A Teen’s Perspective On Being Homeless…
This is from Courant.com:
Winter Lynn Kornfield, 13, left, and her sister, Gaia, live with their mother at Beth-El Center, a homeless shelter in Milford.
I was raised in New Jersey, Jackson, and lived there my whole life until I moved here when I was 11. A lot of bad things happened, but I'm learning how to put the past in my mind as a memory.
DYFS — they're like DCF here — tried taking us away from our mom when I was 9. They didn't succeed, but when I was 11, they took us away for nine days. They brought us to a weird foster home and the adults told us we'd never see our mom again.
When my mom won [custody], we were at school and she picked us up and the same day brought us up here to Milford, to her fiance's house. He's a nice person, but we just couldn't live there, so now we're here at the shelter and we're very happy.
Going to school and staying here at the shelter might be difficult for other people. For me, it's easier because I'm not going through the things that were happening before. It's more positive here, especially in our room.
Beth-El is, at times, noisy and it's kind of hard to study. When I can't concentrate, I ask my mom to bring me outside to the little area where the children don't usually go to play and it's really peaceful there and I can study, or we go to the green and after my studying I get to climb trees.
I have a lot of favorite subjects at school but my main favorite subject is art. I'm really good at it. I get to express my feelings in a fun and really cool way. I also like social studies because you get to learn a lot of history and things that have happened to our ancestors. Even if they're not technically my ancestors, they're our ancestors because we're all like one person. We all came from the same place.
I made the honor roll — second honors — all three terms this year. For me, it's a really big thing because I've never really had a chance to do that before because of everything that's happened. I'm very proud of myself. I've had to work very hard. I'd love to be a scientist, like I'd help the earth and study it. I'd also love to help children with their art. The school that's highest on my list is Yale University.
I'm not worrying as much as I did in New Jersey about what was going to happen to me. As long as the three of us are together, I'm perfectly fine.
Winter Lynn Kornfield, 13, left, and her sister, Gaia, live with their mother at Beth-El Center, a homeless shelter in Milford.
I was raised in New Jersey, Jackson, and lived there my whole life until I moved here when I was 11. A lot of bad things happened, but I'm learning how to put the past in my mind as a memory.
DYFS — they're like DCF here — tried taking us away from our mom when I was 9. They didn't succeed, but when I was 11, they took us away for nine days. They brought us to a weird foster home and the adults told us we'd never see our mom again.
When my mom won [custody], we were at school and she picked us up and the same day brought us up here to Milford, to her fiance's house. He's a nice person, but we just couldn't live there, so now we're here at the shelter and we're very happy.
Going to school and staying here at the shelter might be difficult for other people. For me, it's easier because I'm not going through the things that were happening before. It's more positive here, especially in our room.
Beth-El is, at times, noisy and it's kind of hard to study. When I can't concentrate, I ask my mom to bring me outside to the little area where the children don't usually go to play and it's really peaceful there and I can study, or we go to the green and after my studying I get to climb trees.
I have a lot of favorite subjects at school but my main favorite subject is art. I'm really good at it. I get to express my feelings in a fun and really cool way. I also like social studies because you get to learn a lot of history and things that have happened to our ancestors. Even if they're not technically my ancestors, they're our ancestors because we're all like one person. We all came from the same place.
I made the honor roll — second honors — all three terms this year. For me, it's a really big thing because I've never really had a chance to do that before because of everything that's happened. I'm very proud of myself. I've had to work very hard. I'd love to be a scientist, like I'd help the earth and study it. I'd also love to help children with their art. The school that's highest on my list is Yale University.
I'm not worrying as much as I did in New Jersey about what was going to happen to me. As long as the three of us are together, I'm perfectly fine.
posted by LA's Homeless Blog at
7:45 AM
1 Comments:
Being homeless myself for quite some time, I found out just how baddly homeless people are treated by none homeless people, and why so many are not in shelters (the nearest shelter to me was a 5 hour drive by car and I don't have a car!)
My family of 7 became homeless after a flood took away everything we owned and left my dad in a coma. My mom was a stay at home mom, who was disabled, but still took care of us kids.
My dad's hospital bills were more than $12,000 just for the life support machine that he was on, not including all the tests and treatments besides. In the end his medical bill topped 2 million dollars!
Without a house to live in anymore and with my dad no longer working because he was in a coma, we ended up homeless and living in a tent-thing made out of a tarp and cinderblocks, and we had to fight off a winter in Maine under that thing.
We were not eligible for any of the state programs that supposedly helped homeless people either.
Well, when you are homeless, it doesn't matter what happened or how you became homeless, because just the fact that you are homeless "brands" you as inferior and worthless and sets you up for all sorts of a abuse by "regular" people (non-homeless people). I had no idea people were so mean or that homeless people were being treated so shamelessly until my family became homeless. That was the worst year of my life and I don't ever want to have to go through anything like that again, and I wish that no one else had to go though it either.
You can find out more about what life was like for me while I was homeless here: http://www.squidoo.com/OnBeingHomeless
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