How She Was Nearly Homeless. How You Helped.
Someone was crying.
It’s not a sound we typically hear around our office, but the quiet sobs were unmistakable. After glancing around a few corners, it became clear the crying was coming from Leticia’s cubicle.
A peek inside revealed Leticia wrapped head-to-foot in a blanket, hunched over her desk, weeping.
“I just talked to Ms. Gloria,” the blanket said. “She was so grateful for the help. She thought she might end up homeless.”
I asked why she was crying, and she replied, “It’s not always easy to see the value of our work, but then there are moments like this—when we keep people safe in their homes…this is why I do this work.”
Our eviction-prevention work enabled Ms. Gloria to stay in her home, safe, and off the streets, but it’s important people understand how she got to this point.
We sat down with her to hear some of her story:
“I worked at Home Depot for years, but one day I got to work and just felt so tired. I could barely stand. I knew something was wrong, this wasn’t just a lack of sleep or something, but my boss told me he couldn’t hold my job for me. I’d been there years, but he didn’t have a problem letting me go. When I went home that last day of work, I thought I’d just go home and die. I really thought that would happen. Instead, I went to the hospital on the way and they rushed me to the ER. I was in a cloud…I remember hearing people talk in these scary, urgent voices, and I was fading in and out of consciousness. It turned out I went a-fib—they lost me for awhile but managed to bring me back.”
That’s when Gloria found out she had stage four kidney failure. She needed a transplant and had to go on dialysis. In a matter of days, she went from working all day and lifting heavy bags of cement to being jobless on the brink.
“I fight hard. Always have…
but as I get older, it’s getting harder and harder to fight. God has always gotten me through everything. Really, everything. So I know if I do end up on the street, God will get me through it. That’s just what God does.”
Since losing her job, Ms. Gloria is doing a little better, but only a little. She lives day to day, month to month trying to make ends meet and take care of herself and her family.
“I always imagined dying of a heart attack, ya know? They’d find me in the morning and that would be that. But having this…with the huge needles and the dialysis and the treatments…” she pauses, fighting back tears. “It’s just too much sometimes. It’s overwhelming.”
The simple story you might hear about people who end up homeless is that they’re on drugs, they’re lazy, or they’re mentally ill. Those are sometimes true, but many people living on the streets of San Diego today are more like Gloria: hard working people whose life changed suddenly, some emergency slammed into them like a truck and they had to make a series of nearly impossible decisions.
This is why we keep people in their homes. This is why we ask you to prevent evictions. When you give to this work, you buy people a little more time to figure things out. Ms. Gloria was able to bring a roommate into her spare room, increasing her income, and she is picking up additional income wherever she can. Life isn’t suddenly ‘easy’, but it’s far better for her still being in her home than for her to figure all this out on the streets.
So to all of you who gave to One Month Away: thank you.
You are impacting lives.
Special thanks to two amazing partners, The San Diego Foundation and The San Diego Housing Commission for helping make this eviction prevention work possible!