So I got a part-time job at Santa Cruz Roasting Coffee shop. It is right downtown and so far a pretty cool place to work. We sell a lot of coffee beans, as you might suspect since we're a roasting house, and I get one free pound a week, which is pretty cool (Ethiopian was my first pound). The length of employment at the roasting house is pretty low, the employee who has been there the longest? 3yrs. I don't know if anyone else there is a Christian, although the manager, Kacki, is sober and has gone through A.A. I assume the people I work with represent a typical slice of Santa Cruz, and what they lack in their representation the customers are sure to make-up for. I have only worked two shifts, both of the closing (we close at 11 and 12pm) and it has been fun. Most of the employees are students, but some are not. Most of the employees are straight, some are not; most of them have tatoos, and, so far, everybody's favorite words are four letters long.

My first night I worked with a gal who moved here two-months ago to get away from a bad marriage of ten years in Wyoming; I was blown-away when she told me twice in two seperate conversations that she had also left her four children; the youngest being 6 or 8 months. She is starting afresh in SC and has already found someone who she is interested in.

Last night I worked with a new guy who is back in town as he waits to be accepted to a law school. As we took the garbage out I asked him why he wants to be a lawyer and he said, "I'm tired of being poor," a novel ambition. He asked me what I was doing in town and I told him I was here to start a church, which really didn't get much of a response. In reality I just don't think people have any sort of grid for starting a church, since it is equated with a building instead of a group of people. We'll see where God takes these relationships.

A big eye-opener came as a result of us not having a public restroom. It was converted into a storage area because of the graffiti and drug use that happened in there. One of my co-workers told me of finding needles, razor-blades, and other stuff in there. But last night one of the girls revealed it was finally closed when some overdosed on Heroin in the bathroom. Come to find out, SC has one of the highest rates of Heroin addiction, per capita, in the U.S; I had no idea. One of the employees told me she can tell when a bad batch of dope is on the streets because the nightime customers come in all messed-up. Here is an exerpt from a local newspaper about the issue:

"Ten years ago, we had one student hooked on heroin," he says. "Today, one-tenth of our students are dealing with heroin addiction. More than half of them are female."

Those in the know agree that girls are more likely to be recruited than guys because once they are addicted, "they are not only working for the drug itself, they often end up prostituting to support their 'boyfriend,' the dealer who got them hooked in the first place," says Garcia.

Over the last few years, especially here in Santa Cruz, the ages of the addicted have continued to drop. Now, there are cases of addicted 9-year-olds and 12-year-old girls prostituting to feed their habit."



No doubt we need to do something.