Camp Quixote to return to familiar territory this month

OLYMPIA - Camp Quixote, Olympia's year-old tent city, has come full-circle. It is preparing to return to the property of the Olym pia Unitarian Universalist Congregation, its first church home.

The congregation agreed to bring the camp back March 27, about a year after it was last there, after the congregation learned no other church was going to play host to the camp, said Melissa Denton, president of the church's board.

"We just found out at the last moment nobody else was going to come forward to host," she said.

Most of the churches that would take on the camp most easily are "already being in the state of mind to do so," said Tim Ransom, an Olympia Unitarian church member who belongs to a group of "a dozen or more" churches that decide who will play host to the camp next, called the Panza Board.

The group gets its name from Sancho Panza, Don Quixote's sidekick in the eponymous classic by author Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Quixote is the namesake of the homeless camp.

After leaving the Olympia Unitarian church grounds last year, the camp moved to United Churches of Olympia, St. John's Episcopal Church, First United Methodist Church and First Christian Church.

Ransom said it will take persuasion for other churches to host the camp. He said a church that was preparing to sign to give a home to the camp next backed out. He declined to name the church.

No church in Lacey or Tumwater has taken in the camp. Lacey Community Church has considered it.

Tumwater requires a church looking to host the camp to give 30 days' notice to the city and two weeks' notice to neighbors. The camp also has historically had a hospitality tent staffed by church volunteers, which also requires organization.

"There's issues of timing," Ransom said.

This is not to say the camp of homeless people will itself be homeless. A church always has stepped up to host the camp. Once a church hosts a camp, it can't again for a year. But the churches that already have hosted the camp could host again, in the same order.

Ransom said Tent City 4, a homeless encampment in

Seattle, has moved from church to church for years.

"The pattern is that churches repeat," he said.