‘Lord, please, let this be a dream’ — A District family escapes homelessness
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Version 0 of 1. You recognize an eviction the moment you see its aftermath: the possessions stacked on the sidewalk, the intensely personal suddenly made very public. “I hate it when I see it. I hate to see people’s stuff sitting out on the street,” said Rosemary Yorn, 51. Rosemary went through it herself in 2005. She’d been gainfully employed, doing payroll for several federal agencies, when a complicated pregnancy put her on bed rest. She lost her job. She fell three months behind on the rent for the Landover Hills, Md., apartment where she lived with two of her sons. Then she gave birth to a healthy daughter. Rosemary had applied for financial help from a social service organization, but the check couldn’t be delivered. It was around the Fourth of July, and delinquents had blown up her mailbox with a firecracker. She was in a cab, returning from the agency, when she saw the contents of her apartment near the curb. What do you in such a situation? “The first thing I said was, ‘Lord, please, let this be a dream,’ ” Rosemary remembered. It wasn’t. She tried to comfort herself with a thought: “If you pay attention to the stuff that you don’t have, you’re gonna lose. So you always got to be thankful for the things that you do have.” What Rosemary had was just enough money to rent a truck and put her things in storage. She was homeless with three children, one a newborn. Rosemary and her children lived for a while with her brother, then with an older son. They lived in a hotel, paid for by an administrative assistant job Rosemary held briefly. She tried to scrape by. When her mother died in 2007, Rosemary found herself in a funeral home to arrange the burial. “Don’t laugh, I asked the people for a job,” Rosemary said. She worked there for three months. At one point, Rosemary became a live-in caretaker for an elderly woman just so her family would have a place to stay. In 2008, she moved with her children to the shelter at the old D.C. General campus in Southeast Washington, her second stint there. “It was really chaotic,” she said. “I kept my kids with me all the time. It just wasn’t good.” Rosemary prided herself on being able to keep it together, on trying to instill a sense of normalcy even as she moved her family from place to place. Once, she was at a job training program offered by the United Planning Organization. “This lady was helping me and she said, ‘Where do you live?’ I had to tell her: ‘Well, I’m homeless. I stay in a shelter.’ ” The woman gave Rosemary a look of disbelief. Rosemary realizes now the toll all of this took on her children, especially her youngest son, Athel. Then she found Community of Hope, a District charity and a partner in The Washington Post Helping Hand fundraising campaign. Community of Hope offers many services in the District, including an apartment-style shelter for 20 families, on Girard Street NW in Columbia Heights. It became Rosemary’s salvation. “When we opened up the door to go in the first day, the first thing Athel said was, ‘Oh, wow, we’ve got our own bathroom.’ ” Rosemary and her family lived at Girard Street for about a year and then moved into Community of Hope’s permanent supportive-housing program, which provided them with a federally subsidized home. Now they live in Northeast Washington, not far from Fort Totten. Rosemary works for a delivery company. She pays a portion of the rent and all of her utilities. A Community of Hope case manager checks in regularly to see where Rosemary might need help. Athel, who had such a bad time being constantly on the move, is a high school freshman who’s active in Junior ROTC and a member of the basketball team. (An older brother, Wally Judge, was a McDonald’s all-American before playing for Rutgers. He’s now playing professionally in Argentina.) Rosemary showed me Athel’s report card: A’s and B’s, with a single C (in biology; Athel told me that it irks him). Rosemary looked back on her slow slide into homelessness, and her long crawl out of it. “It’s not like I didn’t try — like all my life — but I needed support,” she said. Just as Community of Hope supported Rosemary, you can help support Community of Hope. Please make a tax-deductible donation by going to posthelpinghand.com. To give by mail, send a check, payable to “Community of Hope,” to: Community of Hope, Attn: Helping Hand, 4 Atlantic St. SW, Washington, D.C. 20032. Twitter: @johnkelly For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/johnkelly. |