bass photo
Patricio Ramirez (pictured) took the full time allotted, emerging clean and in good spirits.
“I hadn’t take a shower since Friday. I feel better,” he said. Ramirez, who is 53 and said he has been homeless for the past year, prepared to “rest a little” on the Green, stop at the library, then “go eat.”
Clarke, meanwhile, returned to stall #3 to prepare it for the next visitor.
Click on the video to watch the full conversation with Almando Clarke on the“Word on the Street” segment of WNHH FM’s“LoveBabz LoveTalk” program.
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