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This B.C. man has picked up thousands of discarded needles

Charles Bafford - Needle man
harles Bafford, who lives in a modular housing building at Main and Terminal, spends his days picking up discarded needles in Vancouver. (via Glacier Media)

What Charles Bafford has displayed on a picnic table in front of his home at Main and Terminal is no longer a shocking sight in the Vancouver of 2019: containers and bags full of needles.

He estimates there are about 1,500.

Some are used, some are still in the package.

What’s significant and impressive about the haul is the 64-year-old Bafford voluntarily picked up every one of the discarded syringes by himself.

He found them in the streets, on sidewalks, on benches, in stairwells, in alleys, in parks, in playgrounds, in bushes, in planter boxes, under bridges and on the small island near Olympic Village.

It took him a few months.

Going back about a year, when Bafford began his morning routine of picking up garbage in and around his neighbourhood, he estimates his total needle haul at close to 4,000.

Over the same period, he’s collected and dumped piles and piles of garbage, filling up his five gallon bucket several times during his rounds.

He does this most days.

Early on, he would dispose of the syringes in sharps containers at his modular housing building and at a needle exchange near Main and Hastings.

Now he holds on to them and takes his collection — stuffed in gym and shopping bags — around town and creates the occasional guerilla-like art/education project.

He did one a couple weeks ago.

Bafford took a handful of needles and other drug paraphernalia and spelled out “the earth cries ocean roars our kids die” on the plaza at the Olympic Village. He has a photo of it on his phone.

Two realtors who were about to show a condo at the Village called the cops on him because they didn’t like what they saw. Parks staff showed up but eventually let him be.

“I’m showing people the reality of the situation,” he said from the Courier’s office the day before a reporter and photographer joined him on his route. “I don’t mean to scare people, just to let them know to be careful, to be aware so they don’t get hurt.”

Gambling addiction

What drives Bafford to do what he does takes some more explaining.

On the surface, it’s about keeping the elderly and kids — mostly the kids — from poking themselves with a discarded syringe. He also likes a clean city.

“It’s just unnecessary,” he said of the garbage and needles littering the streets.

The deeper motivation for Bafford, who lives on social assistance, is to make amends of a life torn apart from his addiction to gambling.

Betting on horse races provided the rush.

His addiction led to divorces, the loss of a house, cars and a steady job in building restoration. He hasn’t seen his two sons and daughter in more than 30 years.

“I was all or nothing, and I never got all,” said Bafford, who is originally from Baltimore, Maryland, which horse racing fans would know as the home of the Preakness Stakes.

Bafford moved to London, Ont. in 1979 after meeting and marrying a Canadian nurse. He described her as an angel.

“I left her because of me,” he said of his eight-year marriage.

After going through another divorce, and still in the grips of his addiction, Bafford went from shelter to shelter in Ontario until working his way west to Vancouver.

That was in 2006.

When he arrived, he stayed in more shelters and transitioned to single-room-occupancy hotels, including the Regal and the Clifton.

At some point, he ended up under the Granville Street Bridge before seeking shelter at the Union Gospel Mission. From there, he sought treatment at a rehabilitation centre in Kelowna for drug users and alcoholics.

He said he’s never been an injection drug user, but smoked crack cocaine for a short period to keep from descending into total despair.

“That was my medication,” he said.

The facility in Kelowna didn’t have a counsellor to treat problem gamblers. That didn’t necessarily concern Bafford, who stayed there for 18 months.

“It’s all the same. If it takes everything you have, it’s the same.”

Bafford lives with depression but feels his condition is subsiding, particularly when he’s out doing what he does. Aside from the odd card game, he hasn’t gambled heavily in two years.

He reads the bible regularly, which he started doing while in Kelowna. Now he has a verse that pops up on his smart phone every day.

Like this one:

“There’s nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man.”

‘I do what I do’

It’s close to 8 a.m. when Bafford returns home to gather up his collection of needles for the Courier to see. He places four yellow sharps containers and a couple of bags on the picnic table.

There’s more in his room.

A friend named Keith, who lives at a nearby shelter, happens to walk by. He’s in a hurry but stops long enough to talk about Bafford, whom he met six months ago.

“He’s great,” he said. “He picks up the garbage and no one else does. He does this all day long.”

Bafford reiterates that he’s not the only person who picks up needles. He doesn’t want recognition for what he does, but recognition of the problem of needles littering the streets.

That will be emphasized in his plans for another impromptu art/education project with his needles outside the Main Street SkyTrain station, and another in front of the cruise ship terminal at Canada Place.

In the meantime, he said, he will continue to scour the city for needles and garbage, referring to a classic Spanish novel written in the 1600s by Miguel de Cervantes to make some sense of what drives him.

“I do what I do. That’s my windmill — whether I’m the ass, or Don Quixote, I’m one of them. And that’s OK because I think I’m doing something good, and that’s the bottom line. That’s my very, very bottom line — I’m doing something good.”

- Mike Howell, Vancouver Courier