Amber and her 10-year-old daughter Brooklyn sit in the hard plastic chairs that circle the round table, a centerpiece in their one-room home. Two sets of bunk beds line opposite walls. A double bed, carefully made with a blue and white quilt, nestles in the corner near the large, blinded window. Nine-year-old Shannon stops fidgeting with his soccer ball for the first time in 15 minutes and gazes with rapt attention out the window as leaders from Girl Scout Troop 1449 stir homemade Brunswick stew in a cauldron large enough for Shannon to swim in.“I’m not eating that stew!” Shannon declares.
“You don’t have to eat it, but be polite about accepting it,” his mother warns. TeVin, Amber’s oldest son, sits on the double bed strumming mellow chords on his electric guitar, seemingly oblivious to his younger brother’s whirling dervish or the excited chitter-chatter of his mom and sister. A dedicated vegan for the past few months, he’ll also politely decline the stew, the only lunch he’ll see today.
“We love our church,” Amber says. “We’ve been going to Potter’s House for eleven years. We have an outreach program where we go on Saturdays to feed the homeless and give them the word.”
“My Daddy grills food for them,” Brooklyn says proudly.
“My husband has such a desire to go and help the homeless, especially since being here. It’s given him a different outlook,” Amber says.
Amber and her family are homeless. They’ve been living at Pathways, an outreach of Urban Ministry in Greensboro that provides temporary shelter for homeless families.
Mark Sumerford has been director of Pathways for the last 26 years. His eyes cloud when he describes the growing epidemic of families without homes.
“It’s horrible,” he says. “We recommend that families call us every day to see if there’s space for them. When this center was built six years ago, we’d have fifteen to twenty families on the waiting list. Last month we had 43 families waiting for one of the sixteen rooms we have here, now we have 53 homeless families waiting for a place to live. “You can hear the frustration in their voices when they call day after day and there’s no room for them,” Mark continues. “Sometimes they become angry because we can’t do anything to help them. It’s tough for these families, especially the victims of abuse. Where do we stay tonight? Where will my children stay?”
Amber and her family are the luckier ones who found shelter at Pathways several months after losing their home and sleeping on the floor of Amber’s mother’s house.
“I miss riding my bike and playing with my cats,” Brooklyn says about her old neighborhood. “I wish we didn’t have to give our Jack Russell terrier, Bandit, away,” Amber says. “We couldn’t bring him with us. I held onto him as long as I could.”
Amber’s father, a violent and abusive alcoholic, lined Amber and her brothers up to watch as he beat their mother. He had just thrown her down the steps as Amber played outside with her red ball. Running for her life, Amber’s mother grabbed the 3-year-old and hid her behind a tree.
“Stay here,” she commanded before running back inside to grab her brothers. “I can’t leave without them.” Seeking shelter at the homes of relatives, Amber’s mother eventually rented a trailer. Amber’s life became like that one long moment when the elevator plunges downward, leaving the rider suspended and off-kilter, waiting for the landing.
Molested as a child by a family member while other teenage boys watched, Amber kept her tongue even as she was forced to hug her abuser when family arguments always ended in “make-up” time. She dropped out of school by the 8 th grade and bore her first son at 15. “I went into the same abusive situation I swore I’d never be in,” she says. “I wanted a way out. I just didn’t know how to get up. I ended up in Charter Hill’s Hospital after I had my son. DSS threatened to take my son away. It broke my heart. All I ever wanted to be was a good mother.”
Amber took out life insurance at 18, convinced she would never see the light of the next day. “I made a decision to move from the abusive relationship and found shelter at Clara’s House,” Amber says, a home for abused women. “He tried to shoot me there so I moved into public housing, where he kicked my front door down.” Back at Clara’s House, Amber connected with an advocate who helped her go to court. The abuser ended up on probation with 10 month’s jail time. “I felt violated and had no voice,” Amber says. “I was so angry for everything that had happened to me.” One night when Amber was 20 years old, she and a girlfriend played a drinking game with a male college student in the neighborhood. Amber’s girlfriend left to go back to her apartment and Amber followed later, passing out on the living room floor.
“I awoke to being carried back to the apartment where we had played the game. I had no physical control over my body; it was if I had no voice or strength. I couldn’t fight or verbalize what was happening as they raped me. So I had to make my mind go somewhere else so I could make it through. Afterwards, I literally blocked out the events of that night so I could make it. I was so angry at myself. I felt like I was worth nothing all over again. I hated that feeling.”
“I went to bed every night with a bottle of liquor and woke up with it in the morning,” she says.
“One day I looked at my son and quit drinking and smoking cold turkey. That January I gave my life to the Lord. For the first time, I felt like somebody."
When this center was built six years ago, we’d have fifteen to twenty families on the waiting list. Last month we had 43 families waiting for one of the 16 rooms we have here, now we have 53 homeless families waiting for a place to live.
— Mark Sumerford, director of Pathways
Eighteen months ago, Amber and her husband were excited about buying their first home. The loan was approved. They were building their credit. Her husband worked second shift Monday through Friday, leaving Greensboro at 2 p.m. and returning home at 2 a.m. On Saturdays he worked from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. They purchased a van and provided for their children on $32,000 a year. “Sundays were the only days my husband was home,” Amber remembers. “I was feeling overwhelmed with him being gone so much. Our youngest son has encopresis, a slow transit bowel disease and pelvic floor dysfunction, an illness that causes him to miss a lot of school and keeps him in the hospital a lot. He also has ADHD. So my husband took a position in Greensboro which paid $10.50 an hour and the promise of overtime options and some benefit packages. We went back to our mortgage lender and discovered that we could not buy a house because my husband had switched jobs in the middle of the process. No one had ever told us that.”
“We ran across a young couple who were divorcing and wanted to rent their house with an option to buy. All they wanted was for us to pay the mortgage which was $850 a month and that was it. So we moved into the home and discovered we had a gas bill, light bill and car insurance.
Our van was breaking down right and left, so I got a job at a convenience store working third shift. I wanted to do anything to keep us in the house. For the first time, my daughter had someone else to play with. My kids could finally go outside and play in the front yard and be safe.”
Then the van broke down again. Amber’s husband walked to work, rain, sleet or snow, never missing a day. Amber quit her job because of her son’s medical condition. Next, a letter came from their landlord informing the family that he was filing Chapter 7. They had 45 days before the house would be repossessed.
They made the decision to move in with Amber’s mother and apply to Partnership Village Apartments, a lower-rent housing option designed to transition the homeless back into permanent housing.
“My first application to Partnership Village had gotten lost so I went back
to fill out another one. My mother was getting ready to move and the van was broken down again. We couldn’t afford to get it out of the shop. We were paying my mother money for utilities and going to the laundrymat three to four times a week to wash my son’s clothes, sheets and towels. The apartments we were trying to get into never received the paper work so they gave the space to someone else,” Amber explains. She called Pathways every day to see if there was a vacancy. On a Tuesday night last July, Amber and her family became residents.
“We ran across a young couple who were divorcing and wanted to rent their house with an option to buy. All they wanted was for us to pay the mortgage which was $850 a month and that was it. So we moved into the home and discovered we had a gas bill, light bill and car insurance.
Our van was breaking down right and left, so I got a job at a convenience store working third shift. I wanted to do anything to keep us in the house. For the first time, my daughter had someone else to play with. My kids could finally go outside and play in the front yard and be safe.”
Then the van broke down again. Amber’s husband walked to work, rain, sleet or snow, never missing a day. Amber quit her job because of her son’s medical condition. Next, a letter came from their landlord informing the family that he was filing Chapter 7. They had 45 days before the house would be repossessed.
They made the decision to move in with Amber’s mother and apply to Partnership Village Apartments, a lower-rent housing option designed to transition the homeless back into permanent housing.
“My first application to Partnership Village had gotten lost so I went back
to fill out another one. My mother was getting ready to move and the van was broken down again. We couldn’t afford to get it out of the shop. We were paying my mother money for utilities and going to the laundrymat three to four times a week to wash my son’s clothes, sheets and towels. The apartments we were trying to get into never received the paper work so they gave the space to someone else,” Amber explains. She called Pathways every day to see if there was a vacancy. On a Tuesday night last July, Amber and her family became residents.
“We knew we had to get our life back together,” she says. “The programs they offer here have taught us how we can better budget so when we do go into a home we aren’t faced with this situation again. “I think God lets things happen for a reason,” she continues. “Since we’ve been here we’ve been able to save our money and pay off some debt. But most importantly, our family is stronger. Whereas my oldest son used to run track and be going in a million different directions, now I know we’ll all be sitting down to dinner every night as a family. It’s given us back our perspective of what is really important to us. A lot of people come here with only the shirts on their backs.”
The hearty Brunswick stew is served in white Styrofoam bowls with Saltines on the side. Amber’s husband joins the family for the noonday meal. “Sometimes I can get here for lunch if there’s enough gas in the van,” he says. If not, he works his 10-hour shift without. Amber takes Shannon’s untouched stew back to the room to store in the scant shelves of their refrigerator.
“This is a nice place to stay,” says TeVin. “I don’t like to just sit around so I hang out with my girlfriend or play music with my friends. It’s not bad unless you have a little brother running around,” he teases.
The hardest part for the family is the time-restriction rule. Everyone must be in their rooms by 9 p.m. Children and teenagers can never be left alone. When Shannon goes to Brenner’s Hospital, Brooklyn leaves school because there is no one to be there when she gets off the bus. Amber’s family has been there much longer than the average 90-day stay at Pathways. An unexpected childsupport check from TeVin’s father placed the family in a higher income bracket Partnership Village allows.
They are having trouble finding a home in a decent community because they are overqualified for specific assistance programs such as Section 8, a governmental program that offers vouchers to qualifying landlords and provides assistance with rent.
“I didn’t grab anyone’s coat when we came in July,” Amber says. “One morning a couple of weeks ago, it was really cold. There was a burgundy windbreaker on the cart beside the door where anyone can get take what they need. It did look like an old man’s coat but I told TeVin to wear it because I didn’t want him to be cold.” “I don’t want to wear that coat,” TeVin protested, storming out to the bus for school.
“I look out the window and halfway to the bus, there’s no coat. So I do what any typical parent would do and ran out in the freezing cold in my pajamas,” says Amber.
“Put the coat on, you are so grounded. No phone, no girlfriend!” “Right then, tears started falling just like puddles,” she says. “Mama, please don’t make me wear this coat. They’re already picking on me because we live here,” TeVin pleaded.
“I went back to our room and just fell apart. ‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘How long have they been teasing him?’” “Later that day, my friend took TeVin and me shopping and bought TeVin this super-cool leather coat. He just stood there and grinned ear to ear. He was so grateful. It was the perfect ending to a day that had started so bad.”
Last Thanksgiving Amber had to lay down their cherished dog, Hero, for health reasons.
“He was the coolest dog in the world,” Brooklyn says. “He used to lick me awake every morning. It was the worst Thanksgiving ever.” This Thanksgiving, Amber and her family will have their meal served by youth from Our Lady of Grace Church at Pathways, along with fellow pilgrims in their hardscrabble journey. They are not without hope as they gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing.
“It’s not where we eat Thanksgiving dinner that’s important,” says Amber. “It’s about being with my family.”
Originally Published in Yes! Weekly 11/25/08
