Wheeling Street Doctor William Mercer teamed up with a big-city street medicine team during a visit to Los Angeles. The trip taught him some new techniques, while affirming the groundbreaking street medicine work that Wheeling is already doing at home. 

I cried when I first saw and spent time with the Saint John’s Bible. It was the resurrection illumination (the pictures that accompany the biblical text) with Jesus telling Mary Magdalene, and all of us, “don’t hold on to me...”

I’ve always heard crying at art was a thing. My mother and sister, both artists, could regularly get a few tears going on  family trips to the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. I’m more of a crier at things like “Les Miserables,” church, and “It’s a Wonderful Life,” always “It’s a Wonderful Life.” But never art. While I like opportunities to evoke an emotional experience,  I always wondered, what were they seeing in Monet, or Van Gogh that I was just missing? 

So when tears started at the hand painted illumination in the Saint John’s Bible, it finally  registered for me.

Ryan was a 31-year-old convicted felon who ran the streets of Wood County as a kid, abandoned by a father he never knew and weighed down by a legacy of family addictions and dysfunction, along with the racism he endured as one of the only kids of color in his community.

He says he never really felt like he “had a place in the world” and that he was somehow “less than” the people and the world around him. Nothing in his life made him believe that he had any potential worth or value, and he found his “safety in hiding from the world.” 

It is nearly six months since Wheeling closed its exempted homeless camp in freezing December temperatures, displacing around sixty individuals. 

Some former camp residents are now in permanent housing, but many more are staying in abandoned buildings and local shelters. For certain groups, there is still not a clear path forward.