Scratch Beginnings_ Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream - Adam W. Shepard [18]
Two psychiatrists were also on board to help guests who might be suffering from a mental illness.
Special programs for veterans were organized with the Ralph Johnson Veterans Administration Medical Center downtown, one of the premier VA hospitals in the country.
And most importantly, each guest would be assigned to a social worker that would help us to identify what exactly had gone wrong in our lives and what type of plan we needed in order to return to a self-sufficient lifestyle. We would set goals and meet with our caseworker on a regular basis—weekly or biweekly—to monitor our progress.
The system came as a shock to me. I had never expected that it would be so complex and ambitious. I could tell early on that Crisis Ministries was not like the shelters where I had volunteered in the past or the shelters that I had heard about. They had an established regimen to aid its residents in getting out and on our own. They didn’t judge us for our fall into homelessness, but at the same time, they hated to see us in that position.
Noticeably absent, though, from the laundry list of offerings at Crisis Ministries were programs involving education. Through our caseworkers, and with the aid of the newly established Clemente Program, we could arrange to get our GED or enroll in the Associate’s Degree program at Trident Tech, but what about those people that didn’t understand the importance of such credentials, I wondered? Wasn’t a lack of education one reason that many people lagged behind in the first place? Later I learned that shelters like the Helping Up Mission in Baltimore mandate that enrollees are working on some form of education, and they have one of the lowest return rates of all the shelters in the country, so wouldn’t it be advantageous for Crisis Ministries to adopt a similar program?
After the group meeting, Ms. Evelyn met with each of us individually to discuss our situation and to assign us a caseworker. In my meeting with her, she gave me three pairs of socks, a water bottle, a towel, and a bar of soap. She also provided me with vouchers to get a state identification card free of charge, a discount bus card that I could use to ride the bus for 50¢ instead of $1.25, and a letter to give to the Department of Social Services, affirming my homelessness and allowing me to apply for programs such as food stamps. Then she handed me a coupon for the Goodwill store that I could exchange for two pairs of pants and two shirts.
I tried to tell her my story about my druggie mom and my alcoholic father, but she wasn’t interested. “Save it for your caseworker,” she told me as she signed a series of papers for me. It wasn’t her job to lend a therapeutic ear but rather to merely get me jump started in the right direction.
Ms. Evelyn keyed my essential information into the computer and then followed with a tutorial about meeting with my caseworker. Kazia, to whom I was assigned, was working on her master’s degree in social work at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. She made the ninety-minute commute to downtown Charleston every Wednesday afternoon to meet with her assigned shelter residents. That was the only opportunity I would have to meet with her each week. If I missed that time and Kazia felt that I was not making a concerted effort to better my situation, I could be evicted from the shelter for a period of time that she deemed appropriate.
After my meeting with Ms. Evelyn, I waited in the lobby for the nurse to call me for my TB test. I had the opportunity to speak with a gentleman in a wheelchair who was new to the shelter. He was also new to the wheelchair. Two weeks prior, he had been run over, literally, by a drunk driver while crossing the street in North Charleston. He had bruises and scrapes and scars on his arms and face, and a series of teeth were missing from his upper gum line. He offered to show me his badly mangled legs,