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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 1, 1988)
umoi punojy Shelters help poor make ends meet By Desiree Kennon What do you think of when you hear the word homeless? Do you imagine an impoverished person searching through the garbage cans of a city? Maybe you visualize someone sleeping under a bridge or in a park. These are common scenes for many people, but the tragedy of being homeless goes far beyond these pictures. In 1986 sociology professor Dr. Ruth Schaffer and student Lauralee Phillips conducted a study about poverty in the Bryan-College Station area. They found that 40 percent of impoverished families cannot afford health insurance, nor can their incomes adequately cover food, clothing or utility bills. Thirty percent of these families have not, and cannot, receive any financial aid assistance. So what happens to these families? Some of these people turn to alcohol, or spouse or child abuse. In the worst cases, the family completely breaks apart. The Twin City Mission, in Bryan, is a shelter set up to aid families and individuals who find themselves victims of these type of situations. The mission has four programs available to people needing help. The family shelter program helps families who are having trouble finding permanent homes or jobs or who have other financial problems. The program provides one week of free shelter for the families. Twin City Mission also offers a therapeutic program to help homeless men. Some of these men are mentally disturbed or emotionally unstable, but most are alcoholics. Bob Good, executive director for the mission, says the men who come to the mission are unlike the alcoholics depicted on television commercials. “These men have no jobs, no family and no self-respect,” he says. “They have lived in the most vile places one could imagine. To be able to come to a place like the mission is a step up for these people, because this is as good as it will ever get for them. ” Good says the men’s shelter provides individuals with hot meals and a place to sleep for two days. After two days the person has the opportunity to live at the mission and receive a job working in the shelter. “The labor they do provides them with meaningful employment,” Good says. “It’s a job that is important to the mission, and it’s something that is important to them. They in turn don’t become a burden on the community, the county or the state. ” Good says the program keeps these men in a safe place. “They’re not dangerous, they would just be sleeping in doorways, panhandling or being found dead along some railroad tracks on a cold morning,” he says. Battered women and their dependent children can turn to Phoebe’s Home, a 30-day shelter sponsored by the mission. Director Liz Jackson says while a woman is staying in Phoebe’s Home, she can decide what to do about the situation in which she and her children live. “We help counsel the women and their children, so it is therapeutic,” Jackson says. “We also help them with leads on jobs and will even drive them to the interview. We drive them to doctor appointments or do whatever we can do to help ease the burden on these women.” Both Jackson and Good agree that, unlike the homeless-men program, Bryan-College Station does not have a program for homeless women. Good says that Phoebe’s Home gets a lot of inquiries from women who need a place to stay but have not been abused. “We want to provide the same type of shelter that we have for the men, ” Good says. “We want to teach these people a skill so that they can earn a decent living and get back into society. We don’t want the shelter to be like the flop houses in Houston. ” Good says they hope to establish a shelter for homeless women living in this area within the next year. In addition to providing a safe environment, they want to help the women regain their self-esteem and self-respect. Along with the rehabilitation, they hope to design a work program to help the women learn job skills and go back into the community. Another mission program, Sheltering Arms, is designed to help children who have been emotionally, physically and sexually abused. “We wake up to hundreds of kids each year brutalized by both natural and unnatural parents,” Good says. Many times parents are the reason children are homeless, Good says. Homeless children are often runaways or throwaways. “A throwaway child is someone whose parents say they don’t love the child anymore and (tell the child) to get out of the house, ” Good says. Kevin Wood, Sheltering Arms administrator, says people don’t understand that runaways are also considered homeless. Wood says the home environment drives the children Continued on page 11 11 .Thursday, Deip. 1,1988/At E»$e/Page 7