At the House of Joseph, a small, church-based, men’s recovery home on the outskirts of Marysville, California, the guys are losing patience with each other. They’re squabbling about details, about housework and money, about unfairness in their responsibilities.

The challenge is keeping things steady, riding out these cyclical rough spots, and that’s why Aquil Hafiyz, the director, has decided to keep everyone home tonight.  Instead of attending church, the dozen or so men gather in “Freedom Hall,” the erstwhile living room, to listen to Aquil lay down a bit of the law and affirm some of the basic rules.

Aquil has spent the afternoon roaming the grounds, supervising the landscaping work in the front and side yards. He’s in his 30s, younger than a lot of the guys, but he maintains the position of older brother around the house.  His orders are direct and firm, his tone low-key.

The guys, who range from their mid-20s to late-middle-age, are buzzing around in the hot Central Valley afternoon.  They’ve already tilled the yard’s packed-dirt turf and seeded a new lawn, and today they planted a sapling, installed some decorative cinderblocks and got rid of the clutter in the side yard.

The house is a former rest home, with an extra-wide hallway and side entryway, and a wheelchair ramp leading up to the front deck. It shows the effects of age and neglect and so blends into the landscape of Olivehurst, a chronically downtrodden suburb on the south edge of Marysville. But today, the place is a little tidier, and the progress has infused the men with a sense of pride and boosted the cooperative spirit.

These past couple months the guys have kept things positive, worked well together. There’s been a solid group running the daily fundraiser car washes, heading out diligently after breakfast each morning with a shopping cart full of buckets and soap and rags, hawking washes for donations through the hot afternoon.

But for some guys the routine doesn’t work.  They’re trying to kick addictions, dealing with the daily ups and downs, exhausted, irritable, strung-out.  So they stick to the grounds and try to meditate on the Bible and cultivate the self-reflection that’s expected of them. Before long the other guys, the guys who are out in the blazing sun all day washing cars to work for the household income, start grumbling.  It doesn’t help that the guys are crowded four to a room.  So it’s time to nudge the group back into line, a task which falls to Aquil, the house’s sole staff member.

He sends word around, and soon the yard empties and everyone filters into Freedom Hall, a musty room suffused in greenish light from aging skylights. The guys slide into the two old church pews that line a table, open their Bibles to Ephesians and begin reading in turns, like they normally do. And as he often does, Aquil soon interjects with a comment, adding perspective to the verses. But this time, he doesn’t stop talking for about a half-hour.

“The reason we’re having this meeting tonight is because we’ve got to get certain things back on track,” he begins, in the snappy rhythm he always use to talk about weighty matters. “We’re a family in this house. We are men, and we should treat one another like men! This is our community, and everybody has to learn how to help each other out.”

He brings up incidents from days before, brings up characters and verses from the Scriptures, waving his Bible in the air like an impassioned pulpit orator.  Slowly, the guys begin to respond, joking and laughing together, and Craig Anderson, a clean-cut, middle-aged man who arrived depressed and homeless from Sacramento two months ago, stands and offers an apology for losing his cool the previous day. There’s hugging, and the guys rib each other a little, and laugh some more.  For now at least, Aquil has held things together.

Aquil came to this job through a connection, a friend’s father who knows the pastor who runs the place. He came to it not because he’s religious, or because he has any history of addiction, but rather because of a social conscience honed during a childhood spent in youth shelters.  He grew up in those shelters, and the lesson he learned was that the only way you get anything is to push forward with energy and creativity.  He moved from place to place for years. By the time he arrived in Marysville, he was percolating plans for a nonprofit recording studio that would help promote the local youth scene. It wasn’t his first idea for a socially conscious venture, but as with his other projects, the challenges of starting a business proved too formidable. So when the offer came for steady employment in a noble cause, Aquil placed much of his life on hold and took up residence at the House of Joseph.