L.A.’s Haven for Homeless Women : Center Helps the Downtrodden Resurrect Their Lives

She is a shadow, moving purposefully, down a dark corridor. The approach of a stranger sends her scurrying faster, her bandaged arm, held in a sling, cleaves more closely to her side. As she moves busily from the gloom of the corridor to a brighter room, the light reveals a pretty young woman with terror in her carefully made-up eyes. She acknowledges a greeting with a twitch of a smile and widening eyes, then vanishes.

In the sunlit space she has left, the living room of the Good Shepherd Center for Homeless Women in Los Angeles, the pieces of a large puzzle lie scattered on a table. Rhonda Brooks, 32, is methodically putting the pieces together. (Brooks’ and other residents’ names have been changed to protect their identities.) It is therapy, she says, the poisons that accumulate from sleeplessness bagged under her eyes.

At the other end of the room, a woman naps with an open Bible on her lap while soap operas play on the television. Like the woman in the corridor, some are reluctant to speak about how they got here. Others welcome an audience.

A plump, giggly woman is seated on the sofa. She is 30, but looks and acts much younger. “Thumbed my way to Los Angeles,” Edith Reed says. “I always wanted to be in the movies.”

That wasn’t the only reason she left her home in Utah. Her foster mother abused her. “She would lock me in the closet.” Her real mother “left her in a plastic bag,” at birth. “ A dog found me,” she says, and kept her warm until police rescued her. “My older (foster) brother raped me.” At 13, “I had a nervous breakdown.” She’s been in and out of mental institutions ever since.

Her relationship with her foster mother, who’s sick now, is better than it was. It’s still not great, she says. But she’s going home. “It’s better than staying here and getting beat up.” A prostitute on Skid Row smashed her in the nose with a fist the other day. It wasn’t the first time. “She wants me to sell my body, but uh, uh,” she giggles, “there’s better ways to make a living.”

A white-haired woman, dressed in blue, turns from the afternoon melodrama eager to talk.

“This is my 53rd day here waiting for a place to go,” Ida Francis says. “I’m a survivor of an old pioneer family,” from the Rockies, she volunteers. She’s outlived one husband and was divorced by a second who stole all the insurance money the first one left her, she says. Her oldest son is a recovering alcoholic. Her younger daughter is partially brain damaged from an accident.

The elderly woman was living in a vermin-infested, crime-ridden tenement near MacArthur Park when her minister referred her to the Good Shepherd Center.

“Oh, I remember that song, “ Francis says suddenly, prompted by a commercial on TV: “All the gold in California, is in the middle of a bank in Beverly Hills in somebody else’s name.” She smiles and sighs, then talks about the oil stock she owns that hasn’t been paying well of late.

What Ida Francis says is probably true, according to Sister Julia Mary Farley, director of the Center. It is not unusual for a woman with a financially comfortable background to become homeless. But even if the stories the women at the center tell are exaggerated in some way, it doesn’t matter. The center is committed to helping homeless women--what society usually calls bag ladies--resurrect their lives without delving too deeply into their past.

The center prides itself on helping women achieve independence through job placements, psychological counseling or referrals to the appropriate social service agencies.

Victims of Abuse

Most of the women who come have been abused in some way. “Many are victims of the whole deinstitutionalization process,” says Kevin Flynn, a psychologist who counsels women at the center. They are women who have been released from mental institutions but have no place to go, no one to take care of them, he explains. “A larger group of them suffers from post-traumatic stress disorders that have become chronic,” he says, the same type of problem suffered by many soldiers who served in Vietnam.

Typically, Sister Julia Mary says, “these women are not assertive, they don’t know where to turn to for help, they don’t know how to present themselves” in public. Further, these women tend to come from impoverished families to begin with, they lack a sound education, says Sister Julia Mary. When they do fall on hard times, they have few resources to draw on.

The center, at 267 N. Belmont Ave., is housed in a former convent. Its target area is the Mid-Wilshire/MacArthur Park area, but it accepts women from other sections of the city. Its outreach program, run by Sister Anne Lanh Thi Tran, is housed in a van that combs the target area for homeless women. The mobile unit has food and hot coffee, available to any man, woman or child who needs it while supplies last.

Reluctant Women

Even with the lure of food and a hot drink, women are reluctant to come to the center, says Sister Ann. “It takes time to develop trust.” It may take 15 attempts before a woman actually accepts an invitation to the center, she says.

Grace Burton, a mountain of a woman from the Rockies, was one of the reluctant ones. “I didn’t mean to be so difficult,” she says now. “But I was so scatterbrained at the time.”

She speaks of her time on a park bench like a prison sentence. “I did 11 months on the bench,” she says of one stint. “You know what the difference is between being out there and here? Out there, you wake up at night alone, scratching board. Here you wake up with your hands on a real mattress. Out there, I’d have to walk blocks trying to get rid of excess energy. I’d have done anything for a mop or a dish rag. Here you have the opportunity to do chores, help. Out there, you’d get hypothermia. I was always cold no matter how hot it was. Out there, I got a nice egg thrown at me. Out there, I was nobody but a blob. Here, you know people care.”

Like Burton, others who come to the center find a serene, safe, communal environment.

Day-Care Program

There are private rooms that accommodate 24 women and a day-care program that allows women to come in for a shower, wash clothes, chat and eat a hot meal. And there is a well-stocked clothes closet the women are free to use, too. Looking good is an important way to reestablish self-esteem, the sisters say. And it allows the women to look well-groomed when they go out on job interviews.

More than 1,000 women have been served by the center since it opened in 1984 and “over half the ladies who leave here leave with a job,” says Annette Deschamps, a center volunteer. The maximum stay at the center is three months.

Typically, the women find jobs as live-in housekeepers or in clerical fields.

One young woman, Sister Julia Mary says, came from a good family but found herself homeless. She went to a Skid Row hotel and it was the effect of that experience that really traumatized her. “The walls were so thin you could hear the drug deals and prostitution going on right around her. She told us ‘I thought I had died and gone to hell,’ ” the sister says.

That young woman was brought to the center and stayed until she could regain her emotional health and find a job. She now has a clerical position at an area university.

Need for More Money

The center’s work has been accomplished on an annual budget of $130,000, most of it from donations, says Sister Julia Mary, and there is a need for more money--more everything--to continue its programs.

With the breakup of the family displacing women more and more, says Sister Julia Mary, and the government’s lack of commitment to low-income housing, she expects the number of homeless women to increase--and their age to drop. In the two years the center has been open, the average age of women seeking help has gone from 46 to 42.

Large cities will certainly bear the brunt of this distressed population, and warm spots like Los Angeles in particular, says Terry Hayes, founding president of the center’s board of directors. “They say homeless people travel toward the sun.”