Clean Up Thursdays on Atkinson Street have changed. Since the city removed the tents and cleared Atkinson Street, the Newmarket clean-up crews’ job has shifted, and walking with the crews has changed as well. Previously, while some crews walked into neighboring streets, several crews would work to clean up Atkinson Street.

This effort meant sweeping and scooping up trash in a crowded area with rows of tents on the blacktop. I sometimes found it hard as a chaplain to hear the person I was listening to, and no privacy was available. Depending on who was there, I might listen to someone on a Newmarket crew or someone else on the street who wanted to talk.

Now Atkinson Street serves as a gathering place for crews and chaplains. We meet in the parking lot next to the Engagement Center, where we gather equipment: brooms, rakes, standing dustbins, and long gray carts that hold 2 plastic trash cans each. We circle up and talk about prayers people need. A chaplain then offers a prayer, naming people present and not present.

After being assigned to a team, I walk with that team on a route they are familiar with. We pick up trash and debris near loading docks as well as streets. Members of the crew will at times encounter people they know and say hello. As a middle-class, white, cis-gender, straight male, I find this process humbling and sacred for its newness: I am not usually in a neighborhood I don’t know, being led on a route I am not familiar with.

On one route, the crew and I encountered what must have once been a small encampment just to the side of a loading dock. Now what remained were condoms, used and unused; a soaked sweatshirt; food items; trash; and feces. The head of the crew let me know we didn’t have to clean up the feces. I wondered who had been there, and where they were now.

I’m getting to know the Newmarket crew little by little. Jeff*, a tall man, greets several people in the neighborhood as we thread through backstreets. Clarice lives in Dorchester with two of her kids. She grew up in foster homes, and is proud to have kept her own children out of them despite her spending a stint in prison. Many crew members are estranged from family members who they remember and think about. When one crew member appeared in a photo as part of a newspaper article, he wondered aloud if his son, whom he hadn’t visited with in years, would see him in the picture.

*I did not use real names for this article.