Affordable Housing is Not Optional… Read this Compelling First-Person Account of a Homeless Mother and Daughter
Yesterday, the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless’ blog featured a guest blogger who had a pretty compelling story to tell. Here’s a quick snippet, but read her post in its entirety at WLCH’s blog.
. . . I grew up in the DC foster care system. I didn’t have an easy childhood, but I was always a good student (I even won the science fair two years). After my high school graduation, I went to medical assistant school and began working. Three months after I had my daughter in 2008, I found out that I had Multiple Sclerosis. My daughter’s father decided he couldn’t deal with the stress, so he opted out of our lives. I went to work and realized that I would get sick in spurts. My relapses would come suddenly and fiercely, sometimes a numb leg or numb arms, sometimes I would go blind, sometimes I wouldn’t be able to move at all. It started to affect my ability to keep a job, and I fell behind on my rent.
I first went to Virginia Williams Family Resource Center (FRC) in 2010 because I lost my apartment, but I was still employed. They gave me first month’s rent and security deposit, but I knew I would get sick again and that the short term assistance would not be enough to keep me from losing yet another apartment. I lost my job again because of my illness and I was evicted from my apartment shortly after that in the fall of 2011. My daughter and I house-hopped between our friends and family for almost two months, sleeping on couches and floors for as long as we could.
Finally, just before the New Year, we were placed in a hotel room on NY Avenue. I was grateful to have a bed to sleep on after so long. But now it’s been months and it feels like we’ve been forgotten. I don’t know what the rest of the shelter system is like, but when you’re in a hotel, you don’t talk to anyone, you don’t see anybody, you have no sense that anyone is working to help you. We’re just there. We’re just a number. I have not seen a caseworker since I got here.
Read the rest of Charmaine Walton’s story here.