Almost home book kevin ryan

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Almost Home Helping Kids Move from

Homelessness to Hope

kevin ryan and tina kelley

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Dedicated to the young people who struggle on the streets, and the loving adults who lift them up

The book is printed on acid-free paper.

Copyright © 2012 by Covenant House. All rights reserved Interior photos: © Timothy Ivy

The lines from “The Opening of Eyes,” from Songs for Coming Home, by David Whyte, are printed with permission from Many Rivers Press, http://www.davidwhyte.com, © Many Rivers Press, Langley, Washington.

Cover image: © Jan Sonnenmair

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Ryan, Kevin. Almost home : helping kids move from homelessness to hope / Kevin Ryan and Tina Kelley. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-1-118-23047-3 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-28698-2 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-28295-3 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-28403-2 ( ebk) 1. Homeless children—United States. 2. Homeless youth—United States. 3. Homeless children—Canada. 4. Homeless youth—Canada. I. Kelley, Tina. II. Title. HV4505.R798 2012 362.77’56920820973—dc23

2012017212

Printed in the United States of America

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iii

Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Foreword by Cory Booker xi

Preface: Years to Understand the Light by Kevin Ryan xvii

Preface: Help and the Homing Instinct by Tina Kelley xxiii

Introduction 1

1 A Son Walks Alone: Paulie’s Story 12

Arriving at Covenant House 21

The Costs of Not Caring 39

Homeless, but Graduating 42

2 A Survivor Facing Her Future: Muriel’s Story 46

Arriving at Covenant House 56

Helping Traffi cking Victims, Holding Exploiters Accountable 62

Fighting Back on Many Fronts 67

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iv C O N T E N T S

3 Moving Forward after Foster Care: Benjamin’s Story 72

Memories of Mistreatment 77

Working toward Mental Health 83

Arriving at Covenant House 88

Fixing Foster Care 107

4 A Homeless Teen Mother Reaching for a New Life: Creionna’s Story 115

Homelessness in New Orleans 120

Arriving at Covenant House 126

Help for Young Parents 138

5 A Teenager with Nowhere to Go and His Mentor: Keith’s and Jim’s Stories 153

Arriving at Covenant House 167

Keith’s Thoughts on the Meaning of a Mentor 171

Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg on Fostering Resilience through Mentoring 176

The Power of a Presence 178

6 Searching for Safety: Meagan’s Story 182

Arriving at Covenant House 191

Meagan on Her Moms and Her Future 197

Helping LGBTQ Youth 199

7 Separate Paths Uniting: Paulie Revisited 201

The Death of Decal 206

8 What You Can Do: Steps to Help Homeless Young People Thrive 210

Mentoring 210

Anti-Traffi cking Efforts 211

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C O N T E N T S v

Supporting LGBTQ Youth 212

Advocacy Work 213

In the Community 214

What You Can Do from Your Computer 216

On the Home Front 216

Keep Us Posted 217

To Learn More 217

Epilogue 219

Notes 221

Index 224

Photo gallery begins on page 143.

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vii

Acknowledgments

We could never have written this book without the openness and generosity of the six young people who told us their life stories. They spent hundreds of hours walking and talking with us for much of the past three years, and we are deeply grateful. Their stories would have been far different without the devotion and dedication of the men and women who cared for them and about them, day in and day out, including the counselors and other staff members of Covenant House who also shared their time and insights with us.

We heard in the voices of so many kids a burgeoning hope that is the legacy of Sister Mary Rose McGeady, D.C., and Jim Harnett, who spent most of their lives fi ghting for homeless and forgotten young people. They kept company with those who lit the way forward as stewards of this movement to end the exploitation and suffering of young people, including Dorothy McGuinness, Joan Lambert, Bob Cardany, Bruce Henry, Sister Tricia Cruise, Pat Connors, Priscilla and Dick Marconi, Bill and Peggy Montgoris, L. Edward and Irene Shaw, Ralph and Jane Pfeiffer, Dick and Priscilla Schmeelk, Brian D. McAuley, and Denis P. Coleman.

We hold great esteem for men and women across Canada and the United States who devote part of their lives to loving other people’s children and giving them alternatives to street life. This is

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viii A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

especially true for the Covenant House staff, who do diffi cult and incredible work, every day of the year.

Our agent, Andrew Blauner, one of our fi rst and most impor- tant yay-sayers, buoyed us when we needed it, and Tom Miller, our editor at Wiley, believed in this project in a way that touched us deeply. We are beyond grateful to them. C. Allen Parker, Esq., Paul Saunders, Esq., Stuart Gold, Esq., and their colleagues at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and the constant, patient, and wise John Ducoff, Esq., provided us expert legal advice and were advocates of the fi rst order for our work. Liz Lewis, Jayne Bigelsen, Mary Ann Simulinas, Elisabeth Lean, Molly Ladd, and the Covenant House Institute provided research assistance; Patrice Ingra juggled sched- ules with inimitable good humor; and it’s safe to say we were each blessed with a coauthor of great good cheer and endurance.

We are deeply indebted to the experts who shared their origi- nal research and wisdom with us, from across two countries, including those who are mentioned in these pages and so many others—experts in the kids we write about; experts in the care of the mind, the heart, and the spirit; and experts in wise policies for the benefi t of young people. Thanks for your insights and for helping us reach the conclusions we did.

Across Canada and the United States, Covenant House executive directors opened our eyes to the suffering of homeless young people in their states and provinces, and we are thankful to each of them: Allison Ashe in Georgia, Dan Brannen in the District of Columbia, Ruth daCosta and Bruce Rivers in Toronto, Deirdre Cronin in Alaska, Jim Gress in Florida, Cordella Hill in Pennsylvania, Sam Joseph in Michigan, Jim Kelly in Louisiana, Jerry Kilbane and Jim White in New York, George Lozano in California, Ronda G. Robinson in Texas, Jill Rottmann in New Jersey, Krista Thompson in Vancouver, and Sue Wagener in Missouri.

We developed an abiding esteem for the great human rights activists who inspired us in their fi ght against child traffi cking, including Menin Capellin, Carolina Escobar Sarti, Maria Jose

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A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S ix

Arguello, Sofi a Almazan, Hugh Organ Sr., Nancy Brown, Norma Ramos, Andrea Powell, and Rachel Lloyd.

Thanks to Tyler Perry, Jon Bon Jovi, Natalie Grant, and Laura Bush, who helped us over the last three years to reach so many more kids, and to Cory Booker for his passion and vision.

We are grateful to our friend Jim Burke, who generously gave us a peaceful place to write and meet in the summer of 2011, and to the talented and good-humored Timothy Ivy, whose photo- graphs reveal the heart and power of the special young people of Covenant House in New York.

We are thankful to the board of Covenant House International: Phil Andryc, Barbara P. Bush, Andrew P. Bustillo, John F. Byren, Brian M. Cashman, Paul A. Danforth, Mark J. Hennessy, Capathia Y. Jenkins, Tracy S. Jones-Walker, Drew A. Katz, Janet M. Keating, Thomas M. McGee, Brian T. “BT” McNicholl, Anne M. Milgram, Karla Mosley, Liz Murray, John C. Pescatore, Brother Raymond Sobocinski, Thomas D. Woods, and Strauss Zelnick. And to the board members of Covenant Houses across Canada and the United States, thank you for your dedication to creating opportu- nities for children and youth.

To the millions of special people who have contributed to the Covenant House movement, believing that every young person deserves the opportunity to shine, regardless of the circumstances of their birth, thank you. Huge thanks to our Broadway friends for inspiring us with their time, talent, and dedication to homeless young people, especially the multitalented Neil Berg and Rita Harvey, John Asselta, Dan Walker, Carter Calvert and Roger Cohen, Lawrence Clayton, Natalie Toro, Rob Evan, Danny Zolli, Ron Bohmer and Sandra Joseph, Craig Schulman, Al Greene, and our beloved Capathia.

We thank our friends and family who provided invalu- able feedback, guidance, and moral support: Liz Alanis, Molly Armstrong, Neela Banerjee, Lynn and Tom Benediktsson, Elaine Bennett, Abraham Bergman, Alison Brosnan, Lou Carlozo, Lisa Chang, Eileen Crummy, Meredith Fabian, Dan Froomkin, Scott

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x A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

Hamilton, Peggy Healy ( abrazos ), Tom Kennedy, Taisha Kullman, Carlette Mack, Frith Maier, Rylee Maloles, Tom Manning, Dan McCarthy, Peggy McHale, Diane Milan, Robin Nagle, Barbara, Jerry, and Livia Newman, John O’Brien, Karl Pettijohn, Jeanne Pinder, Susan Plum (our tireless friend and reader), Ruben Porras, Tom Potenza, Susan Rabiner, Lee Roberts, Vera Roche, Tim Ryan, Emily Schifrin, Lauren Simonds, Lisa Taylor, Joan Smyth, Ruth Warner, Laura Weinberg, Richard Wexler—and Jill, Joan, and John again, for their many readings and generous input. We know both Ann Hoelle and Frank Kelley were there in spirit throughout.

To people who extended their hospitality during our travels, deep gratitude: Deirdre and Rob Cronin, Alison Kear, Mike Mills, Kevin Kerr, Roberta Degenhardt, Owen Ryan and Trevor McLaren, Al Gough and Beth Corets, Bill and Peggy Roe, Fred Weil and Kayo, Rio and Kento, Diane and Reilly Gillette, and Neela, and Karl again.

To the Ryans: Clare, Dan, Liam, John, Nora, Maggie, and Maeve; home will always be wherever you are. Thanks for happily mak- ing the Covenant House movement so much a part of our life. A special smile for Maeve for keeping it real when relaying exactly what the breeze says to the trees on a winding river in Westport. To Jim and Eileen Ryan, whose big shoulders and bigger hearts carried their sons, and to my brothers, much love, always. And a special thanks to Ellie Boddie and Joe and Kathleen Neitzey for countless sacrifi ces in the name of family. Most of all, to Clare, who strummed her guitar to the music of Paul McCartney, James Taylor, and the Indigo Girls during many late-night (re)writing ses- sions; you’ve multiplied life by the power of two.

To Kate and Drew Newman, who were patient when deadlines always landed smack at the end of vacations: a ton of IOUs and much gratitude. To Tish Kelley, who always encouraged the pur- suit of dreams: love, thanks, and a good long laugh about it all. To Pete, who heard and read these stories many times over, asked all the right questions, and believed in just the right ways: an honorary byline and many hugs.

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xi

Foreword —Cory Booker,

Mayor of Newark, New Jersey

I’ve learned that real heroes usually aren’t the kind of people you read about in newspapers or see on TV. Real heroes are usually the ones concerned with the least glamorous of things. In fact, I’ve come to believe strongly that the most heroic or biggest thing we can do in any day is a small act of kindness, decency, or love. What frustrates me is that so often we allow our inability to do the big things to undermine our determination to do the small things, those acts of kindness, decency, and love that in their aggregate over days, weeks, and years make powerful change.

My parents raised me to know this. They raised me to under- stand that I was the result of a vast and profound conspiracy of love. My father, for example, was born poor. In fact, he jokes now that he wasn’t born poor, he was born “po”—he couldn’t afford the other two letters. He was born to a single mother who couldn’t take care of him, and after his grandmother couldn’t take care of him either, it was the kindness and love of strangers that stabilized his life and gave him a foundation to eventually head off to college. This past Thanksgiving as my family was going around the table saying what we were thankful for, my father got a little emotional talking about his childhood and how people whose names he

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xii F O R E W O R D

couldn’t even remember helped him. He talked about how when he was college-age, people reached out and gave him dollar bills to ensure he could afford his fi rst semester’s tuition.

Time and time again, my parents reminded me that there were thousands of people over numerous generations who did for my family and our ancestors. All that I have now is the result not only of famous people from history, but mostly of ordinary Americans who showed extraordinary kindness—small acts that were not required of them but that they just did . I am proud of that part of our American history. I am proud that although I don’t know their names, there were so many people who just did: they mentored and marched, they served and sacrifi ced, they loved.

We in this nation drink deeply from wells of freedom and liberty that we did not dig; we eat from lavish banquet tables that were prepared for us by our common ancestors. And we can either sit back and consume all that has been placed before us, or we can choose to remember. We may not remember names or dates, but we can remember this spirit, that soulfulness, the conspiracy of love that so shaped our nation and experiences. And more than remem- ber, we can metabolize our blessings and keep the conspiracy alive.

In Newark, I often get to witness people who are the modern- day manifestation of this spirit of humility and service. I encounter and work with people who are focused on the least glamorous of things and yet make some of the most profound differences in our city. In fact, I am proud that the spirit that took my father, from a “po” boy without a home, to a college graduate, IBM executive, and even father of two children is alive and well.

Three blocks away from City Hall is a place called Covenant House. The people there work with youth, and I believe they see in each one the same potential, promise, dignity, and hope that people saw when they looked at my dad back in the 1940s and 1950s. They serve homeless youth, but I actually think that through what they do, they serve us all.

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F O R E W O R D xiii

They do the wonderfully unglamorous things; they perform signifi cant and unyielding small acts of kindness, decency, and love. They empower lives and change destinies. They know that it actually doesn’t take all that much to keep a young life from veer- ing far off track.

In the stories you’ll fi nd in this book, there are several cross- roads, where a kid’s fate turns on the next encounter: will a kind person come along, or will it be a mugger, or a hater, or worse? Sometimes it’s an elderly couple who give a kid a lift to a homeless shelter. Sometimes it’s a counselor who says, “You look like you need to talk.” Sometimes it’s a barber who sees potential and hires someone fresh out of jail, lending him tools of the trade; or it’s a friend’s mom who lets a kid crash in the guest room for a couple weeks. Sometimes it’s a coach or a teacher or a volunteer who provides the belief and encouragement that lights a fi re in a young heart. None of these actions cost the grownups all that much, but each act of kindness and love from a humble hero can form a turn- ing point for a kid who needs direction.

At Covenant House, the stakes are higher than at many other places. Covenant House workers have one main goal: to love kids the world too often calls unlovable; they want to keep the conspir- acy of love alive for everyone, to ensure that no one is left without. It’s not always easy work, but they try hard to bring open and lov- ing hearts to kids who, often, don’t believe that adults can possibly care. No one has before, so why should some stranger start now?

I’ve encountered other disadvantaged young people in my travels; I’ve seen their uncertainty, or worse, the way their eyes seem to shut down in the face of poverty and hopelessness. But at Covenant House, I see enthusiasm in the eyes of the young people, their hope, and how they know big things are possible for them.

It’s the ones who arrive at the shelter who are, in some ways, lucky and the ones most likely to succeed, the ones most likely to

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xiv F O R E W O R D

contribute to the well-being and strength of all of us. By defi ni- tion, they care enough about their future and their safety to come in from the dangers of their homes or the street. Their instinct for self-preservation hasn’t been pummeled out of them yet. Some have heard about the shelter through a friend or a family member, which means they may have a social network in place.

It’s the isolated, defeated kids, the kids in cities and towns without youth shelters, who make me worry—they don’t have any- where to make a home or fi nd a community of support. They’re the ones who are most vulnerable to the dangers of the streets.

I’ve seen too many of our kids, young and uncertain, wonder- ing if they will ever have a fair shot at attaining their dreams. They wonder if the world is a place that will welcome them or smack them down—again.

Fortunately there are many ways grownups can help, many ways our small acts can make big differences. We can advocate for homeless kids, wherever they are, and we can simply become more aware by reading up on ways to prevent youth homelessness, such as those described in this book.

I am lucky. I had a father and mother who provided me a home; I had a father who had a community that would not let him fail when he was young. And we all encountered a world where we were taught that we had worth, not one that made us feel worthless.

Too many Covenant House kids grow up without any of those blessings. They get mad at the world, and at the people who have hurt them. They have what Kevin Ryan calls “dynamite in their stomachs,” an emotional storm that can be calmed by love or hope, but only if they fi nd it.

I have a stubborn faith in us as a community and nation. I believe that we can give every kid these basics: a feeling of worth, a home, and a pathway to advance their dreams. We can break the cycle of despair and hopelessness kids can get caught in. In fact it

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F O R E W O R D xv

is not a question of can we—it is a question of will we. I believe, collectively, that we will break the cycle of poverty and homeless- ness. Covenant House has a mighty recipe for doing that: uncon- ditional respect and love, help with schooling and fi nding jobs and apartments, assistance with mental and physical health needs, and a shared belief in our children’s future and their ability to follow their dreams.

We can’t lose a generation to homelessness. With the loss of those children, we would lose all they could contribute to strengthening our communities. That doesn’t have to happen. It can’t happen, not on our watch. Generations to come depend on our success.

I know that those folks who helped my dad may not have imag- ined my brother, me, and our generation, but their conspiracy of love back then helped us to serve, give, and love now. Let’s keep the conspiracy going and make real on the promise of our nation that our children speak of every single day in a chorus of conviction, when they say those last six words of the pledge: With Liberty and Justice for All.

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xvii

Preface Years to Understand the Light

—Kevin Ryan

I came to New York City in the fall of 1992 as a newly minted lawyer fresh from Georgetown Law Center, hoping to save the world and help homeless and runaway youth. My charge was to provide legal aid to homeless young people in family court, housing court, or any of the civil venues that overfl owed with poor people.

I arrived at Covenant House, which this year celebrates its forti- eth anniversary, just as the dust was settling from the worst scandal to hit an American charity in many years. Truth is, there wasn’t a long line of applicants eager to work at Covenant House back then. In 1989, Covenant House’s founder, Father Bruce Ritter, had been accused of having sexual relationships with several young people at the shelter, of keeping a secret trust fund, and of further fi nancial improprieties. He was never charged with a crime, but he stepped down as head of the agency in February 1990. That was shortly before the Manhattan district attorney said he would not bring criminal charges against Father Ritter. A report commissioned by Covenant House’s Board of Directors described “cumulative evidence . . . supporting the allegations of sexual misconduct” and added, “Father Ritter exercised unacceptably poor judgment in his relations with certain residents.” The report, supervised by a former

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New York City police commissioner, concluded, “[I]f Father Ritter had not resigned, the termination of the relationship between him and Covenant House would have been required.”

With Covenant House’s future hanging in the balance, the Board of Directors hired a new president, a forceful social worker and Roman Catholic nun, to save the day, and that she did. Sister Mary Rose McGeady arrived in 1990, clear-eyed about the task before her: thousands of staff members, volunteers, and donors felt betrayed, curtailing their support of Covenant House just as the economic recession of the early 1990s caused a surge in teen homelessness. She implemented rigorous new standards of trans- parency and accountability that the state attorney general had insisted on, and she spent the fi rst several years restoring confi - dence in the charity. Thanks to her work, after a free fall in dona- tions in 1990, charitable contributions to the agency grew again, allowing her to more than double the number of Covenant Houses in the United States, Canada, and Latin America.

Unlike most of Covenant House’s supporters at that time, I had not learned about homeless teenagers from Father Ritter or Sister Mary Rose. My tutor was a young woman named Clare, whom I knew from my undergraduate days at Catholic University and who had decided to become a full-time volunteer at Covenant House in New Orleans after graduation. I was so touched by the ways the isolated young people of the French Quarter inhabited her heart, I signed up for a tour of duty myself and soon resolved to make it part of my life’s mission or, more accurately, our life’s mission. By the time I fi nished law school, Clare and I were married and had an infant son.

Covenant House in New York City was a revelation to me. I had never dined with teenagers grappling with despair, until that Thanksgiving when I met three boys who had just learned at our health center that they had tested positive for HIV and were sing- ing bits of pop songs they wanted played at their funerals. I had no idea that some fi fteen- and sixteen-year-olds endured serial

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rapes for the benefi t of corner pimps, until I met them in the shelter that fi rst Christmas, two of them pregnant. I just didn’t realize so many young people were homeless and alone. I did not understand that children—in real life, as opposed to in the movies—were ever stolen from their families, forced into servi- tude, and driven to life on the streets. That is, until I met Binnie. She was the fi rst teenager who asked for my help at Covenant House, back in 1992. Picked up by the Port Authority Police, she was brought to Covenant House in a puddle of tears. Reeking of dirt and urine, she was shy, anxious, full of fear, and unable to hold her head up.

Lost in her misery, Binnie was a slight fi gure, eyes bloodshot from crying, and for good reason. As a young teenager, she had been taken from her home by extended family members when her mother fell ill. They withdrew her from school, forced her to do all of the family’s cooking and cleaning, and forbade her to leave the house. By the time she was sixteen, her family had offered her up to the son of a powerful neighbor, who repeatedly raped her. She escaped one night, made her way to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, and scavenged for food in the trash cans, sleeping for more than a week among the terminals until the police found her and brought her to Covenant House.

Binnie’s life allowed me to confront human suffering in a new way. Yet even as the white-hot spotlight of her reality illuminated dark corners for me, I still could not see the fullness of her life. I did not know it at the time, but much like the Alaskan halibut caught by Paulie Robbins, whose story inspired me and broke my heart during the reporting for this book, I was developing a blind spot at Covenant House. The halibut has two eyes on one cheek, and it is unable to see half the world. I was just like that, blind to the other side of the bridge where the kids were heading. I came to know mostly the darkness and the shadows, and it would be years before I began to understand the light.

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Then one day I ran into Binnie at a diner in midtown Manhattan. She was almost unrecognizable, though she had not gained more than fi ve pounds or grown an inch since I met her. I remembered her as a hunched teenager, but now she was a tall young woman in her early twenties, poised and smiling, head held high. She wore a bright-blue waitress dress with a white apron, and her face glowed. She told me about her determination to become a registered nurse and work in a hospital. The diner salary helped pay her way through nursing school, so she did not need to rely on loans. She was dating a boy she had met at church, and he was kind and loving. She said she was happy in this new life. I told her she was amazing.

Whether or not she knew it at the time, Binnie planted a seed that sparked a handful of new questions for me as I walked back to the shelter.

How could a young person, abandoned by everyone around her and left to sleep in an airport, go on to dedicate her life to others as a nurse? How do young people transcend the sort of vio- lence and rejection that overshadowed Binnie’s childhood? How do kids prosper after suffering alone on the streets for months, sometimes years? How could travelers pass by that heap of a girl sleeping at JFK airport without noticing her? And when they do notice young people like her, how can they help?

The best answers, of course, lay in the lives of the young people themselves and in the acts of compassion by complete strangers that inspire transformation. I cowrote this book to fi nd these answers, tell these stories, and, I hope, encourage people of goodwill to believe they can make a difference in the lives of young homeless people, helping them on their way to a brighter future.

In the darkness, inspiration is not merely a fl ashlight; it is the oxygen that keeps us breathing. I have seen it time and again, starting with the many years I worked with homeless, runaway, and traffi cked youth at Covenant House. But this is not limited

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P R E F A C E xxi

to Covenant House. I spent seven years working to reform child protection systems and helping to launch a global support pro- gram with the United Nations to reduce malaria deaths, which at the time claimed more than 1 million lives a year, mostly African children. When I returned to head Covenant House in 2009, I did so savoring the optimism and determination of the men and the women who had blazed trails during these years, achieving signifi - cant improvements in New Jersey’s child welfare system and stun- ning reductions in malaria mortality in Africa. My colleagues sent me back to Covenant House with a gift: the belief that anything is possible if people are inspired to make it so.

Less than a year ago, I received a note from Binnie, now a mother to three young children and a nurse in the pediatric inten- sive care unit at a top hospital. “My dear Kevin,” she wrote, “I hope you had a very good Thanksgiving with all the children. We had a very nice day here. I have so many things to be grateful for, something I never forget when I see all the sick little ones here at the hospital.” Times were tight, she said, because her husband was looking for work, but she and her family had all that they needed, and she was sending fi fty dollars to buy a warm meal for children at Covenant House.

“I hope it helps,” she signed off. It did, in more ways than one. I hope her story and the stories of young people like her remind us that we can change the world, one bold kindness at a time.

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xxiii

Preface Help and the Homing Instinct

—Tina Kelley

When Kevin spoke about his desire to coauthor a book about home- less kids, it sounded like a dream job. The challenges inherent in this project remind me a bit of those I found in writing 121 “Portraits of Grief” at the New York Times , short descriptions of the people silenced forever on September 11, 2001. How do you present a multifaceted life in a way that honors it most authentically? How can you write about searing loss—of life, of innocence, of child- hood—while still inviting people in to read more, to look through the pain and fi nd common ground? Our mission was to introduce some exceptional young people so that readers could feel at home with them, understand their stories, and know them by name, not as “those kids,” a phrase that seldom leads anywhere good.

I had volunteered at the Covenant House shelter in New York City in the late 1980s and admired the courage of its residents then. Now, as the young people in this book welcomed me into their stories, they convinced me of the commonalities among us all. We all wanted to go to the prom, we all love our music, we all have shaken our heads at grownups, and we all have had people who believe in us.

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xxiv P R E F A C E

Yet the mettle of these six young adults—Paulie, Muriel, Benjamin, Creionna, Keith, and Meagan—has been tempered by the sickness in their homes and the greed of their exploiters. I wondered how on earth I would have made it through the adversity they faced as babies or toddlers or young children, through no moral failing of their own. Those circumstances, which might well have fl attened me, often left them vilifi ed and victimized, but here they were, speaking frankly, often smiling. I felt as if I were interviewing marathon runners, while I had never even jogged around the block.

During my decade at the Times , I wrote many stories about controversies involving marginalized or voiceless individuals, sto- ries on polarized communities and courageous struggles against popular opinion. I reported on the health problems of a Native American tribe living near a Superfund site; a transgender voca- tional school principal in a rural town; and the lives of children waiting to be adopted out of foster care. I also covered Kevin’s efforts to reform New Jersey’s troubled child welfare system, when he was the statewide child advocate and then the commissioner of the Department of Children and Families. All of these arti- cles, I see now, involved people whose sense of home had been severely shaken.

I never knew how much home mattered to kids who had dan- gerous family lives. I used to think children would be glad to land in a safe and friendly foster home, where they could expect an end to the beatings and careless insults. From working on this book, though, I see that the pull of home, even a scary and sadistic one, is deeply ingrained in us all.

Slowly, I came to understand why Benjamin, when he was four, would try to cross a four-lane road to return to the mother who had burned him—to him, she was also the source of the fi rst comfort he had ever known, and he hoped beyond hope that she would comfort him again. I was amazed by the forgiveness and generosity Meagan showed to her family, who had kicked her to the curb. And

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P R E F A C E xxv

Keith startled me when he turned the other cheek to his mother, who, he was told, had killed his father and then abandoned her three tiny sons. I remembered the philosopher Blaise Pascal, who wrote, “The heart has reasons that reason knows nothing of.”

It is hard to spend time with young people in Covenant House without fuming about and grieving for their parents. Certainly, we hear more of the kid’s side of the story, not the details of a mother’s frustrations over a broken curfew or a father’s anger about skipped school. But to hear a child talk about a parent’s cruelty stretches the limits of compassion.

It helps to remember that the parents, too, are God’s children, God’s broken children, perhaps, but full of their own dreams, regrets, talents, missteps, and humanity as well. What went wrong to make them hear voices in their heads? What demons were they fl eeing, what memories were they reenacting when they hit and hurt their children so deeply?

Many Covenant House kids carry snapshots of themselves as little ones, and these can be more painful to see than any report in a case fi le. Here is a chubby, pony-tailed Creionna—isn’t there a way to wave a wand and give this toddler the future she deserves? Here’s a picture of Paulie, catching halibut in Alaska, before most of the beatings, before his family imploded, before he quit school. His eyes show all of the promise of a kid who is smart enough to earn an equivalency diploma after attending only a few months of high school. If only someone had stepped in when these kids were young, to give them the right kind of love and attention to help them fl ourish! But that didn’t happen.

Jim White, who runs one of our largest Covenant Houses, in New York City, says in this book, “Sometimes we run and we run, and only home can make us whole. We have to turn back and make peace in order to move forward.” A true home, serving as both springboard and anchor, has been stolen from the kids in this book, but somehow they have transcended that defi cit.

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xxvi P R E F A C E

They survive. They start to thrive, building their own new lives and new relationships, with so little preparation and modeling from their earlier years. With the generous gift of their time and explanations, these three young men and three young women at the heart of our book, and the adults who have guided them, have helped me see that they are, in a word, crucial. So are their stories.

As I researched more about homeless young people, I saw how they try to fl y under the radar, keeping themselves invisible. Many of us don’t notice homeless young people at all. We walk past street musicians or kids asking for spare change, not thinking twice when we see a teenager leaning against a bus station wall. Kids like them sit next to us on the subway or fold our clothes at the Gap, yet their secret strengths, their humor and hopefulness, remain hidden.

They don’t want us to know they have nowhere to go. The advocacy community has found it nearly impossible to obtain an accurate count of homeless young people, in part because they fi nd it safer and less embarrassing to hide. Homeless kids tend to stay with friends, disappear into the woods or the alleys, and gen- erally avoid attention, to steer clear of the people who might use, rob, or harm them. Some don’t want to be sent to foster care. Some are ashamed of their unwashed bodies and ill-fi tting clothes, while they live off scraps and try to make it to school or work. Those who are being prostituted are kept hidden by their exploiters and made to lie about their age if stopped by the police. That’s all the more reason their journeys must be understood.

What is lost as these young people have gone unnoticed? It’s hard to help someone if you don’t know he or she exists. It’s hard for these kids to exist, literally, if more people don’t help. And with a little help and hope received in times of crisis, they can have the indepen- dent and healthy lives they deserve. My wish is that the young people in this book and the many more whom Covenant House serves can fi nd a home in your heart and, with the help of others like you, a lov- ing home of their own, at last.

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1

Introduction

Homeless young people largely remain invisible, except to the strangers who step forward to offer a hand and, in doing so, change their world. This book describes the courage of six tena- cious young people across North America, but it is just as much about the adults who gave them a chance—sometimes working within Covenant House, sometimes not. They look rather average: a New Orleans cook who has spent her life feeding other women’s children; a New Jersey executive searching for a deeper meaning to life; an Alaskan single mother battling to keep hope alive after her husband leaves; a Vancouver nun at war with traffi ckers and pimps; a Texas football family, scooping up a new son from the ruins of a violent childhood; and the social workers, foster parents, and friends around the United States and Canada who care for children who have nowhere to go. They may not have trophies on their man- tels for it, but they have each helped guide a young person into the great promise of his or her life.

For the last forty years, there’s been no shortage of stories to be found at Covenant House, the largest charity of its kind in the Americas helping homeless, runaway, and traffi cked children and

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2 A L M O S T H O M E

youth. Each night about thirteen hundred kids stay at the char- ity’s shelters in the United States and Canada, and each young person could weave a compelling narrative, though few such sto- ries are ever heard by a large audience. Covenant House shel- ters help kids in Anchorage, Atlanta, Atlantic City, Detroit, Fort Lauderdale, Houston, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York City, Newark, Oakland, Orlando, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Toronto, Vancouver, and Washington, D.C. Each year Covenant House shelters more than eleven thousand youth, most between six- teen and twenty-one, and it reaches more than fi fty-six thousand, including those who are helped by its crisis hotline and outreach vans that search the streets and alleys of dangerous neighborhoods, looking for kids in need. In New Jersey, Covenant House provides shelter for young mothers in Elizabeth and for young people with mental health issues in Montclair, with plans for a storefront open- ing in Camden and outreach efforts under way in Jersey City and Asbury Park.

Beyond the United States and Canada, each night Covenant House also takes care of an additional four hundred younger chil- dren, including many traffi cking survivors, in safe houses and shel- ters in Managua, Nicaragua; Tegucigalpa, Honduras; Guatemala City, Guatemala; and Mexico City, Mexico. Covenant House is known in these countries as Casa Alianza, and this extraordinary human rights work across Latin America merits a book of its own; stay tuned. This book focuses on the experiences of homeless chil- dren and youth in the United States and Canada.

Each year as many as two million young people in the United States face an episode of homelessness; in Canada, an estimated sixty-fi ve thousand young people are homeless. While milk cartons have shown the faces of missing kids whose parents are pan- icked and heartsick over their absence, who looks for the adoles- cents who get kicked out of their homes and land in the streets? More than half of the unaccompanied young people interviewed

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I N T R O D U C T I O N 3

by the Family and Youth Services Bureau of the United States Administration for Children and Families said their parents either told them to leave home or knew they were leaving and didn’t care. These kids are lonesome and low on resources, needing a room to sleep in, food for breakfast, and a sympathetic ear.

Almost 40 percent of homeless people in the United States are under eighteen. Many live with at least one parent, but some young people become homeless when they believe the streets offer a safer alternative to abusive, drug-dependent, or mentally ill fami- lies. Some never had a consistent home, because they were tossed through the foster care system, never adopted, then left alone at age eighteen. Some are kicked out of their homes right after telling their parents they are gay or pregnant, and some are considered old enough to make it on their own when an extra mouth to feed is too expensive or when their mental health issues cause too much trouble. In any case, the myth of the star-struck adolescent who runs away to Hollywood or Times Square to fi nd a glamorous new life is largely out of date. Young people too often run away from something awful, not toward something hopeful.

Recently, during the worst U.S. recession since the Great Depression, their chances of fi nding work and an affordable apart- ment are slim at best. According to a February report from the Pew Research Center, the percentage of employed young adults ages eighteen to twenty-four fell from 62.4 in 2007 to 54.3 in 2011, the lowest since such fi gures were fi rst gathered in 1948. Calls from homeless youth to the National Runaway Switchboard increased 5 percent since 2011, 50 percent since 2009, and 80 percent since 2002.

It takes courage or desperation to swallow enough fear, pride, and adolescent invincibility to come through the doors of one of Covenant House’s shelters. The young people are a varied group, but they have all been sorely tested. Only 41 percent have a high school diploma. In a recent study of fi ve representative shelters

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4 A L M O S T H O M E

by the Covenant House Institute, the organization’s research arm, 40 percent of the kids had been in foster care or another institu- tional setting, 38 percent had experienced physical abuse, and 40 percent of the teenage girls and young women had been sexually abused. Almost 80 percent of the young people were unemployed, 63 percent lacked health insurance, and more than a quarter had been hospitalized for depression, anxiety, or other mental health issues. More than half came from a family where someone used drugs regularly. Many of the kids have been told, over and over until it echoes in their heads like a voice of their own, that they are worthless and will never amount to anything.

Yet there is one main reason most of them have no place to stay: their parents or guardians left them, discarded them, or abused them, physically, sexually, and/or emotionally, further stacking the odds against them. Based on decades of research, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente’s Health Appraisal Clinic in San Diego describe nine adverse childhood experiences that harm young people’s long-term health and well-being, including emotional or physical neglect; losing a parent; physical, sexual, or emotional abuse; witnessing violence against their mother; and having a family member who is incarcerated, mentally ill, or an addict. Young people who have had such experiences have greater chances of becoming teen parents, being hospitalized for a mental disorder, and suffering from a broad variety of physical problems later in life, including miscarriage, stroke, and heart disease. The damage caused by such childhood experiences is cumulative, with the risk of health problems and heartache in adulthood increasing with each additional childhood hardship. Most of the young people in this book have survived at least fi ve such diffi cult events, through no fault of their own.

Despite all of the challenges and dangers they have faced, many homeless youth yearn for home and for their families. Their homing instinct can be the animating force in their lives, a call

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I N T R O D U C T I O N 5

from deep within the cells, leading them backward, sometimes at their peril. It is part of the psychology of children to blame them- selves for whatever goes wrong in their families and to want to repair it. That desire, no matter how irrational, can drive a young person to desperate and at times dangerous feats. Paulie’s family disintegrated around him when he turned thirteen, but he chased its vestiges on long bus rides, across time zones and national boundaries. Creionna’s home was so dreary and loveless that she escaped, before she was quite ready, to build a family of her own. Muriel blamed herself for her father’s departure from her family and sought home in the center of a loveless human traffi cking ring.

Covenant House and youth shelters across North and Central America can become a bridge forward for young people who have nowhere to go. Our message to kids: even if you can’t go home again, because your parents are missing or dead or abusive or in jail or hate you for who you are, you are still valuable and special and deserve safe shelter. You still have the right to a future. We open our doors, and we promise safety. We want to help you fi nd stability, and we want you to pursue your dreams. We want you to rise up and move ahead, guided by your own hopes.

Even more important, we promise absolute respect and uncon- ditional love. And with that love comes a lesson too few have learned: you are amazing. You are just as God made you. You are lovable, and, with any luck, you will come to understand and share in our love for you.

From seeing the sad weariness in the young people who need shel- ter, our greatest hope is to reduce sharply the number of kids expe- riencing homelessness each year. Many forces contribute to the growing stream of young faces at our doors and the doors of other shelters. This book considers them and highlights promising ways to address each one.

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6 A L M O S T H O M E

If we could improve the child welfare system, safely reducing the number of young people taken from their homes and put into foster care settings, there may be fewer kids turning into adults without a family to call their own, and fewer homeless young adults soon afterward.

As of 2010, about twenty-eight thousand young people turned eighteen in foster care each year and were left to fend for them- selves. (If there were ever a fi gure to prove that government can never love a child the way a family can, this is it.) In one study, more than a fi fth of them became homeless within a year of leaving foster care. The odds worsen as young people grow older—in one study, 37 percent of former foster children had been homeless by age twenty-four. If there were fewer kids in foster care, fewer aging out without families, and more help available for those who do, the knocks on our doors would decrease sharply.

If young people with mental illnesses and addictions could be treated consistently, using the best available therapies, fewer would end up in trouble at home and in school, and fewer would require shelter. Many of the kids we serve have been diagnosed with a mental health issue, often depression or anxiety, a natural result of living with abusive families or on the streets. Too often, they seek solace from their troubles in drugs or alcohol, which only damages them further.

If we could reduce homophobia, making it easier for parents to understand and support their children, regardless of sexual ori- entation, there would be fewer young people pushed to the streets and to the shelter door. Solutions are rarely simple, but if we could encourage more parents to substitute compassion for judgment, we would stem the tide of kids shamed out of their homes into the dark abandon of street life.

Likewise, if we could reduce the chances that pimps pick up runaway and throwaway kids and send them out to be raped repeatedly for someone else’s profi t, and if we could help create

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I N T R O D U C T I O N 7

more safe havens for young people trying to break free of prostitu- tion, we would see fewer sexually exploited young people coming into the shelters. If we could make it even half as taboo to buy and sell kids for sex as it is to buy and smoke cigarettes, we would make huge inroads against human traffi cking.

And if we could provide mentors to young people whose par- ents have died or gone missing, if we could develop ways to encourage young fathers to stay with their children for decades, instead of weeks, we would better tap into the resilience of young people who might otherwise give in to despair or become parents before they are old enough to vote.

Though ambitious, none of these steps is impossible. The causes of youth homelessness are complex and interrelated but not overwhelming. We know what they are, and we know how to address them. There are concrete and helpful steps you can take, today, even without leaving your home. Small steps, large steps, steps to help reduce the number of scared, tired, and beaten-down kids who have nowhere to go but a shelter.

Many of the young people we meet have formidable powers of persistence and deep wells of strength. The counselors at Covenant House know that they can’t erase all the pains of childhood, but they can provide a safe, caring place for kids to exhale and to plan their next steps. The shelters act as a greenhouse in a way, provid- ing conditions conducive to growth and transformation. How can a young person fi nd a job with dirty clothes, an empty stomach, and a huge sleep defi cit? How can someone pass a school exam when he or she hasn’t had a shower in weeks and doesn’t have books or a quiet place for studying? How can a new mother get any rest in a home where she feels her baby is unsafe? The shelters meet basic needs, so that the young people staying there can focus on their higher goals. And while they are with us, they can see that they are

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8 A L M O S T H O M E

not alone. They no longer need to feel isolated, as if they are the only ones who have been beaten, bullied, or troubled by secrets.

Each day, scores of kids walk into Covenant Houses across the Americas for the fi rst time. More than half say they have gone at least a week without a nutritious meal. They get what they need immediately: a shower, food, clothes, a warm bed, and medical care, if they require it—more than a third do. Then, Covenant House has expectations of the kids. Once they’re settled in, it’s time for them to make a plan. The staff promises to help them, and the kids promise to help themselves—that’s the covenant.

They discuss with trained counselors the causes of their home- lessness, their most critical needs, and the steps they will take to meet them. Is it safe to be reunited with their immediate families, or could they live with other relatives? What kind of jobs do they need? Do they want to fi nish high school or go to college? Do they need child care, substance abuse counseling, or job skills? Do they hope to support themselves on their own?

Preparing young people for jobs is part of Covenant House’s most practical and important work. In most Covenant House programs, for example, young people can take a class on how to fi nd, apply for, and keep a job in a competitive market. They can use computers to research leads and write resumes, and staff and volunteers coach them for job interviews. Once the young people have found jobs, Covenant House staff keeps in touch with their employers, to help iron out any problems or disagreements that could put those positions at risk.

Some of our shelters also provide training in skills that are in high demand. Covenant House in New York City has a six-month training course for young people to become state-certifi ed nurses’ aides. The shelter also offers ways for young people to earn their food handlers’ licenses, by working and training in the dining room. In addition, residents work in the shelter’s housekeeping and

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I N T R O D U C T I O N 9

security departments and can obtain a certifi cation in security and fi re safety in a two-week training program.

Covenant House in St. Louis employs young people who live at the shelter to clean up two neighborhoods in the city, which gives them up to six months of real-life job experience. And a new program at an innovative café has provided jobs for young people at the shelter. Panera Cares, a restaurant created by Panera Bread Company founder Ronald M. Shaich that offers meals to patrons on a pay-as-you-can basis, gave internships to three Covenant House residents, with the hope of providing them with jobs and the potential for advancement in the company. Panera chose young people who had struggled with gaining and maintaining employment and trained them in customer service, time manage- ment, and handling confl ict in the workplace. After completing the ten-week unpaid internships, all three received a stipend and were hired at local Panera locations.

The shelters’ programs make a difference in young people’s lives. A 2000 study by the Menninger Foundation found that in New York, almost two-thirds of the residents of Covenant House achieved at least one major goal while they lived there. A full 70 percent landed in stable housing six months after leav- ing the shelter. Although only 10 percent of the young people were employed when they came to Covenant House, that more than quadrupled six months after they left. Although 28 percent were severely depressed when they arrived, that rate fell by more than half, six months after they left. In both New York and California, the study found that the longer a young person stayed at Covenant House, the better he or she fared six months later. For example, four out of fi ve of the young people who stayed for about two months were working or in school when they left. (That’s true for young people whose only alternative to a shelter is the streets; longer stays in emergency shelters for children in the foster care system can often have a detrimental

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10 A L M O S T H O M E

effect if the youngsters are missing the chance to live in a nur- turing home.)

Covenant House is not an anything-goes program. Young peo- ple can be asked to leave temporarily for serious fi ghting or being under the infl uence of drugs or alcohol or for repeatedly failing to follow their plans. But the kids know that our doors remain open, and when former residents return, we stand ready to coach them and to cheer for them, starting all over again, if necessary.

To complete the book, we conducted more than 175 interviews and visited more than 25 cities across North America, talking to people involved with these young lives: parents, foster parents, uncles and aunts, siblings, coaches, mentors, and, at Covenant House, main- tenance workers, cooks, counselors, and executive directors. We also talked to dozens of experts on the issues that force children out of their homes. We collected and reviewed thousands of docu- ments, including foster care fi les, criminal records, report cards, transcripts, and contemporaneous letters and journals.

For their privacy and protection, we refer to the young people, their family members, and other acquaintances by pseudonyms. When they were clearly identifi able in the schools or other institu- tions where they studied or worked, the names of those institutions have been changed as well. In the case of Paulie, a handful of potentially identifying details have been altered, none of which change the truth of his experiences. No other names, dates, or information has been changed.

We hope the stories that follow, taken together, will help reveal the heart and the face of homeless youth across Canada and the United States and the abundant generosity of adults who made a difference for them. The portraits relay the toughness of the times, the resilience of homeless young people, and the life-affi rming acts of kindness from adults who surround them with love and hope.

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I N T R O D U C T I O N 11

The young people and many of their allies allowed us into their lives in an extraordinary way, giving us hundreds of hours of their time, hashing over in detail some of their most diffi cult experi- ences. We approach the young people as their advocates, but in order to understand the extent of their ultimate achievements, we have not shied away from presenting their occasional shortcomings and the challenges of those who aspired to help them.

As parents ourselves, we understand that none of these kids deserved to suffer as they did. The book recalls profound and sometimes serial childhood maltreatment, and during our research, we have felt rage and, eventually, some compassion toward the adults who hurt the six young people, leaving grievous scars. We have also felt joy at the small, sometimes anonymous kindnesses that helped pull the kids through—the seeming bit players who made signifi cant differences in their lives. They all raised small lan- terns that helped the kids follow a safer path. Look around in your life to see if you, too, can fi nd a young person who needs nothing more than encouragement, and odds are you can.

It is hopeful work, to help someone at the crossroads take concrete steps toward a fulfi lling future, away from the specter of chronic homelessness, of growing old—or dying young—on the streets. At Covenant House, the staff often feels outmatched by the depths of young people’s suffering and need. We are an imperfect crew, struggling against forces bigger and older than us: poverty, inequality, and violence, among others.

Yet for forty years, one thing has remained true at Covenant House: we sit ringside for some of the most miraculous and unlikely transformations of the human spirit. To be sure, there’s room for many more to join in this hopeful movement, and to help.

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12

1

A Son Walks Alone Paulie’s Story

Soon after Paulie was born, the fates seemed to have it in for him, pulling him from loved ones, beating him up, tearing his families apart, sending him demon after demon to wrestle. When we think of him as a newborn, we imag- ine softer landings for him. But our respect for Paulie, the teenager, the young man, the champion kickboxer, the cook who shares his skills, is boundless.

Thirteen-year-old Paulie Robbins sat up in bed, jolted awake by the shaking ground and the bouncing coins on his night- stand. It was yet another tremor in Palmer, Alaska, this one mag- nitude 4.0, enough to wake him at nearly one thirty one morning in December 1997. He rubbed his face groggily. In disorienting moments like this, he wished his father were home to be the man of the house. But Hank, a crab fi sherman, was out on the Bering Sea, leaving Paulie’s mother, Tiffany, alone with Paulie and his nine-year-old sister, Casey, in their trailer.

Hank’s weeks away from them were a mixed blessing. He could be boisterous and lively, bringing the kids to garage sales in search of discarded treasures. He fi lled the shed he had built adjacent to the family’s trailer with bargain tools and used them to

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A S O N W A L K S A L O N E 13

repair toasters, bicycles, lamps, door hinges, anything that needed fi xing. In the summertime, Hank took the kids camping and fi sh- ing, trolling for salmon on the Kenai River. An experienced angler, he taught them how to catch rainbow trout on Skilak Lake, baiting their gang hooks with worms as they faced the glacier at the head of the basin. Indoors, though, Hank was another man entirely. His angry, violent outbursts regularly left Tiffany or the kids crumpled in tears.

Paulie still fl inched recalling an afternoon many years earlier, when during a disagreement between his parents that escalated into a brawl, Tiffany fell to the carpet with a bloody nose, and Paulie, just six, rose to defend her. But his father pinned him against the wall in front of the dining cabinet, his hand around his son’s throat. Then, suddenly, he dropped Paulie and left the room, returning moments later with a gun. Paulie thought, “Oh my God, he is going to kill me.” But Hank did not point the gun at Paulie, nor at Tiffany. Instead, he put the barrel in his own mouth and forced Paulie to put his small fi nger on the trigger.

“It’s time for you to make the decision what you’re going to do for the rest of your life,” Hank hollered into Paulie’s face. The boy cried, silently. Tiffany, who had wet herself from anxiety, vomited. I should do something , she thought, but she was frozen. Eventually, Hank scoffed at Paulie for refusing to shoot, then left the trailer in a rage.

The violence accelerated, and Tiffany descended into depres- sion as their seventeen-year marriage wore on. A sour melancholy, beyond what’s common during the long, dark Alaskan winters, often paralyzed her. She slept away hours of the day, escaping via a mixture of antidepressants and pain medication prescribed for recurring back problems. Her frizzy reddish-brown hair splayed across her face as she dozed in the dark wood-paneled living room, sometimes leaving a dangling lit cigarette for Paulie or Casey to douse.

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14 A L M O S T H O M E

Paulie stood up and glanced at Casey asleep in the top bunk. He shadowboxed a bit near his sister’s head, thinking about how his father would cheer from the stands during his Pop Warner football games. He sometimes felt more exhilaration from that sound than from victory on the football fi eld. Paulie cherished that fl eeting feeling, the thrill of seeing his father beam with pride, video camera in hand, his whole family together and happy.

Yet the last football season had ended badly for Paulie, and he was eager to prove himself again to his father. He had steamed through a fantastic fall, throwing dozens of touchdowns. His Bruins were undefeated, 8–0, coming into the playoffs against the rival Wolverines.

The Bruins went ahead early in the game, but the score tight- ened as the clock ticked down, and with just minutes to go in the fourth quarter, Paulie could not fi nd an open receiver downfi eld. He took matters into his own hands and ran out of the pocket for the end zone. He peeled past the defensive line, and with only a free safety to beat, he raced to the goal line. The defender dove at Paulie’s heels, tripping him up a few yards shy of the end zone, and Paulie, thrown off balance, leaped with the ball to try to score. But his arm hit the turf hard and bent fully backward, pulverized. Paulie held onto the ball, short of the touchdown. The crowd rose, hushed, as his coach and his mother raced onto the fi eld. Sobbing and unable to talk, he limped to the sidelines, passing his father, who repeatedly asked what was wrong.

Tiffany brushed Hank away and led Paulie to a chair. He hunched over in severe pain, oblivious to his surroundings until he felt a sudden jerk as Hank’s hand reached down and pulled his injured arm.

“Quit your bawling,” he said, cursing. “ Tell me what happened or I’m taking your whiny little ass home!”

Paulie walked to the car behind his family, his head bowed, his arm in excruciating pain. Casey was already in the backseat, and

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A S O N W A L K S A L O N E 15

Tiffany was in the front passenger seat, nursing a new welt on her eye. Paulie asked her what happened, and she insisted it was nothing, that she had tripped and fallen. They rode in silence to the hospital, where X-rays showed Paulie had fractured his humerus bone. The doctor reset it and applied a cast that ended Paulie’s football season and the family’s outings for the year. Hank’s video recorder went into storage. The Bruins buckled a few weeks later in the championship game, with their star quarterback sitting on the sidelines.

Paulie was devastated, and Tiffany tried in the immediate aftermath to boost his spirits and remind him that the setback was temporary. Paulie still remembers with a grin how she looked him in the eyes each morning and encouraged him, “You are going to grow up and be something special, Paulie. You’re not like every- body else. You’ve been given a gift.” For her part, Tiffany hoped those words would inoculate him against the loss of his football season and other rough punches to come.

That early morning after the shaking of the ground woke him, he faked one more hit in Casey’s direction and climbed back in bed, ready to sleep again. At least Mom’s still here , he thought as he drifted off to sleep.

Not long after the earthquake, Tiffany obtained a new antidepres- sant prescription from her doctor, and as the drugs started working, she took stock of her contentious marriage, realizing she’d had enough. She collected her children around the kitchen table one morning and delivered two strong aftershocks: she did not intend to let Hank back into the trailer when he returned, and she had invited a man named Ben, whom she had met online, to visit them for Christmas. She described what a nice man Ben was and how he lived south of them in Alberta. It was plain to Paulie that Ben was not just any visitor—Paulie had watched Tiffany feverishly typing for hours at a time online. To get her attention, he sometimes

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16 A L M O S T H O M E

crouched next to the screen, facing her, close enough to smell the nicotine on her breath, but she stayed thousands of miles away, her eyes obscured by the refl ection of the monitor on her large glasses. Looking to catch his mother’s glance, he instead found in her glasses a wall of backward type.

Now he saw a new liveliness in her eyes, as she encouraged the kids not to worry about this new visitor. And, she added, they didn’t have to call him “dad” if they didn’t want to.

When Ben arrived, Paulie did not call him dad or anything remotely like it. Ben was nothing like his father. Hank was stocky and strong; Ben was lean and wiry. Paulie carefully danced around him, eyeing him suspiciously, declining offers of kindness and assistance.

Ben seemed to sweep into their lives seamlessly, helping with the chores, wrapping Christmas presents, and sleeping with Tiffany in Hank’s bed. It was unreal, and although Tiffany seemed happier than Paulie had ever seen her, he knew it could not last. He dropped to the lower bunk at night, aware that just a few feet away, his mother was enmeshed with her new boyfriend, while his father planned his return. He waited, watching the foundation of their family teetering. Something had to give.

Sure enough, it did. A few days later, Ben’s estranged wife killed herself in their home in Alberta. Paulie couldn’t quite make out the whispering between Ben and his mother during the next two days, but he listened intently, in anger and shock, when Tiffany sat the kids down once again and explained that Ben needed her help in Canada. She and Ben would be leaving together after Christmas. She described it as a fast trip, just to take care of a few things, and pledged they would return to the kids in a week. She sent Paulie and his sister to live with different friends. Paulie left home a day before his fourteenth birthday with some clothes, socks, and underwear hastily packed into a small duffl e bag.

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A S O N W A L K S A L O N E 17

After a week, however, Tiffany sent word that Ben could not come back to Alaska, having previously overstayed his visa in the United States. Plus, Ben had his hands full in Canada, trying to win two of his four children back from foster care and removing his late wife’s belongings from their home. Tiffany had to decide whether to return to Alaska alone or stay with Ben and try to arrange for the kids to join her in Alberta down the road. It was an easy choice for her. Alaska held mostly bad memories for Tiffany, but with Ben, she had found an ease and a peace she could not, would not, relinquish. She promised to apply for a student visa to allow Paulie to join her in Alberta, and she arranged for him to move in with one of her friends in the meantime. When Hank returned from crab fi shing, he found his trailer empty, his family gone. He picked up Paulie and Casey and, in a rage, forced them to choose where they would live. Neither was eager to answer, but when repeatedly pressed, Casey chose Hank and Paulie chose Tiffany. His mother was the weaker of the two, and Paulie worried about her. Hank erupted, and nothing was ever the same again.

Until Paulie could move to Canada, he stayed with a girlfriend of Tiffany’s, who gave him more freedom than he had ever experi- enced. It was intoxicating. The woman’s son, more than ten years older than Paulie, roamed with a carefree tribe of twentysomethings, and Paulie, often unsupervised, lost weekends and eventually schooldays to cocaine and cribbage marathons, poker tournaments, and beer pong. He soon began to experiment with marijuana and other drugs, all readily available. As the weeks turned into months and the temperatures climbed enough for the spring break-up to begin, Paulie’s attendance at school fell off, and he became edgy and unhappy about the long wait to rejoin what was left of his family. Just a week before his last day of eighth grade, he attacked the bully from gym class, who had been taunting him about his missing

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18 A L M O S T H O M E

mother for much of the winter. Paulie left the boy’s face bloody and swollen, with his bottom lip split wide open. During middle school, Paulie had been a scrappy kid, encouraged by his father to fend for himself, but now he felt out of control, and the school agreed, expelling him.

Early that summer, after six months away, Tiffany fi nally sent a ticket for Paulie to join her and Ben in Alberta. When Paulie arrived at their home, he could see that Tiffany had settled into her new life without looking back. Ben’s older child in the house, a six- year-old boy with autism, was a handful, but he and his four-year- old sister looked to Tiffany as their mother. And she embraced the role, announcing to Paulie within minutes of seeing him that she and Ben planned to marry soon.

Paulie didn’t feel like he fi t in. He continued to experiment with different drugs—downers, Ecstasy, cocaine—in larger doses, occasionally breaking into his mother’s room to steal her pot. Ben tried to encourage him to attend high school in Calgary, and Paulie seemed momentarily to hit his stride when the football coach discovered his strong arm and gave him a spot on the team, but it was not nearly as much fun as it had been up north. He missed his teammates, he missed his family cheering on the sidelines, and he missed home.

He even missed Tiffany, even though she was right there in front of him. He loved her, and he knew she loved him in her way, but he felt like a spectator or a houseguest in her new family, not a son. The painkillers Tiffany had become increasingly reliant on muddled her mind and pushed her further away from him. Paulie eventually quit school, idling away most of the day, sometimes watching the children or listening to Tiffany’s wedding plans. When the big day arrived, he put on his most ardent smile and sat to the right of his mother, watching her marry Ben in the very spot in their living room where Ben’s late wife had died one year earlier.

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A S O N W A L K S A L O N E 19

Over time, Paulie started returning home at odd hours of the night, addled, incoherent, pale. New blond streaks lined his jet black hair, and he grew a stubby goatee, making him look older than his fi fteen years. He ignored curfews, and Tiffany had a hard time keeping track of him.

She woke him one morning in his makeshift basement bed- room and discovered piles of shoplifted clothes. Paulie was plan- ning to wear some and sell some for drug money. It was more than Tiffany could bear. She was not yet a Canadian citizen and worried that offi cials would discover the theft and punish her, perhaps forcing her to leave the country and her life with Ben.

She telephoned the authorities, turned Paulie in, and watched the police handcuff him and take him away. Paulie headed to a group home for delinquent youth. Before long, he was roaming Calgary, intermittently sleeping at Ben and Tiffany’s house or on the streets, watching the hookers and the drug addicts. This was no life, he thought. He had a better shot back in the 907 area code—friends, a sister, even his estranged father. Maybe he could reconstruct some semblance of a home back there, and, in any event, it was clear to him, at the age of fi fteen, that he had run his course with his mother and her new family.

Tiffany warned him not to go back to Hank in Alaska, predicting they would not get along, but when she could not persuade him, she handed him a creased and faded sheet of yellowed loose-leaf paper. “This is from your mother,” she said, “your biological mother.”

Paulie stopped short, speechless. He knew he had been adopted, but he had no idea his birth mother had left him a note. When he was eleven or twelve, Paulie’s parents had told him his birth mother, who they said was a teenage runaway, had aban- doned him in a shed in the Alaskan countryside as an infant. How

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20 A L M O S T H O M E

could he have a letter from her now, fi fteen years later? He opened the letter immediately and read its contents. His correspondent, homeless and then just seventeen, said she knew he wouldn’t understand why she had chosen to surrender him, but hoped he might one day forgive her. And then, as only a mother can know, especially a young mother who for two years struggled to keep him safe and make ends meet, she explained:

I didn’t do this because I don’t love you or want you. I did this because I would much rather die than see you be deprived of a father, proper upbringing, and happiness, for you are my world . . . I don’t expect you to love me but I would love to meet you and see if you are well and happy . . . I love you my son. Please forgive me. Love you always, Frankie Sandmeyer

Reeling, Paulie put the note in his pocket and headed back to Anchorage, asking Hank if he could stay at the trailer. As Tiffany predicted, his arrival ignited a powder keg. Paulie and Hank fought constantly from the start. Hank was bigger and stronger than Paulie, and he had no tolerance for his son’s drug use, his stealing, his fl outing curfews. Their shouting matches rou- tinely turned violent, and one in particular shook Paulie to his foundation.

Although he had been considered an eleventh grader in Canada, his Alaska high school put him back in ninth grade, and he cut a lot of school. When Hank caught him, he gave Paulie one of the worst beatings of his life—pulling his hair, kicking him, throwing him against the refrigerator, nearly breaking a table over him. Then he drove Paulie to school. During the ride, Hank cried his eyes out, saying how much he loved Paulie and wanted to be his friend. Dazed, still bleeding, Paulie sat motionless, wondering what love is.

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A S O N W A L K S A L O N E 21

A week or so after that fi ght, he called his football coach and said he wouldn’t be playing on the team anymore, as he was leaving home. He left Hank’s, empty-handed, and wandered the cold, dark streets of their northern town.

Paulie continued to become more involved with drugs, espe- cially Ecstasy, a stimulant and low-level hallucinogen, stealing from local retailers so he could buy more pills. After he was arrested for shoplifting at a local store, Paulie tried to crash with his best friend, begging his friend’s mother to hide him. But she knew Paulie had a juvenile record and was expected to report in regularly to a pro- bation offi cer. She called the cops, who brought him to Covenant House in Anchorage, the only shelter for homeless and runaway teenagers in Alaska’s largest city. Housed in the former downtown YMCA, the shelter was an unremarkable brick building that once had one of the city’s only community pools. Covenant House had fi lled in the pool and converted the space into a living room for the city’s destitute young people. Paulie could hardly believe he had become one of them.

Arriving at Covenant House

Mildred Mack was working an overnight shift when she fi rst saw Paulie walk through the front door of the shelter. She had started at Covenant House six years earlier, in 1993, after the breakup of her nearly twenty-year marriage. She had loyally supported her ex-husband’s army career, moving with him from Kansas to Hawaii to Georgia, uprooting their son and daughter each time, and fi nally arriving in Alaska. After the divorce she was faced with raising two teenagers on her own.

Mildred was hard to miss, one of the few African American faces in a city that is more than 70 percent white. She was older than the rest of the shelter staff—well into her fi fties, with wavy

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22 A L M O S T H O M E

brown hair combed forward and high cheekbones that cradled inquiring, wide eyes. By most accounts, she was no-nonsense, demanding, and relentless, qualities that had helped her put her children’s lives back together after the divorce, when all she really wanted to do was cry herself to sleep. She had found a way to force a smile and put food on the table, with no time for self-pity, hers or anyone else’s. It was Paulie’s terrible misfortune, he would soon think, to have Mildred Mack as his primary counselor.

When Paulie fi rst arrived at Covenant House, it was obvious he needed sleep, a warm shower, and food. He came exhausted, having couch-surfed from one friend’s home to another, some- times with their parents’ knowledge, other times sneaking inside after they went to bed. He spent a few nights walking the streets, bundled against the freezing temperatures, tired, and hungry. His body was just run down. The staff at Covenant House called local child welfare authorities to report Paulie’s allegations of physical abuse, and called Hank to notify him of Paulie’s presence at the shelter and request some clothes, but Hank refused. The next day, Paulie called Hank directly. Crying, he asked his father for his clothes, but Hank rebuffed him and fumed that Paulie was just avoiding reality by not getting help for his drug problem.

“Why don’t you come home and stand up to me like a man?” Hank said.

“I will when I’m not a toothpick,” Paulie responded, “when I can stand up to you without getting beat up.”

After letting him rest a few days, Mildred expected more from him. He needed counseling, she was certain. He talked longingly of a birth mother he had never met and denied having a drug problem. He seethed about feelings of abandonment, Hank’s beat- ings, and the many reasons he could not live with either parent, unloading story after story like a seasoned raconteur, but he was stymied by the simplest follow-up question: “What do you want to do about this?”

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A S O N W A L K S A L O N E 23

Mildred believed that Paulie needed to become serious about school, gather his important papers, and look for a part-time job. He had not fi nished one year of high school, and the longer he waited, the tougher it would be to earn his diploma. Without that, his pros- pects for fi nding his way off the streets would be much slimmer.

Paulie resisted and dawdled, complaining that neither parent had his birth certifi cate, so he couldn’t go to school or work. He lounged on the shelter’s couches and overslept, avoiding Mildred whenever possible. When she found him, she put him to work and peppered him with questions about his plans. Had he seen the social worker? Had he gotten his social security card? Did he go to school? And she was fi rm with him about the curfew that Paulie creatively attempted to fl out, citing all manner of natural disasters and public transportation calamities.

He insisted that he needed a break. Mildred told him Covenant House was his break. He felt he needed a friend, but Mildred said she wasn’t his buddy. She had a higher purpose in his life; she believed he could move himself forward—she could see it in him, plain as day.

Actually, she saw equal parts resilience and rage. She could tell Paulie had promise, but he was shiftless, simmering with anger, and unsure of himself. He peppered the conversations with Mildred with unsolicited non sequiturs: “I’m not a bad person,” “I think my mother really wants me to be with her but she has a lot going on in Canada right now,” “I really don’t deserve to get beat up all the time,” “I think I have some good qualities.” She listened and probed during dozens of conversations. She tried to affi rm and encourage him, but she knew that he was not trying to convince her or anyone else of his self-worth; he was trying to sort it out for himself.

As suddenly as he had arrived at the shelter, Paulie left, AWOL one night without so much as a good-bye. Mildred had seen it

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24 A L M O S T H O M E

coming for days. Moments after Paulie left the shelter, Tiffany returned the staff ’s call of several days prior. She told them she was Paulie’s offi cial guardian and assured them “if Paulie made allegations of abuse against Hank, they are true.” When staff advised her of the pending child abuse investigation, she ended the call by pledging to dial the state child welfare agency, but the allegation against Hank had been dismissed for lack of evidence by the time Tiffany called.

He went back to Hank’s trailer, where Hank beat him worse than Paulie could ever recall, zip tying his thumbs behind his back and throwing him into the car. Before they went into the probation offi ce, Hank cut the ties and hauled Paulie across the parking lot. Hank told the probation offi cer that he could not handle Paulie any longer. Together, Hank and the probation offi cer agreed to send Paulie for an assessment at a local psychiatric hospital, then to a drug rehabilitation center in Idaho, for two years. Paulie and another boy attempted to escape after only two months. They were caught and locked in a juvenile jail for a month.

Idaho offi cials contacted Tiffany and agreed to bus Paulie to the border of British Columbia from the detention center after his stint ended. But when Paulie stepped off the bus at the border crossing in the dead of winter, Tiffany was unable to meet him; she lacked the necessary immigration documents. She wept through the phone, urging Paulie to wait on the Idaho side of the border until she could develop a plan. It was getting late. Paulie lay down on the curb and put his jacket over his legs to keep warm. When that failed, he walked over to the visitors’ center bathroom to warm himself with the hand dryers, making four or fi ve trips throughout the night.

The next evening, Tiffany fi nally appeared in a friend’s car and told Paulie to hop inside. They drove around looking for a less traveled route into Canada and found one where the agent waved them right in. Paulie entered Canada illegally that night, joining Ben, Tiffany,

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A S O N W A L K S A L O N E 25

and the children just as they were preparing to relocate to Ontario, on Ben’s whim. On the way east, they slept in their station wagon, stuffed with their pets and all of their possessions.

As they settled into their new home, Paulie slowly realized that Tiffany had become a prescription pill junkie. She’d found a new doctor in Ontario right away, one who gave her Oxycontin and Valium. She was hooked almost immediately and took Ben down with her. Virtually comatose during the day, Tiffany let cigarettes burn holes on the couch, the recliner, and eventually her own knees and legs. Mired in addiction, she and Ben faded away, and life unfolded in slow motion, painkillers thickening the couple’s words and movements. Paulie introduced his mom to a local drug dealer, and they returned to the house and took morphine pills together, the boundaries between mother and son eroding further and further. Paulie spent less and less time at home, running away frequently, taking up with local truants, petty thieves, and drug couriers.

In a few months, he returned to the streets of Anchorage, tir- ing of Tiffany’s addiction but knowing Hank’s place was no longer an option. He felt unnerved by an abiding sense of not belong- ing that he could not overcome. Tiffany had tried to love him as best she could. Paulie did not blame her for failing to protect him from Hank’s fi sts, though Tiffany blamed herself. Looking back on Paulie’s childhood, from the safety and security of her new life in Canada, Tiffany indicted herself for not standing up to Hank more. During all of those years in the trailer, she was a wreck. She threw up virtually every day for a decade, a jumble of depres- sion and dread. She believed that if she dared intervene on behalf of the kids, Hank would kill her. Yet later, away from Hank, she could not shake an overwhelming sense of remorse.

It was not all Hank’s fault, either, Paulie knew. Hank had encouraged Paulie to share some of his core passions: fi ghting, fi shing, and football. That was how a man like Hank expressed

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26 A L M O S T H O M E

affection. Some days, Paulie felt that his father just suffered an accursed temper that made him impossible to live with, but the problem was bigger than that.

There was something wrong with them as a family. They didn’t go together. The pieces did not fi t. This was not about love, whatever that was; this was about connection. The older he got, the more distant Paulie felt from all of them. It was too easy to live apart from them, to say good-bye and not miss them deeply. He came to think of them as his rented family, and he did not belong to them or with them. Home was somewhere else, it had to be. He searched for it, yearning. The chase took him everywhere and nowhere, six months with Tiffany and Ben, six months with friends in Anchorage on the streets, a few months with a relative in the Lower 48, a chain of group homes, Covenant House, Anchorage’s parks, the transit center, street corners, and benches.

Alaska’s rave scene temporarily quenched Paulie’s thirst, intro- ducing him to a community of dance party and drug enthusiasts. Raves popped up across the city, starring turntable magicians who pushed the churning dance fl oor into all-night frenzies with a succession of fast-paced electronic songs and accompanying light shows. Paulie favored trance music, and he was attractive in that crowd, his piercing brown eyes suggesting sensitivity, his square jawline virility. The girls fl ocked to him. He spent countless nights spinning and swaying to the progression of thumping sounds spun by the rave’s DJ ringmaster. The communal spirit of the dance fl oor fi lled him with a sense of belonging. He didn’t have to ponder his lost home and family; the music invaded all of his senses. The bigger the space, the more dancers in his midst, sweating and mov- ing in sync to the music, the better he felt.

In no time, he was drawn into a drug subculture among the ravers, centered on Ecstasy. Some called it the hug drug, because they claimed it helped them be more in touch with their feelings, thawing hearts and minds in the frozen north. But the side effects

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A S O N W A L K S A L O N E 27

could be serious: depression and paranoia, not to mention involun- tary teeth clenching, blurry vision, and increased heart rate.

Paulie peddled the green-and-blue tablets before and during raves and, for a while, made a life of it. He was sleeping on the streets or on friends’ couches or bundling with other ravers in a shared hotel room or in Town Square Park, across from Covenant House. But Anchorage was freezing—the snow fell from late September to April, and in midwinter, the sun barely showed up. After ten-hour dances on a drug that caused a marked spike in body temperature, Paulie struggled to stay warm. When he became too cold and weary, he returned to Covenant House, and Mildred soon caught on to his pattern: fi rst asking for help, then professing to change his life, followed by resistance, anger, and a quick exit. The steps refueled him for the next foray on the streets, but he never tackled the heartache and the substance abuse that continually kept him in bad straits. He missed his mother and felt deeply alone. The drugs took hold of him, and didn’t let go.

He idled on the top level of the F Street mall, buying one soda and refi lling it all day so no one would kick him out for loitering. He pinched food from the garbage and could fi nd a coat, gloves, or fresh socks from Covenant House any time he wanted, whether he lived there or not. But he was decidedly not interested in the shelter’s rules, least of all the ten o’clock curfew. He wanted liberty.

By the time he was seventeen, he had come to Covenant House eight times in nearly three years, and most times he’d leave in a huff, after complaining about Mildred “getting in my face.” He was unwilling to return to school or study for his high school equivalency diploma (GED). He missed meals and coun- seling. When Mildred laid down the law and told him not to waste his days loitering downtown, he bristled, and the lure of the streets prevailed. The parties, the beer, the drugs, and, most of all, the freedom trumped Mildred’s voice, Mildred’s rules, Mildred’s agenda for his life.

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28 A L M O S T H O M E

Most days, Paulie was glad for the dark, and there was a lot of it in Anchorage in the winter. It made it possible for him to hide, backing up into doorways, sleeping on or under benches, without feeling exposed. He didn’t mind eating out of the trash cans as much as he minded being seen doing so. But the eighteen-hour winter nights were dangerous. Homeless people routinely freeze to death on the streets of Anchorage; some have been crushed to death when the dumpsters they sought shelter in were emptied into trash trucks.

In 2009, Covenant House Alaska and the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, pub- lished results from a ten-year review of more than four thousand individual case fi les belonging to youth who sought shelter between 1999 and 2008. Like Paulie, 66 percent of those young people had not fi nished high school, and 40 percent of them had lived in a mental health residential program. Nearly one in three kids who came to Covenant House Alaska had spent time in foster care. Almost half of the girls and young women at the shelter were sur- vivors of sexual assault, as were about 7 percent of the boys.

These hardships were not unique to children and youth in Alaska. In one of the largest-ever studies of homeless youth in New York City, researchers at Columbia University’s Center for Homelessness Prevention Studies, in partnership with Covenant House Institute, reported in 2009 that almost half of the 444 homeless youth who sought shelter at Covenant House New York reported signifi cant violence at home. One in fi ve reported being beaten with an object. Thirty-fi ve percent of the young people had spent time in foster care. The data paint a stark picture of the life-altering events that may drive children into unaccompanied homelessness: abuse, instability, emotional trauma.

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A S O N W A L K S A L O N E 29

Paulie had confronted all three, so he was far from alone. Deeply isolated, he sought solace in the music, the community, and the pills of his rave world. He often found buyers among them for the handful of Ecstasy pills he carried with him, selling on the down low in bathrooms or dark corners of the fl oor. Eventually, the police caught up with him, charging him with twenty-fi ve felonies—one for each pill he delivered in an unusually big deal and three for the other pills he had on him when he was arrested. He spent three months in the McLaughlin Youth Center, Anchorage’s juvenile jail. He was just three months shy of his eighteenth birth- day. If he had been tried as an adult, he might still be in prison. At McLaughlin, he appeared depressed, in part because he was coming down from the Ecstasy. He had eaten sporadically on the streets, so he arrived at McLaughlin looking gaunt. His record of hospitalization and treatment left McLaughlin offi cials worried that he was a suicide risk, so they isolated him. He could feel himself bottoming out, squandering the days on his cot, crying, wondering what kind of life this was. He wanted to change.

When the news of Paulie’s arrest reached her at Covenant House, Mildred felt sad but not surprised. Maybe this is what he needs , she thought.

After returning to Covenant House from McLaughlin, Paulie was unhappy to fi nd Mildred still there. She occasionally heard him grumbling about her, and she chalked it up to a play for sympathy. She was not out to win any popularity contests with the kids, and if she tried, she would lose badly. She did not hug or purr or sweet talk, and even if she did, she was sure those were not the things Paulie needed. He did not need another friend. Mildred watched him intensely, like an eagle attending its speckled eggs high above the arctic wilderness, trying to fi gure out what it was he needed most.

“Why can’t you just leave me alone?” he pleaded one after- noon, sprawled across the couch, having failed to go to school yet

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30 A L M O S T H O M E

again. He had repeatedly told her about the humiliations of show- ing up with mismatched outfi ts from the shelter’s clothing room. Had she even been listening to him?

“These chores you should be doing, Paulie, one day they’re going to help you. You’re going to go to work and have a good work ethic, you know?”

“I am sick and tired of you with this tough love bull. Just leave me alone!” he hollered.

She bent down to face him and saw him trembling, his eyes moist, searching as far away from her as he could. She looked into those tired brown eyes and for the fi rst time she had second thoughts. Maybe this was not the way. Maybe Paulie needed most to retreat into his shell, to rest, protect himself, and heal. Maybe the beatings and the drugs and the end of his family had exacted too great a toll, and he was not as resilient as she had estimated. If she turned her focus away from him, perhaps in time he would over- come his hurt and inertia. She wanted to give in, to tell him it was okay just to lie back down and relax. But her steely determination, which had forced her out of bed and into the workforce, would not let her do it. She prayed for God to give her the wisdom and grace to know what to do with this boy. She stood silently and waited for Paulie to do his chores, and she didn’t leave the room until she saw him reluctantly pick up a broom and start sweeping the hall.

After an especially tense day with Paulie, Mildred unleashed her frustration at the afternoon staff meeting. “I don’t know how to reach this boy,” she said, almost pleadingly, and stopped herself short, the plaintive tone in her voice lingering. It was a rare display of disquiet from Mildred, whom younger coworkers dubbed Miss Military for the confi dence, structure, and discipline she brought to her work. Mildred excused herself from the circle and retreated to an offi ce, where, hidden behind a stack of boxes, she cried quietly.

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Working at Covenant House is not for the faint of heart. It is a calling, not a paycheck. Any young person staying at the shelter who thinks you’re doing it for the money will tell you so, imme- diately and often. Imagine being a residential adviser in a col- lege dorm, struggling to bring order to a crowd of sleep-deprived, hormone-addled, and opinionated young people living away from home, some for the fi rst time. Then subtract most of the high school diplomas and stable family histories, and add trauma to the mix and varying degrees of loneliness, anxiety, and stress. Then put everyone in crisis, perhaps with fresh wounds from fi ghts with family or friends or pimps or recent abandonment by foster care. Add a handful of mental illnesses and addictions, the panic of having no permanent address, and try to make sure everyone gets along enough and keeps quiet enough so that the others can rest. The goal is to do all of this with unconditional love and absolute respect. The work can take its toll.

Mildred went to fi nd her long-time confi dante and supervi sor, Connie Morgan, a veteran of the shelter’s fi rst days in Anchorage. Connie originally hailed from Olive Hill, Kentucky, population sev- enteen hundred. That small town taught her to prize community, and her folksy, Southern amiability won friends readily, including native residents of the icy northern tundra of Alaska, where she had followed her husband on assignment from the federal Indian Health Service in the mid-1980s. Her natural affability thawed the reserve of the Inupiats she met in Barrow, the northernmost American city, and helped land her a spot as one of Covenant House Alaska’s fi rst employees, charged with helping to build the Anchorage program and recruit the new shelter team.

Connie could see Mildred struggling with Paulie. He always seemed to teeter on the ledge, leaning toward decisions that could help him turn his life around before he dove back into street life, never dealing with the grief over losing his home that he wore like an extra layer of skin. Mildred increasingly believed it was

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32 A L M O S T H O M E

not enough to keep him warm and safe for a couple weeks, then watch him go back into the fl ux. She wanted to pull him off the edge of the abyss before he fell, save him from the streets and the drugs, get him focused on the promise of his life. But she didn’t know how.

She trusted that Connie might. Connie had worked with hundreds of homeless teenagers, many of whom had survived unspeakable violence, and Connie repeatedly told her that no kid was unreachable. But Paulie’s life was upside-down. His father beat him, and they could barely be in the same room together. His mother had abandoned him on her way to a new life in Canada, then did drugs with him. All of this left Paulie pining for some mysterious birth mother who had supposedly left him for dead in a shed as a baby. Grownups had unwittingly trained this boy never to trust them.

Connie suspected that he was too smart and handsome for his own good. Paulie’s considerable intelligence, good looks, and abundant charm kept him from the harshest consequences of the streets. Even after stints in juvenile jails in Canada, Idaho, and Alaska, Paulie had avoided the bottoming out that landed many young drug abusers on the road to recovery and many homeless, truant teenagers back to school.

“A lot of our work is like small steps,” Connie said to Mildred. “And not everything is going to go well. We can’t expect kids to come in here and have some earth-shattering experience. Paulie has been through the mill. He keeps coming back, yes? He trusts us more each time, right?” Then she sighed, and answered her own question. “Right.”

Connie knew that Mildred thought she had to be strong and demanding for Paulie’s sake, but it was mostly a well-rehearsed facade. Underneath Mildred’s veneer of certitude and toughness dwelled a soft center, one she hesitated to reveal. She needed per- mission to experiment a bit.

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“Try something different,” Connie advised. “He expects you to lean into him. Try giving him some carrots. If he wants an extra hour on curfew, barter: give it to him if he enrolls in the diploma course.”

It could not hurt to try, so Mildred did just that. And in a matter of days, Paulie started to earn the privileges he sought. Suddenly, carrots in hand, Mildred found it easier to lure him toward an edu- cation. She still insisted they meet every day and review his plans and accomplishments. When he was late, she waited for him. When he feigned ignorance of the scheduled meeting time, she sought him out, without exception. She was not letting go.

A few weeks later, Paulie approached her in the hallway of the shelter. She sensed he was coming to the end of his latest stay, because his attendance at meals had become less frequent and his requests for extended curfews more common. “Mildred, I never did anything to you. Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

She looked at him with a faint smile. He just shook his head, shrugged, and walked away.

Covenant House had started out for Mildred as a job. She was working at the Salvation Army after her divorce but not earn- ing enough. She had read an article in 1990 about Covenant House Alaska after it fi rst opened, the piece prominently featuring Covenant House’s then president, Sister Mary Rose McGeady, talking about how the shelter gave her a way to bring the values of her faith into her work. Mildred, a fellow Roman Catholic, applied for a part-time position on the evening shift. Soon it became more than a job, and she left the Salvation Army to join Covenant House full time.

She was inspired by the shelter’s dynamic duo: the unfussy and accessible Connie and the spunky young executive direc- tor, Deirdre Cronin, a red-headed fi reball with a heavy Queens accent. Deirdre had volunteered at Covenant House in New York City right out of college, as part of its Faith Community

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34 A L M O S T H O M E

program, a corps of volunteers who dedicate a year of their lives to work at Covenant House sites in Anchorage, Atlantic City, Fort Lauderdale, and New York. Deirdre moved to Alaska after Sister Mary Rose offered her the chance to lead her own agency, albeit one far from her family and friends. Deirdre jumped at the opportunity; her enthusiasm for serving homeless youth reached from the pushed-out kids of Times Square to runaways from the most remote Native Alaskan villages, no matter what their faith.

“I am a fan of Jesus,” she often declared to the staff matter-of- factly, “and while I never met him personally, I’m pretty sure he never said you have to pray in order to eat and have shelter. They’re all our kids.”

When Paulie resurfaced at Covenant House at the age of nineteen in 2003, still homeless, tired, and cold, both Deirdre and Connie encouraged Mildred. “Find his spark, Mildred. You can do this,” Connie said. If Mildred was feeling uncertain about how to break through to Paulie this time, both Deirdre and Connie had confi - dence she would do so, and Mildred never let Paulie see her doubt.

Paulie told her he wanted to stop eating out of trash cans. She told him he had to stop using drugs and get his equivalency diploma, a job, and some savings. He didn’t quite roll his eyes, but it was close. She admired his courage for coming back yet another time, but she wished he would check his adolescent swagger at the door.

Paulie told her he had received his diploma a few weeks ago, without having had to study much. Mildred was speechless at fi rst, then put her hands on his shoulders and gave them a shake, beam- ing. He had his GED? It was a terrifi c omen, and it confi rmed to her that he was naturally smart. After all, he had no formal

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education beyond a few months of the ninth grade, yet had passed the high school equivalency exam on the fi rst try.

“All right, then!” she said. He had to smile. Her voice, the one that had taken root in his

head during the last year, had fi nally started making sense. He heard it on the streets, in a crowd, though she was nowhere in sight. Nothing had gone right for him when he followed the ravers, the drug pushers, and the other kids on the street, so for something different, he had started to listen to the voice of Mildred Mack. Maybe she really did care about him. He wanted to make the right decisions, the kind that Mildred had been encouraging, choices that would help him off the streets. He was tired of being a victim.

During the next several weeks, she saw him for the fi rst time apply himself steadily at the shelter, tackling his chores without any lip, fi nding a part-time job, then another, saving his paychecks, and expressing an interest in Covenant House’s Rights of Passage independent living program, which gives young people the skills they need to prosper on their own, while insisting that they work, budget, and save during their extended stays.

He began to engage in the life of the shelter, owning his sub- stance abuse, sharing openly at youth meetings about his use of Ecstasy and the downward spiral it caused. He wanted to make drugs a thing of the past, and he attended Narcotics Anonymous meetings, eventually joining peer counselors in downtown Anchorage to encourage homeless youth to avoid drugs and leave street life behind. He signed up for the shelter’s chess tournament and won handily. And he poured himself into the weekly Cov Poetry Slam, writing about the quest for family and acceptance, sharing his poems with staff and other young people.

A Knight walks alone Looking for his sister Do you know where you are?

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36 A L M O S T H O M E

Calls the voice “No” Do you know who your father is? “No”

Within a month—his longest stay at Covenant House until then—Paulie was accepted into Rights of Passage, and he planned to leave the crisis shelter for his new digs several blocks away. The morning before he left, Paulie invited Mildred to go for a walk. They bundled up and headed outside, passing the mural painted across the back of the building depicting a young person sitting on a trash can next to the words “Life on the Street Is a Dead End.”

“Umm, I just want to say thanks for helping me. You got my ass in line. You never gave up on me.”

She shook her head no and reminded him of the last time he had stayed there, when he asked her why she wouldn’t leave him alone.

“Yeah,” he said. “You didn’t really say anything.” “I know, I know,” she said, looking down, pausing. “Paulie, I

wanted to say never. I’m never going to leave you alone, you know, because I believe in you.”

He faced her and quietly responded, “Thanks, Mildred.” “Don’t thank me, Paulie. I did for you what I did for my own.” “I’m kind of your own by now,” he said. “That you are,” she said with a grin.

At Rights of Passage, Paulie, who logged a grand total of eleven stays with Covenant House, had his ups and downs like all of the kids. He worked at Arby’s at the mall during the day and spent a lot of time imagining life with his birth mother, wondering where she was, if she was even still alive. He grew certain that he wanted to try to fi nd her, but he didn’t know where to begin. His birth records

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were sealed, and he had no idea what she looked like, whether she had changed her name, where she lived. It was a painful cul-de- sac, longing to fi nd her, knowing he could not, then fantasizing about her once again. At night in bed, he unearthed her letter to him, rereading it repeatedly. She wanted me , he thought. Out there, somewhere, my mother wanted me .

When he was twenty-one, he moved downtown into an apart- ment with a friend for fi ve months before fi nding his own place three blocks from a spare, underground kickboxing center. The owner encouraged Paulie to give kickboxing a try, and it felt right to him.

Paulie lost his fi rst public bout, which he invited his father to watch, but when he talked to Hank afterward, it was as if Paulie had won in a knockout. Hank was electric, impressed by how strong and fast his son had become. It reminded Paulie of those Pop Warner games. Eight years later—too late, on so many counts—Paulie had won his father’s esteem as a fi ghter.

As a boy, he had cared more about his father’s reaction than about the play on the football fi eld. But now, although Hank’s enthusiasm pleased Paulie somewhat, it did not color his percep- tion of the match. Paulie had lost, and he did not want to do that again. He threw himself into the rigors of the ring, training four to six hours a day, all day on the weekends, weightlifting to build muscle on his lean frame. He never wanted to be skinny, which is how he saw himself, and his new routine helped him grow stronger and feel better about himself.

The sport taught him about staying on his feet when all he wanted to do was lie down. He relished the chance to care, bleed, coach, and sweat with kids who thought only about kickboxing, not about drugs, not about sex, not about violence, just about the respect they had for each other and for the sport.

He woke at four or fi ve in the morning to run, then started his workday, and afterward returned to the gym until it closed.

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38 A L M O S T H O M E

For hundreds of hours during the next eight months, he practiced footwork, refl exes, and the fi nesse and reach of his kicks. He couldn’t count on his bulk, so he won by wearing down his oppo- nent with careful strategy. Victory was contingent on being in top physical form, and he was.

For Paulie, fi ghting allowed for the physicality of a street brawl without the negative feelings directed at his adversary. Most of the kicks did not even hurt Paulie when they landed, blunted by surges of adrenaline. The real pain came later that night or the next morn- ing when he awoke unable to move a bruised, stiff limb or two. He took as his motto “Pain is the greatest teacher, time is the ultimate healer, and heartbreak is the best motivator.”

Kickboxing seemed to Paulie the fi rst of his pursuits that gave him back exactly what he put in. The harder he trained, the bet- ter he became. He loved feeling in control. His childhood and adolescence had been chaos, making him feel weak and adrift for so long that he had never imagined a sense of autonomy that was not drug-fueled. The sport redeemed him, he believed that. He would not eat from a trash can or sleep on the street again. He would not beg or steal or let himself be attacked again. He gloried in the ring, winning ten straight matches after his fi rst loss, and within eight months, he won a statewide championship bout in his weight class.

Kickboxing did not pay most of his bills, though, and he kept busy in a number of Anchorage’s best restaurants, fi rst as a waiter, then as a cook, sometimes as both. He had not been back to the shelter in several years, though it was not far off his usual path. Eventually, he decided to volunteer at a dinner for the kids of Covenant House. He just felt it was time to give back. Paulie arrived at the restaurant before six o’clock in the morning on the day of the dinner to start prepping for 120 hungry kids and staff members. Once the other volunteers began showing up, about one for every young person, he walked down to Covenant House to

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escort the kids through the snow, to the restaurant. They had no idea what was in store.

Flowers graced every table in the burnt-sienna dining room. The menu included vegetable crudités, salad, rosemary poultry and stuffi ng, gravy, two kinds of potatoes, baked veggies, and three desserts: a chocolate cream pie, pecan pie, and apple crisp. The kids were awestruck. The meal was like nothing they had ever seen or tasted before.

Paulie worked the tables in his white chef’s uniform with the grace of a practiced waiter, but by the time he had talked to the third or fourth kid, a wave of melancholy struck him as he remem- bered life on the streets. Whether he looked left or right, each face was his, a dizzying room of Paulie Robbinses. He was surprised to discover how much a part of their struggle he still was, feeling so connected to them and separate from society at the same time.

THE COSTS OF NOT CARING

—Tina Kelley

Sometimes, the right solution solves fi scal problems, as well as human ones. Homelessness is expensive, and help- ing young homeless people fi nd a fi rm footing keeps them from becoming older homeless people, with more costly, entrenched health problems and chronic needs. According to a 2009 report of homeless people in Los Angeles, those ages forty-six to sixty-fi ve accrue fi ve times the health-care costs of those under thirty.

I’ve often been dismayed by the waste in government- sponsored social service solutions. Remember when New York City used to spend up to three thousand dollars a

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40 A L M O S T H O M E

month to put homeless families in dangerous welfare hotels, when the same amount would have more than covered rent in a decent apartment? Have you watched the costs of health care skyrocket, in part because preventive or routine care is not available, and poor people end up sicker or dead, when the emergency room is their only option?

It just makes sense to meet human needs before they become more acute. That’s how Covenant House saves society millions of dollars, with its ability to provide thou- sands of young people with safe shelter, affordable health- care referrals, educational programs, and employment help. Rights of Passage, our transitional living program, costs less than fourteen thousand dollars per young person, for an average stay of seven months, compared to forty-seven thousand dollars per year to keep a kid in juvenile detention in California.

Yet beyond the dollar costs, consider the psychic ones. After spending a night in a cardboard box as part of Covenant House’s Solidarity Sleep Out for homeless youth, I understood much more about the toll “sleeping rough” takes on the hearts and the heads of young people. The cold, the noise, the wind, the fear—I don’t know how kids bear it. They become exhausted and, eventually, sick from the cold and the worries that keep them awake. Imagine trying to get a good night’s sleep in a subway car, in a rat-infested park, or in a room with someone who trades a bed for the use of your body. Imagine waking up having to fi gure out the next semiacceptable place to stay!

There are small steps that each of us can take to save the lives of our kids. Mildred grabbed hold of Paulie and never let go during the course of fi ve years, even as he drifted away from her, over and over again. It begins

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Volunteering at the dinner rekindled Paulie’s relationships at Covenant House. From time to time, Deirdre, the executive director, texted or called him, inviting him to speak to the kids at the shelter about his life or grab a cup of coffee with her to catch up. She invited him to join her for the shelter’s candlelight vigils, an annual outdoor event designed to remind people of the struggles of home- less teenagers as the win ter closes in. Deirdre also invited Mildred, who had retired to Washington, D.C., asking both of them to stand with Covenant House supporters—elected offi cials, advocates, families, and friends—for the evening’s program.

It was nine degrees as Paulie stood next to Mildred, both draped in down jackets, scarves, gloves, and hats. Deirdre took to the podium, her voice rising across West 6th Street to Town Square Park: “Every young person deserves a place to be warm and safe this winter. But more importantly, they deserve to know that they are special and beautiful and loved.”

As the program ended and a children’s choir fi nished singing, Paulie and Mildred locked arms and walked together from the stage into the warmth of Covenant House.

there—taking an interest. The government will never love children the way families must, and when families cannot or will not, the answer is in each of us to fi nd the extra- ordinary in the next Paulie and help unleash his sacred potential.

Without some of these actions, the lives of homeless young people can take deeply dreary turns—for want of a nail, the kingdom is lost. I often wonder how kids without a home fare in cities without safe shelters. The waste of potential, in terms of human and fi nancial costs, is painful to contemplate.

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42 A L M O S T H O M E

“You know, Paulie,” Mildred said, as she smiled somewhat devilishly, “you are special and beautiful and loved.”

“Yep,” Paulie said with a grin. “So are you.” A beat passed, but he could not help himself, “And trust me, Mildred, there were a lot of times I never thought I’d say that.”

Homeless, but Graduating

Paulie’s struggle to fi nish high school is typical of the challenges many homeless youth experience in school. Among the hundreds of young people who sought a bed at nine of the Covenant House shelters in North America in 2010, only 37 percent had a high school diploma or its equivalent. Without either, they often cannot fi nd full-time employment and can quickly fall deeper into poverty and street life, especially in times of recession. All of Covenant House’s U.S. shelters offer high school equivalency courses, and many innovative educational programs for homeless youth are wor- thy of replication. Education may very well be the single most important tool for young people aiming for self-suffi ciency.

For example, advocates for homeless young people have cham- pioned a new cadre of schools, many of them created by char- ter, tailored to welcome homeless young people and meet their needs. The Center for Education Reform, a nonprofi t group in Washington, D.C., that tracks charter schools, has contact with seven that specifi cally target homeless young people. In 2011, Broome Street Academy opened its doors to about 125 of New York City’s most at-risk students, those who are homeless, in foster care, or come from very low-performing middle schools. The academy is on the third fl oor of The Door, a forty-year-old multiservice center for young people in Manhattan. Although The Door does not provide shelter, it offers almost everything else, including counseling, food, career services, health care, and legal

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aid, serving as a daytime refuge from the streets for many home- less youth. With a personalized program, the academy plans to tackle the issues that drive homeless and at-risk students away from school, while tripling the current graduation rates for this population.

Two charter school programs in the United States have taken the unusual step of operating through homeless shelters for youth: Covenant House Michigan in Detroit and the Academy of Urban Learning in Denver, Colorado. In 2005, Covenant House Michigan launched three charter high schools after Sam Joseph, the agency’s founding executive director, estimated that 90 percent of the youth in the main shelter were high school dropouts. Although the charter school movement has been criticized for skimming the most motivated students and families away from the public school system, Covenant House Michigan actually helps the Detroit Public Schools by enrolling only dropouts and young people the system has expelled. On average, students at the schools are two to four years behind, and about 30 percent of them have been involved in the criminal justice system. A quarter are parents themselves.

Each school provides a team to work with students on their social and emotional needs, with counselors, a family liaison, and a psychologist. The schools try to move past whatever caused the young people to drop out in the fi rst place—bullying, feeling in danger, hardships at home, not having clean clothes to wear.

More than 630 young people have earned their high school diplomas through Covenant House Michigan’s schools in the last six years, although critics say the schools have four-year gradua- tion rates signifi cantly lower than other Detroit charter schools, and test scores trail as well. That’s understandable, given the hard- ships and the lack of support homeless young people face. School offi cials are working to show the value of schools that engage dis- connected and very transient homeless youth, breaking cycles of

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44 A L M O S T H O M E

welfare dependency and incarceration that are not visible through the traditional school metrics.

Currently, almost 60 percent of the schools’ graduates go on to some kind of formal, postsecondary training, either college, com- munity college, trade schools, or certifi cate-granting programs. Covenant House Michigan’s schools encourage graduates to push forward, knowing that a college degree more than doubles their likelihood of employment.

For the last twenty-fi ve years, Youth on Their Own (YOTO), has helped homeless or abandoned young people ages thirteen to twenty-one graduate from high school in Tucson, Arizona. Supplying support services and a stipend of up to $125 a month to students who maintain good attendance and grades, the program has managed to shepherd 92 percent of its students to diplomas, in a state with only a 75 percent graduation rate.

In almost every high school in Tucson, the program works with school liaisons—school employees such as teachers, counselors, or dropout prevention specialists—who volunteer their time to Youth on Their Own as mentors, helping kids fi nd clothing, health care, tutoring, job placements, college scholarships, and referrals to safe places to sleep. Community members have generously donated food items, clothing, bedding, diapers for the babies of young mothers, school supplies, household goods, and prom wear.

A little more than a third of YOTO’s students are under the guardianship of the state of Arizona, because they have been abused or neglected by their parents; many live in group homes. The rest are eighteen- to twenty-one-year-olds who sleep from couch to couch, in subsidized apartments YOTO helps them fi nd, or on the street. None of them go home to Mom and Dad at night, but they have a fi erce desire to graduate.

The stipend, which is prorated according to what grades the kids earn, takes the edge off their poverty, said Teresa Liverzani- Baker, YOTO’s executive director. For fi fteen-year-olds whose

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A S O N W A L K S A L O N E 45

parents have skipped out on them, leaving them with no money, no car, and no doctor, the stipend can help them avoid some crises.

The program to date has helped eighty-six hundred homeless young people in thirty schools and has given out thirty scholar- ships to a local two-year college, paid for by donors. The group was able to help about 570 of the 740 young people who applied in 2011, though Ms. Liverzani-Baker wishes they had reached more, to help each student, and to help Tucson as a whole. Homeless kids often stay in the city they grew up in, and if no one helps them become educated, they can grow into unemployable home- less adults.

She’d also like to expand the program around the country, but funding for a full-time staff person is needed to operate the pro- gram. It could be a dream job for the right person, to help young people graduate, even in the face of obstacles that they themselves had not created. A high school diploma, they know, is their ticket to get anywhere in life.

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46

2

A Survivor Facing Her Future Muriel’s Story

No one would sign up to be born with fetal alcohol syn- drome, to be raised in a foreign culture, and to be depressed and addicted to drugs before turning thirteen. Yet this was Muriel’s childhood. Before she was twenty, three different pimps had sold her body over the Internet count- less times, for their own profi t. Long before she broke free from the last one, someone at Covenant House said something that helped her fi nd her footing: “You deserve better than this.” The results prove what we tell people all of the time—our kids need to know that people believe in them. And when we convince them that they are amazing, just the way they are, they can reach the stars.

It was early in the morning, late in September 2010, a Monday, the day Sister Nancy Brown always heard appeals, one after another, from kids who wanted to come back to Covenant House Vancouver. They had all been discharged recently, for not fol- lowing their plans, for fi ghting, or for being under the infl uence of drugs or alcohol. They all wanted a second chance, or a fi fth. Or a sixth.

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Sister Nancy, a gray-haired, neighborly woman with a hearty laugh, sat at a round table in her bright offi ce, with a big quilt of the Tree of Life hanging on the wall. She looked across the table at Muriel, a nineteen-year-old with a vulnerable, shopworn beauty. The girl acted unhealthy and perplexed. Sister Nancy saw famil- iar signs of exhaustion and drugs but could also see the struggle in her—Muriel was working for an escort service, and part of her wanted to be safe instead. Sister Nancy, one of Vancouver’s most visible opponents of sex traffi cking, sensed a window of opportunity.

The staff had recently asked Muriel to leave because she was not following her plan, not trying hard enough to fi nd a safe job. They worried that she was just refueling, enjoying a short respite before returning to work as an escort. From Sister Nancy’s earlier work with domestic violence survivors, and now, after coming to understand the seedy underground of Vancouver, she knew the struggle to leave a dangerous situation needs to take priority over other goals. She knew the fi gures—between 85 and 95 percent of prostituted people want to leave their situations, but there are only a handful of shelter beds in North America available to them.

Although young people see Sister Nancy as an authority fi g- ure at fi rst, she has a passion for justice, as well as a soft spot for earnest kids. Maybe, she thought, fi nding a job had not been the wisest priority for someone as young-looking as Muriel, who had a limited work history. When Muriel explained in a fast-fl owing, girl- ish voice, “I’m really lost. I want to get my life back, get back into school, and do something, rather than traveling around with a suit- case,” Sister Nancy knew what her answer to this appeal would be.

A member of the Sisters of Charity–Halifax who wears slacks and a sweater, rather than a habit, Sister Nancy felt grateful to work in a shelter where Muriel could be safe, where drugs and alcohol are not permitted, and where full-time addiction specialists are on staff. She vividly remembers the snapshots in the newspaper of the sad-eyed, disheveled victims of Willie Pickton, the pig farmer who

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confessed in 2007 to killing forty-nine women, mostly local prosti- tuted and addicted people. His depravity still haunts the city.

Muriel appeared sincere and seemed less damaged by drugs than many of the sex traffi cking victims Sister Nancy meets. Hardest to reach are the many girls who are doubly ensnared—by the threats and brainwashing that can come with prostitution, and by the physical and psychological ravages of addiction. Which problem do you tackle fi rst? How do you help a young person real- ize that her pimp is manipulating her when he feeds her the drugs she craves? Would she go back to her pimp if kicking drugs proved too hard and she needed a free high? Would she go back to drugs to numb the pain of seeing with newly clear eyes how her pimp had exploited her or to avoid the pain of losing the relationship with him, which she had come to need?

Looking down at the fi ve-foot-two, ninety-nine-pound woman- child across from her, Sister Nancy knew that any young person involved in prostitution was probably there because her family or community had rejected her. Sister Nancy had no interest in reject- ing Muriel further and sending her back to the streets. There were already about ten thousand traffi cked youth in Canada each year, and Sister Nancy wanted to help this girl step away from that life.

She said she was happy to see Muriel again and thanked her for returning. “I want you to come back into the shelter, rest, and start working on your plan,” Sister Nancy said.

Muriel exhaled for what seemed like the fi rst time all morn- ing, as Sister Nancy encouraged her to think about her worth as a woman and as a person, so she could be strong in the choices she would make for herself. The nun asked her how the shelter could help her get her life back.

Muriel didn’t know, exactly, but would try to fi gure it out during her fourth stay at the shelter. According to the antiseptic descrip- tion in the daily Resident Logs, which includes counselor notes from each eight-hour shift, “youth indicated that she does not want

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to return to sex trade and really wants to return and live with her mother—must get job, work at schooling, stay clean and sober.”

It was a formidable order. Sister Nancy would be watching, trying to help Muriel exit prostitution for good. As Muriel headed downstairs to rest, she shook her head at how much work it would take, just to get back home.

In the early 1990s in a tony suburb of Vancouver on the scenic west coast of Canada, a couple adopted a daughter from the Philippines. Three-year-old Muriel arrived in the family’s neatly kept two-story home. It had a big picture window in front and a gracious cherry tree in the back. For a little girl born in a shack in Manila, the comfort- able Canadian home, with a full pantry, looked like a wonderland.

Muriel’s birth parents had been “engaged in different kinds of vices,” according to her adoption records. She was the eighth of her birth mother’s nine children and had lived with two different aunts before arriving in Canada, malnourished and suffering from intestinal parasites. She was a little beauty even then, pale, with big eyes and pouty lips, but she was also an impulsive and wild child, eating until she threw up, stealing things, and hoarding food, probably because she was not used to having a steady supply of it.

Muriel’s adoptive mother had recently given birth to a third son, and three months after Muriel arrived, her adoptive father left the family. He visited on weekends, but the family mostly man- aged without him. Muriel knew him only as a part-time fi gure, one who, she felt, left the family because she had entered it. As she grew older, she wondered whether the others blamed her, seeing in her foreign face the cause of the family’s dissolution.

Each time she looked in the mirror, she saw how different she was from them. Her brothers were brilliant and calm; she was energetic and manic. Her mother tried to channel her energy into ballet classes, but Muriel rarely sat still, setting fi res, tampering

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with food, and playing around with her mother’s medications. When pediatricians diagnosed her as having ADHD—attention defi cit hyperactivity disorder—language processing diffi culties, and oppositional defi ant disorder, Muriel strung the labels next to all of the other words that defi ned her indelible differences from her family: adopted, foreign, hyper, girl. She could never shake the sense that she was not a part of their world.

Puberty hit Muriel with a vengeance. She was angry at being mismatched to her family and at her father’s departure. At twelve, she started using drugs and became addicted to Ecstasy, which her friends supplied. Its chemical euphoria seemed to counteract the depression that gripped her. She spent hours biking around her neighborhood, which suited her perfectly, because she didn’t want to go home. She ran away—a lot.

One day when she was fi fteen, Muriel came home from school, then went upstairs to read for a couple of hours as usual. When she came downstairs, she saw her three brothers, her grandmother, her mother, and even her father, who rarely appeared on a weekday, all watching her. Something was clearly up. Why were they each standing in front of a doorway, barring any chance of escape?

Muriel recalled her family’s steely demeanor as they told her they were sending her to the Philippines, that night, on a nine o’clock fl ight. She’d been out of control, she knew that. And now she was going to stay away until she learned how to be grateful. They had arranged for her to visit her birth family.

They were right to stand in front of the doors. She had no inter- est in visiting Manila. As a child, she had not been terribly curious about her birth family and had not fantasized about meeting them. From what she’d heard about her Filipino family, she was better off in Canada. She would not have been raised by her birth parents anyway. She knew her mother had more mouths to feed than she could handle and had planned to send infant Muriel to an orphan- age instead.

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So when she stepped off her fl ight alone in the Philippines the next day, there were no emotional embraces, only a taxi driver holding up a sign with her last name on it. She met her sisters, her brothers, an aunt, a nephew, a niece, her cousins, and fi nally her birth mother, who didn’t speak English.

Muriel hated every single minute of the visit, every missed holiday back in Canada, and she grew more depressed. Each time she talked to her adoptive mother on the phone, she cried, begging to come home before Christmas. Her family in Canada promised to try to buy her a ticket by New Year’s but didn’t. When Muriel fi nally returned home after missing four and a half months of school, she felt deeply angry, and her resentment lasted for years.

Her parents soon realized that Manila had not been the pana- cea for Muriel that they needed. They offered to send Muriel to Outward Bound, a personal growth program set among the chal- lenges of the wilderness, and to get her psychologically tested. They sent her to alternative schools and tried hard to fi nd the proper medications for her behavioral problems, but nothing helped. She snuck out of the house at night and continued to do drugs. Whatever , Muriel thought. Do whatever you guys think is going to make you feel better. It’s truly going to make me want to do worse.

She found one comfort at her mother’s. A large cherry tree presiding over the backyard offered solace and steadiness as she watched it every day of the year, even though her mother wouldn’t let her climb it. It bloomed, leafed out, turned dark red in autumn, fell barren, then budded out again. Its predictability calmed her. The tree’s constancy gave her hope. It never died. It kept growing.

Muriel’s mother worried that the same would not be true for her daughter. Just before Muriel’s sixteenth birthday, her mother took her to the hospital, concerned that Muriel had a plan to kill herself—she still has light scars on her forearms where she cut herself. At the hospital, they asked her whether she wanted to go home. She didn’t.

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The day after her sixteenth birthday, Muriel entered foster care. From there, she spent two years drifting, from foster homes to friends’ houses, back home for the night, holing up at safe houses (group shelters for homeless underage kids, where they can stay for a week at a time), trying a supervised apartment, all the while smoking a lot of pot, using a lot of Ecstasy and cocaine with friends, and skipping school.

Drugs were her only pleasure, and there wasn’t a day between her seventeenth and eighteenth birthdays when she wasn’t high. She believed she couldn’t experience any natural happiness, and it made her so irritated that she kept cutting herself, which again landed her in the hospital when she was about eighteen.

A new personal low forced Muriel to realize that addiction had overtaken her. She had earned six hundred dollars for spending ten to fi fteen minutes with a strange man with a foot fetish. She was high the whole time, but she later decided that the sexual experi- ence was “gross.” It was quick, easy cash that translated to as much cocaine as she wanted, but enough was enough. She went to her mother and asked for help.

Her mother set off in search of yet another possible solution, one Muriel fi nally seemed to want. The family found a rehab program in eastern British Columbia, where Muriel lasted almost six months before she was kicked out for fi ghting with another resident. If she had graduated, she could have returned home, her mother said, but now she had no other options. On May 6, 2010, she came back to Vancouver and made her way to Covenant House, which she had heard about while living at the safe houses.

She arrived dedicated to fi ghting her addictions. That fi rst visit, she stayed a month and a half, until a fi ght with her mother sent Muriel off the deep end again, and she accepted a friend’s invita- tion to go downtown to score some drugs. The friend, who was working in the escort business, introduced Muriel to her pimp, then went out for the night. At the end of a two-day binge, on top of

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the heroin, the Ecstasy, and the crack cocaine Muriel had already consumed, the pimp gave her GHB, a date-rape drug. It didn’t make her pass out, though, because of all of the stimulants she had taken. He then spent hours trying to persuade her to work for him.

At the time, she was nineteen and had been a drug addict for seven years. Give her a drug, and she’d take it and keep on taking it, without stopping. The drugs won out, and she didn’t fi ght back as the pimp, then his friend, had her. The pimp swiftly sent her to a hotel room and put her to work with a revolving door of strange johns.

She was young, Asian, and lovely. There was no shortage of demand for her. She describes the johns disdainfully, how full of themselves they sounded, their tendency to show off their houses and brag about their careers. There was an old man who lived by the yacht club downtown, a milkman who just wanted to talk, a guy or two who had just gotten out of jail, married men who would pay six hundred dollars an hour. There was a steady stream of them during the total of four months she worked as an escort for three different pimps—at least two calls a day, sometimes eight or nine. They were mostly boast- ful, self-involved men, and they used her body, sometimes roughly, never tenderly. She was not fully a person to them; the encounters hinged on their fantasies. This was not about intimacy, love, or con- nection. The pimps made sure that the drugs kept her numb.

Homeless young people such as those who come to Covenant House are those most likely to be ensnared by sex traffi ckers, who do not exploit only young people from abroad: 83 percent of con- fi rmed sex-traffi cking incidents in the United States involved U.S. citizens as victims, according to the federally funded anti–human traffi cking task forces within the United States.

Kids with no place to stay often come to the attention of pimps, who troll the streets around youth homeless shelters, hang out in nearby pizza parlors and schools, patrol bus terminals and

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airports, and even send young recruiters to live inside shelters to lure young people into the sex trade. They quickly fi nd the kids who have no strong father fi gures in their lives, a history of foster care or sexual abuse, broken family bonds, or problems with addic- tion. Kids without belief in themselves or hope for their futures are vulnerable to anyone offering so much as a free lunch.

These aren’t the kids who can easily say no to a sweet-talking grownup who tells them they’re gorgeous and takes them shopping for name-brand clothes, pretending to be a boyfriend who cares about them. Many young female victims of the sex trade—and vic- tims are predominantly female—become brainwashed and isolated, believing they are in love with their pimps, holding out hope that the only close relationship they know could somehow turn healthy.

Accurate fi gures for victims of human traffi cking in the United States and Canada are hard to come by, and for good reason— pimps often hide their workers away from the public eye and train them not to give their real names or ages if they are arrested. Moreover, prostituted young people don’t often seek help from the authorities, who are at least as likely to arrest them as to help them. Many don’t see themselves as traffi cking victims at all, but they are, under U.S. and Canadian law, both of which defi ne child traffi cking as forcing anyone under eighteen to engage in a commercial sex act. For people over eighteen to be considered traffi cking victims in the United States, they must have been made to engage in a commercial sex act through “force, fraud, coercion” or any combination of the three. To be considered a traffi cking victim under Canadian law, one must fear for one’s safety or the safety of someone known to them, a higher standard that makes enforcement more diffi cult, a rule Sister Nancy and other advo- cates are working to eliminate.

The number of U.S. youth at risk of being traffi cked ranges from 100,000 to 300,000, according to a University of Pennsylvania study—a number that some critics have claimed is too high. The

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Justice Department estimates that of the nation’s 1.6 million run- away or throwaway young people each year, 38,600 were at risk of sexual endangerment or exploitation as of 1999, while UNICEF estimates that 1.2 million children worldwide are victims of com- mercial sexual exploitation each year.

Between 2001 and 2008, the U.S. Department of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention tallied twelve thousand two hundred arrests of minors for prostitution or “commercialized vice,” and the number caught is certainly far lower than the number involved in such offenses. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s forty-six Innocence Lost task forces and working groups have recovered or identifi ed more than two thousand traffi cking victims, secured 927 convictions of those who exploit children, and seized more than $3.1 million in assets since 2003. Between January 2008 and June 2010, state and local police departments involved in human traffi cking task forces conducted 1,016 investigations of sex traffi cking where the alleged victims were under eighteen.

The scope of the human traffi cking epidemic can also be seen city by city. In 2006, the Center for Court Innovation found 3,946 commercially sexually exploited children in New York City. One police sergeant there estimated that each year, 3,000 runaways or young people in danger of being exploited go through the Port Authority Bus Terminal alone, near Covenant House’s oldest and largest shelter.

In 2010, Seattle police found eighty-one prostituted young people, more than double the number found in 2009. In Winnipeg, Manitoba, about four hundred children and young people are believed to be traffi cked annually, and that’s only counting those who work on the street. More than three-quarters of those kids had previously lived under the supervision of Manitoba’s Child and Family Services.

Meanwhile, the pimps operate with impunity, realizing that law enforcement has not considered them a priority: the U.S.

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government battles human traffi cking with only 0.1 percent of what it spends on fi ghting the drug trade. Many criminal gangs have noticed and have traded in drug sales for the more profi table and low-risk sale of people, in part because women and girls, unlike drugs, can be sold over and over again for someone else’s profi t. In addition, those girls seldom seek help from police. Some are more apt to bail out their victimizers than to turn them in.

One Canadian study shows that prostituted women and girls face a mortality rate 40 times higher than average women do. Even if they are able to leave and steer clear of a pimp’s infl uence and attempts to lure them back, there are limited resources to address their overwhelming range of needs. Many need to visit doctors and obtain medication. Many young traffi cking victims, such as Muriel, never had the chance to fi nish school or develop any job skills at all, and their relationships with their families are fl imsy at best, so they often lack a trusted adult to help them through this most diffi cult transition. Many, such as Muriel, need intensive help in overcoming addictions, and most need long-term psychological counseling—in one study, 68 percent of prostituted people suffered from post- traumatic stress syndrome.

Arriving at Covenant House

After three months of working as an escort, Muriel left her pimp and tried to recover her earnings from him. He stole her dog, a long- haired Chihuahua, and put his foot on its neck, threatening to kill it in front of her if she didn’t stay with him. She refused. She fi gured that in the three months she had been working for him, she had probably made eighty thousand dollars and was supposed to have half of it. He refused. (She later learned that the dog had survived.)

She returned to the safety of Covenant House, but she was still using drugs and was unwilling to address her addiction. Resistant

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to job hunting, Muriel idled away the weeks until the staff asked her to make a decision: begin seriously looking for work or make alternative living arrangements. She bolted but a few days later found herself pleading with Sister Nancy for a third chance, which was granted. Muriel came back to Covenant House, where she was glad to see Crystal Schwarz, twenty-fi ve, a youth worker Muriel had known from an earlier safe house. Muriel liked that Crystal, who has long brown hair and a pleasant, round face, was close to her age and cheerful.

One night after the regular residents’ meeting, on the fi rst fl oor of the Drake Street shelter, Muriel was hanging out in the big beige common room near the television and the coffee table. She sat in one of the black swivel chairs, hitting it with the drumsticks from the Wii’s Rock Band game.

“Muriel, do you need to talk? I think you need to talk,” Crystal said. Muriel didn’t think so, but she managed to chat about how she liked a certain boy. As the conversation progressed, past more gossip and “I hate it when parents do that, don’t you?” Muriel began unloading what she was feeling at the moment and, eventu- ally, about how upset she was after hearing that her former pimp had stabbed a girl in the throat. She admitted that she’d felt more depressed during the last few months, frustrated with her addiction and her need for the money she made at glamorous parties where her pimp made her work. She burst into tears, something she had almost never done at home. What had been the point, there? She felt as if no one had listened to her, and it had become easier to detach from her pain by abusing drugs, to stop feeling and thinking.

Now, Crystal jumped in to offer comfort. “ You’re a valuable person, and you have a lot of reasons to feel good about yourself,” she told Muriel. “Look at how strong you’ve had to be to get this far. You deserve better than this.” The conversations with Crystal, soon a nightly habit, were hard but necessary. As the weeks passed, Muriel came to cherish Crystal’s ability to listen and her

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refreshing willingness to take Muriel seriously. “I think I just never had someone I could sit down and talk with and be able to free the dam of tears,” Muriel explained.

The Covenant House counselors noted in the log one weekday in the fall of 2010 that it was going to be a “heavy” day for Muriel. The results were due from her psychological tests at a local chil- dren’s diagnostic center, and the staff suspected they would be hard to hear.

A few months earlier, she had been completely annoyed to have to attend a daylong evaluation of her mental functioning, at her mother’s insistence. She had still been working for an escort service and using drugs at the time, and she was the oldest patient at the center by about twelve years. She felt that everyone talked to her with a “goo goo gah gah” tone of voice, and she hated being at the center a full nine hours, being asked about squiggly lines and the meanings of blotches. Beyond all of that, she had never done particularly well on tests, and the long day of testing made her head spin.

The results of the tests showed her to have been affected by exposure to alcohol before she was born. She had “alcohol-related neurodevelopmental disorder,” a form of fetal alcohol syndrome. The disorder’s symptoms sounded familiar—sleep disturbances, attention and learning defi cits, and diffi culties with emotional bonds. Her test scores showed serious problems with following rules, keeping safe, and regulating her behavior.

Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD), a range of disorders that includes fetal alcohol syndrome, may well be one of the most daunting diagnoses a young person can receive. The painful con- sequences are all the more maddening because they stem from someone else’s actions. According to Muriel’s diagnostic report, people with the disorder have diffi culty keeping consequences in mind while making decisions, which leads to a pattern of making choices that aren’t in their best interests. Many people with the

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disorder can be easily manipulated and often act out sexually, a combination ripe for exploitation.

One study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that more than half of adolescents with the condition had been suspended from school, almost 30 percent had been expelled, and a quarter had dropped out. About 60 percent of adolescents and adults with FASD have been in trouble with the law, and about half of adolescents show inappropriate sexual behaviors. Many have diffi culty forming emotional attachments, which may explain the numerous challenging issues Muriel faced in childhood but which also saved her from falling in love with her pimps. The syndrome is basically a prediction of likely lifelong failure—80 percent of people with it can’t live independently, and almost half of all adults with the syndrome have alcohol and drug problems. Young people do much better if the condition is discov- ered before they are six. Muriel was nineteen.

Muriel was hanging out with the staff members in one of their offi ces when she fi rst read the report of her test results. “Stupid people, who do they think they are?” she railed, not recognizing the girl described in the report. Crystal just listened, heavy- hearted that Muriel was taking the news so hard but hoping that it would help her in the end—that an understanding of her diagno- sis would make it more possible for her to overcome her problems. Although the diagnosis provided an explanation for a number of puzzling behaviors during her young life, Muriel looked at it more as a downright insult. She did not want to feel broken, and it galled her that the news essentially bolstered what she saw as her mother’s belief that Muriel could never meet the family’s goals for her.

For months at the shelter, Muriel had struggled to earn her way back to her mother’s home. The staff noticed how Muriel’s mother seemed uncomfortable with the idea, perhaps worn down by years of rebellion, domestic strife, and searches for fruitless yet

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expensive solutions. She erected hurdles for Muriel to cross, with the promise of welcoming her home, but then reneged and estab- lished new obstacles. It happened time and again: Muriel could come home if she returned to school, then if she quit drugs, but the goal post receded every time Muriel made progress.

The phenomenon is not uncommon among parents who have struggled with their children’s behavior for years and then rel- ish the peace at home once their son or daughter is gone. Many parents worry that they are unprepared to manage their children’s behavior on their return, and without appropriate support services, they may be right.

Gradually, with the help of regular therapy at the shelter, Muriel realized that she was never going to meet her mother’s ever-changing expectations and had to live for herself. It would take time.

Muriel’s friend beamed with pride as she showed Muriel her pimp’s apartment in Gastown, the hip neighborhood known for its gas- lights and cobblestone streets that bordered Vancouver’s harbor. The two-bedroom apartment had a stainless steel kitchen, a beauti- ful balcony, and access to a sauna, a pool, and a fi tness room. It looked like an elegant set-up, half a world away from Muriel’s shared room in the shelter. In fact, it was a “micro-brothel,” accom- modating one or two prostituted girls, easily hidden from the police, often found nowadays in high-rise condominiums and upper- income neighborhoods.

The girlfriend called Muriel a few nights later, asking her to come live there. Muriel quickly told her counselors she was going back to turning tricks. She had grieved over her time in prostitu- tion, but she could not shake its pull. Sister Nancy recognized the pattern, having seen a number of traffi cking victims go back to prostitution while in the process of breaking free of it. And Muriel

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was free to leave—Covenant House’s central principles include the belief that young people choose their own paths, even if that means going backward sometimes. Transformation does not hold up any other way.

Yet when Muriel left, she took with her a certain phrase that hounded her. Somebody at Covenant House, no one remembers who, had planted a stubborn seed within her.

“ They told me, ‘It’s your decision to go back,’ ” Muriel said, “and also, ‘You’re so much better than that.’ ”

Crystal felt deeply sad to see her go but remembered how Muriel had struggled with prostitution’s strong grip, often con- fessing that she didn’t know whether she could give up the drugs and the money. Of course, Muriel didn’t ever have control over her income. She learned that early on when her fi rst pimp took her shopping for fancy clothes, bought with money she had already earned for him by having loveless sex with a parade of johns.

When she was “working,” the PI’s, as she called her three suc- cessive pimps, dominated her life, never leaving her alone, hacking into her phone, keeping her on a strict diet, making her and the other girls wake up at six o’clock, and working them almost all of the time. Her pimps kept drugging her with GHB, the date rape drug or “G,” which, when mixed with alcohol, makes people black out. It is often a sexual stimulant, and the pimps tricked her into taking it by mixing it with the cocaine she craved. The combina- tion compelled her to do what she didn’t want to do.