Residents applaud positivity, safety
SOUTH BEND, IN--When the woman, homeless and wandering the streets, turned up at the door last Christmas Eve, there was room at the Catholic Worker House. Carmen had been there before, in 2008, and when the disability checks that had helped her move out stopped coming, and the friend where she was staying was evicted, she found a bed on the third floor of the house near downtown South Bend.
“This is my second time around,” says Carmen, who has moved to a first-floor bedroom to save her knees from the stairs. She spends her nights in the Catholic Worker House and most of her days at St. Margaret’s House with other women in similar circumstances.
The House ministries provide complementary day-and-night services to women. At least three participants in the St. Margaret’s House day program, which opens at 8 a.m., have found lodging at the Catholic Worker House, where residents must be out between 8:30 a.m. and 5 p.m. “St. Margaret’s House is a wonderful place to go,” Carmen says, adding that the service offers food, clothing and supplies as well as helpful classes on such topics as budgeting and stress.
“I don’t visit anybody unless they’re positive,” she said. “St.Margaret’s is a safe place for me.”
Wanda, who lost three jobs and her house about five years ago, was on the street when she first heard about St. Margaret’s House in May.
“People kept saying ‘you need to go there and take a shower, get something to eat; it’s a nice place and the people are nice,’ ” she recalls. “I said ‘I’m going to go,’ and I did. They were right.”
Wanda was the keynote speaker at the St. Margaret’s House Fashioning Our Lives event last month, where Carmen was a model. Wanda’s story includes a predatory mortgage loan that ballooned while she lost her full-time job and two part-time restaurant jobs.
“After I lost my house, I had gone from people to people until I ran out of spaces to go,” she says. “I was on the street for about six weeks, sleeping in the park and stuff,” until a friend let her move into a building with no heat or water.
She moved into the Catholic Worker House this month.
“It’s truly a community,” Wanda says. “They welcome you into their home. They live there too. They trust us. I’m warm, I’m happy, I’m fed, I feel good. It’s fabulous, truthfully.”
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