When I travelled to Spokane WA, I saw many different sites.
I couldn’t believe how hot it was in the summer, and there were homeless people hanging out under the trees.
There was very little humidity, so once you got out of the sun, it made a big difference. I saw a sign on the window of a church and it read, ‘Welcome to our Cooling Center’. I wondered what they meant by a Cooling Center. I went into the church and I began to ask questions. Being a writer, I was always interested in learning new things. The priest told me that when the temperatures got into the nineties, they opened the church for people to come in and keep cool. The doors were always unlocked and they had the air conditioning on from morning till night. He said it was their way of helping to keep the homeless safe. Many times, it was just the children who came in, or the elderly. There were some elderly who had their own homes, but they couldn’t afford to either have their air conditioning repaired, or to purchase an air conditioning unit. They didn’t care what their denomination was, or where they came from. Everyone was welcomed into the Cooling Center. He went on to tell me that there were many different areas in the city that offered their stores and libraries for people to be safe during extreme heat. I walked out of the cooling center with a smile on my face, knowing that people care about the people of their city of Spokane WA.