Putting a Face on the Problem

By Erin Wisdom, ewisdom@miconews.com

Kayleigh spends some quality time with her 2-year-old son at My Father’s House Community Services in Paola. The 21-year-old has lived at the homeless shelter for about a month. (Photo by Erin Wisdom / ewisdom@miconews.com)

Kim never planned to call Kansas home.

The 51-year-old former truck driver was just passing by Paola last summer when her car broke down, and while trying to repair it, she hurt her already bad back. She injured it to the point that her plan to move to Colorado and find another truck-driving job — after losing her last one — was no longer an option.

So Kim put all her possessions in storage in Osawatomie, and she waited. With no way to reach her destination, no ability to do the work she’d always done and no income other than a disability check, it was all she could do.

Then the flood came. By the time the waters receded, all she owned had been destroyed. Her TV and DVD player, her antiques from her mother and grandmother, her children’s birth certificates and baby photos — all ruined. It was more loss than she could put a price on.

Kim still doesn’t call Kansas home. But she doesn’t call anywhere else home, either.

“A whole line of situations, and I ended up homeless and here and hurt,” she said. “They were little things, but added up, they devastated my life. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Until she figures that out, Kim is staying at My Father’s House Community Services, 1004 N. Pearl St. in Paola. The homeless shelter currently houses about 25 people and has a waiting list, which speaks to the problem of homelessness in rural areas that many may not recognize but that Jay Preston, director of My Father’s House, knows to be a fact.

Since beginning the organization to offer shelter and services to the homeless in Miami and Linn counties a few years ago, Preston has become increasingly aware of just how prevalent homelessness is here.

He’s also become increasingly familiar with one of the most difficult realities characterizing homelessness in rural areas: The federal government doesn’t provide nearly as much funding for fighting it as it does for fighting homelessness in big cities, simply because small-town homelessness typically doesn’t fit the traditional definition of the condition.

But small towns do offer a certain advantage when it comes to helping the homeless, Preston noted.

“People here are willing to step up and take care of each other,” he said. “It’s just an issue of getting them to understand, first, that homelessness exists here and, second, that people fall into it for legitimate reasons — not because they’re not trying.”

Hidden homelessness

One of the main reasons people don’t realize how common homelessness is here, Preston said, is that it doesn’t look like they expect it to.

The homeless in rural areas typically don’t live on the streets. They don’t huddle under overpasses or sleep on heating grates or stand in long lines outside soup kitchens. Instead, they’re likely to live in their cars or camp out at a lake or hop from house to house, staying with friends or family but always in a state of transition rather than one of stability.

And often, they do it so discretely that no one in the outside world has a clue.

“In a small town, everyone knows you. There’s no opportunity to be anonymous,” Preston said. “And because there’s shame that comes with being homeless, people hide it.”

Jamie is one of these individuals whose situation doesn’t fit the picture of homelessness people expect to see, because she’s never lived on the streets. But at the same time, she hasn’t had a stable home since she was 15.

Now 22, Jamie was a freshman at Prairie View High School in La Cygne when she became pregnant with her first child. She left her parents’ home to move in with her boyfriend, and in the years since has suffered disabling injuries in a truck accident, lived with other boyfriends and had two more children.

If it weren’t for Destiny, Steven and Emma — who now are 6, 3 and almost 2 years old — Jamie might have continued going from place to place, never sure how long she’d be able to stay anywhere. Living without a home of her own wouldn’t have been such a source of anxiety, after all, if it hadn’t come with the threat of having her children taken from her.

“I need my life straight, and I need it straight now, before I lose my kids,” she said. “They’re the most important thing to me.”

Jamie moved into My Father’s House about a month ago in an effort to get the help she needs to provide a more stable life for her and her children. She’s taking parenting classes, preparing to get her General Educational Development diploma and applying to live in a subsidized apartment complex designed for people with disabilities.

It wasn’t easy moving out of her boyfriend’s place to try to build a life for herself, but Jamie knew that, finally, she had to do what was best for her.

“My boyfriend didn’t think it would be a good idea, but he was like, ‘Whatever, do what you want,’” she said. “And I said, ‘I will do what I want.’”

Stuck in a cycle

Another facet of homelessness that often comes into play in rural areas is a tendency for people to become stuck in cycles they can’t escape.

This is especially common for single mothers, Preston said, who have to arrange childcare in order to work and also often have to go into the city to find a job, which requires reliable transportation. If her car breaks down and she doesn’t have money to have it repaired, a woman can quickly find herself out of work, unable to pay her rent and without a home.

Kayleigh knows all about getting stuck in a cycle. Hers started when she was about 15 and ended with a 17-month prison sentence five years later. She was homeless through it all, hopping from house to house without money, food or any idea of where she’d stay from one month to the next.

Kayleigh, who is now 21, began her descent to homelessness when her parents separated. Not long after she moved from Paola to Kansas City with her mom, she began dating a 22- or 23-year-old man and left to live with him. Finding herself needing money and around older people who were involved in drugs, it was easy for her to fall into a lifestyle of drug use and drug dealing.

Leaving this unstable, anxiety-filled life when she went to prison last year might not have been so difficult for Kayleigh if she hadn’t had a baby to leave behind. Her son was 1 year old then, and she saw him only a few times during the year and a half she was behind bars.

“It was very hard,” Kayleigh said as she brushed away the tears beginning to shine in her eyes. “It was hard not knowing if he was OK or what toys he liked or how he was growing up.”

When she was released about a month ago, Kayleigh faced a new challenge: finding a job with a felony on her record. Even with a resolve to break the cycle of crime and homelessness she’d lived in for so long, she knew it wouldn’t be easy to find someone willing to take a chance on her.

She did find that, though, when she moved into My Father’s House shortly after being released from prison and was able to get a job at Burger King in Louisburg. She hopes to earn her GED diploma and move into an apartment to provide a safe life for her son, to just “be normal and do normal things.”

But even with these hopes, there’s always a heavy sense of concern.

Concern for her mom, who’s currently homeless and house-hopping, and for her five younger sisters, who are living with friends.

Concern for her newly reformed relationship with her 2-year-old, who cries every time she leaves a room.

And concern for herself and how little it might take to pull her back into her old habits.

But maybe all it takes to break the cycle is one good choice.

“I’ve always relied on other people,” Kayleigh said. “Now, I’ve chosen to do things on my own.”

State of mind

It makes sense to most people that having a physical disability could easily put someone in a position to become homeless. Preston noted, however, that many don’t realize how common it is for mental disabilities and psychological problems like bi-polar disorder, anxiety disorders and chronic depression to do the same thing.

“Mental health issues are a lot more common than people realize,” he said. “But I think we’re not to the point as a society that we view them to be as disabling as physical problems.”

Psychological issues played a major role in Teresa losing her home and much of everything else she owned.

The 38-year-old former Osawatomie resident and mother of three was working hard to support her family after her husband lost his job, and she was able to withstand the pressure until the day he lost his driver’s license, too. An alcoholic throughout their 13 years of marriage, he received his second driving-under-the-influence charge just when she’d thought things were getting better.

It was hard having to take her husband everywhere he needed to go when she was already responsible for herself and her children, who now are 13, 11 and 5 years old. The stress she felt shouldering all the responsibility for her family caused emotional and physical pain, and Teresa also had to deal with the realization that she and her husband had nothing in common anymore.

Eventually, she chose to deal with all of this by turning to drugs.

“I used them for all the anger and pain, and also to keep us together,” she said. “I tried doing anything to connect with him, even bad things.”

But as she tried to hold her relationship with her husband together, everything else in her life fell apart. On drugs, she couldn’t keep a job and continue to support her family. They were evicted from one house, then another, before coming to My Father’s House about a year ago.

About six months after arriving there, Teresa’s husband was arrested for not following his parole guidelines. They’ve since separated, and she’s taken steps to reclaim a stable life for herself and her children, including receiving counseling and attending a class that has taught her healthy tactics for coping with stress.

“I’m trying to work through the feelings I’ve bottled up, and I’ve learned how to not let my emotions control me,” she said. “I’ve also come to believe God loves me. That was the hardest thing, because I hadn’t had God in my life for a long time.”

Something else she hadn’t had for a long time was a belief that it wasn’t too late for her to pursue the career she’d wanted for years. But now, Teresa plans to take criminal justice classes in hopes of someday becoming a private investigator.

Although she still doesn’t have her own home, Teresa has come a long way from where she was a year ago. And with this progress, she’s also gained a perspective on homelessness that she wishes everyone had.

“I’m homeless. That’s my condition right now, but it doesn’t define who I am,” she said. “Homeless people are people like everyone else; they just don’t have a home.”