Soldiers on the Front Lines of Hope

As streams of holiday shoppers pass her by, Marjorie Moorhous stands in the Santa Monica Promenade, ringing a bell and continuously smiling.

Hers is the face most people envision when they think of the Salvation Army. When donors plop change into her kettle, she gives back a hug and a “God bless.” And when they walk away, she remarks how good it feels to know the money is going “to help folks who need the Army’s help.”

Behind the bell-ringers are the people donors rarely see: a dedicated army of staffers and volunteers in the Salvation Army’s Southern California Division. From Orange County to San Louis Opisbo, they run hundreds of programs, everything from services for senior citizens to recreation centers for impoverished youth.

In downtown Los Angeles, Salvation Army programs target people facing hard times. Among them are Bethesda House, a shelter for families affected by HIV and AIDS; Harbor Light, a drug rehab facility on skid row; and the L.A. Day Care Center, which provides child care for parents working in the garment district.

The Salvation Army’s efforts 365 days a year are taking place today amid a changing environment for social service agencies. Limits on welfare and cutbacks in publicly funded social services have had a dramatic effect on the poor and their providers, said Susan Smith, a professor of social work at USC. “The government is relying on nonprofits like the Salvation Army to fill in the gaps,” Smith said.

Unusual Shelter

Norma Ramirez did not know where to turn. She had three children and a boyfriend who abused her. She was homeless and had been diagnosed as HIV-positive. Hoping to keep her family together, Ramirez, 28, turned to Bethesda House.

The facility on West 9th Street is unusual among shelters for people affected by HIV and AIDS because it can serve entire families. This holiday season 40 people are living there, including grandmothers, mothers, fathers and children.

Among those who are HIV-positive, some know how they became infected and aren’t afraid to tell. “It was during my years chasing the crack pipe,” said one mother. Others say they just ran out of luck.

Ramirez’s story is typical of the tortured journey many have made before arriving here.

As she recalls her recent past, Ramirez sits on her bed, looking content, surrounded by her children in the first safe and comfortable place she’s lived in for years.

In her room the walls are done up with a flowery pastel wallpaper. Stuffed bears hang above her bed, put there to entertain her three children.

Ramirez landed here, she admits, mostly because of her own bad choices and an ex-boyfriend. His name is tattooed on her chest, accompanied by a heart and rose.

He abused her regularly, punching her and forcing her to have sex, she recalls. Though he knew he was HIV-positive he never said a word until it was too late. She says she got the disease from him. Even so, she remained dependent on him. “He would tell me, ‘You have AIDS, who’s gonna want to go with you?’ I started to believe it, to believe maybe I wasn’t worth very much.”

This summer--desperate, living in a single room with six other people and trying to pry herself from the boyfriend, Ramirez was referred by a social worker to Bethesda House.

“I just don’t know where I’d be without this place” she says now, sighing and looking downward. “I just don’t know.”

“They’ve made me understand he’s bad and that I have good things about me. And they make me understand if I see him more, I will probably lose my children.”

Bethesda House is comforting but it is not large or luxurious. From the outside, and even in much of its sparse interior, the three-story building looks like an insurance office. Residents and their families live in single-bedroom units on the third floor. They spend most of their free time on the second, where there is a large meeting room, a play area for children and a TV set that plays English channels one day, Spanish the next.

One man, who said he had lost hope, says the best thing about Bethesda House is the way it sounds. People are around; they talk; children scream and cry. This makes him feel like living.

The residents here connect their future to their bodies’ ability to handle the cocktail of drugs known as protease inhibitors, which they call their “meds.” One woman says she reacted badly to her first doses and stopped taking them. Now her T-cell count is down, her viral loads are up and she’s hoping to give it another try. If the pills work she’s sure she can bounce back.

The pills, some of which must be refrigerated, have to be taken at rigidly specific times. Staff members dole out up to 40 of them each day, at required times, sometimes hours before dawn.

Bethesda House has a staff of 12 nurses, aides, counselors and child care specialists. They provide therapy sessions in everything from anger management to parenting skills. They also link residents to job training centers and colleges.

“We try to treat the family holistically” says Anne Calvo, Bethesda House’s director, who operates on a $1.3-million annual budget. To do that, Calvo tries to provide a space where people can carve out some stability in their lives. With stability comes health, she says, and with health survival.

For Ramirez the goal is simple. The staff wants her to spend the next year gaining back her strength and self-confidence. She can leave when she’s ready.

“I feel I have the time now to just spend my days with my kids, just loving and caring for them,” she says, looking out a window, bouncing 1-year-old Jenny on her knee.

A Beacon of Hope

The addicts and dealers who live on the streets near the Salvation Army’s Harbor Light drug treatment shelter call their neighborhood “the nickel.”

It’s a play on the fact that they find themselves on 5th Street, the heart of Los Angeles’ skid row, and the fact that the bags of crack that consume so many of their lives are sold in $5 increments.

Bruce Montgomery was once one of them.

A hard-core crack addict who used drugs for 23 years, he likes to show a picture of what he looked like when he went to Harbor Light in 1991, looking to reclaim his life. Comparing the picture with how he looks now--bright smile, healthy skin, sharp clothes--is the ultimate before-and-after tale.

In the picture, he looks sick and weak and has a haunting snarl.

“Don’t look too happy, do I?” he asks. “I was fighting them urges to get back on my high. . . . I just kept telling myself, over and over, ‘Don’t drink and don’t use, no matter what.’ ”

It’s been eight years since then. Montgomery hasn’t used any drugs, he says. Hasn’t had a drink.

Montgomery is now a shining role model for the 250 men living at Harbor Light, which along with Safe Harbor, a companion facility across the street that serves women, is one of the most successful drug and alcohol rehab shelters on skid row.

John Horne, a former California Highway Patrol officer who is now director of Harbor Light, calls Montgomery “one of my pearls.” Montgomery worked his way up from a torturous two-week stay in the facility’s detox unit to where he is now, a full-time employee, Horne’s administrative assistant.

According to the Salvation Army, Harbor Light, which has been in operation since 1944, has a remarkable success rate: Close to 50% of the desperate souls who decide to sign up for help turn their lives around and get off drugs.

Harbor Light relies heavily on the 12-step recovery method and on using work as a tool for building responsibility and self-esteem.

Spirituality is important but not forced. As an evangelical organization, the Salvation Army at Harbor Light offers church services and Christian counseling, but members of other faiths are taken in like family. Montgomery, for instance, is a Muslim.

Before entering Harbor Light, the addicts have hit rock bottom, what Montgomery calls “the pit of hell.” Many know this is the last stop. To fail at rehab will spell doom. “I don’t want to die an addict; that’s where I’m headed if I don’t get help,” one says.

The residents usually stay about six months. The successful ones make a transition to a halfway house and living on their own. Many, like Montgomery, choose to keep working at Harbor Light.

“If I didn’t have this place, know where I’d be? I’d probably be dead by now,” says Montgomery. “So it’s not too much for me to stay here and put myself to the task of helping others get where I am today.”

A Problem Solved

Four blocks south of Harbor Light, in Los Angeles’ garment district, a white minivan pulls up to the Salvation Army’s L.A. Day Care Center, at 9th and Stanford streets. It is 7 a.m. and the minivan is following what has been, for the last half-hour, a steady stream of cars that have stopped briefly and deposited tiny Latino children at the center’s front door.

Out of the minivan pops Daniel Sanchez with his daughter, 6-year-old Erica, who has been coming here since she was 2.

She is one of 120 children, ranging in age from 2 to 12, who attend the day care center. The older ones stop by briefly in the morning, go to 9th Street Elementary School across the street and come back in the afternoon. The younger ones stay all day. They attend classes until just after lunch, then play until the parents start arriving at 4 p.m.

The center, which first opened at its current location in 1922, fills a vital need for people like Sanchez, who works in the garment district. For these parents, finding quality, affordable day care is a significant problem.

An increasing number of the center’s parents, almost all of whom are Latino, come from Central America. The garment district provides their jobs, but not a lot of pay. Sara Varela, the director, says the average weekly salary for parents who take their children there is under $200 a week.

On that salary, the $55 per month required to send their children to the day care center remains a sacrifice, but it is still less than they would pay at other places or for other options.

“The cost is a godsend” says parent Maria Rodas, who works as a seamstress. “If the center were not here, I would probably have to pay for a person to look after my daughter. That would cost a lot more each month and wouldn’t help her with education.”

Sanchez says the fact that the day care center is close to his work gives him great comfort. “If my daughter is sick, or we need to be there for an emergency, we can be there right away.”

He sends his daughter to a well-appointed facility that is airy, bright and spacious. Children play and take classes--part of the center’s new Head Start program--in corner rooms filled with foot-high chairs and cut-out pictures of reindeer, flags and angels.

Rebecca Rolin, 10, has been attending for seven years. She says she can’t imagine being taken care of anyplace else. “It’s nice here, we play, we go on trips, and when you get big you can help the little kids. . . . To me, they make you feel like family.”

A Sense of Urgency

One of the great strengths of the Salvation Army is consistency. Helping people living on the margins has been its mission since it was established in the slums of London in 1865.

It has been in Los Angeles for 111 years.

“They’re always there and they know, from years of doing it, how to make a difference for the poor,” says Todd Rosin, a spokesman for the United Way of Greater Los Angeles.

Horne, the Harbor Light director, says that in today’s turbulent times for nonprofits, consistency continues to be key. He says the welfare overhaul has provided Harbor Light with what he calls a “palpable sense of urgency.”

His clients, who help pay for their treatment with large portions of their welfare checks, now get assistance for shorter periods of time. So Horne says his rehab efforts have become more condensed.

“I’ve got to get the same amount of services into a tighter time frame.”

In the end, he says, the Salvation Army, is not “going to get squeezed out by this new atmosphere.” If anything, he adds, “these changes have caused us to do our job better than ever.”