Hope for the Holidays

Check out the article in the Nov. 23 Post & Courier, written by Jennifer Berry Hawes about a few of the guests currently staying at One80 Place. The article details the struggles and hopes of three current guests and how they are finding hope at One80 Place. To read the article online, visit http://bit.ly/11Pm0lS.

Residents of One80 Place homeless shelter see hope for holidays despite hurdles
As Charleston greets the holidays with a traditional gluttony of food, thanks and shopping this week, the region's largest homeless shelter is helping those whose main wish this season is mere survival.

One80 Place, formerly Crisis Ministries, is spending its first Thanksgiving in a new home - and is giving hope to the hundreds who will pass through its new doors this season without food or shelter or much reason to feel thankful or merry at all.

Many arrive here after crashing hard onto the rock bottom of substance addictions. Others struggle with chronic mental illnesses. Few, if any, know the prosperity of local growth and development.

And most have suffered traumas such as sexual abuse and physical assaults. A surprising number have landed here, with only temporary shelter separating them from the streets, due to domestic abuse.

For them, the promise of physical safety and a helping hand means facing the holidays with a hope they hadn't imagined possible before.

The horrors of abuse
It's hard to fathom that a man would try to saw off his own wife's foot. So, Carolyn Merida lifts a pant leg to show a thick band of scarring around her ankle to prove it.

Another time, she says, her husband threw simmering grits at her, leaving bands of speckled scars strewn across her hands and chest. He broke her wrist and busted her knee. He knocked out nine of her teeth.

He even cut her long blonde hair while she slept, she says.

In 2011, the last time he beat her, Merida's husband pounded her head into a mirror. She woke from a coma in a hospital where she lingered for three weeks. Doctors grafted skin from other parts of her body to repair her face. Deep and jagged scars remain along her forehead, cheeks and nose, reminders of her former life.

"When I woke up, I realized that I could be dead," Merida recalls. "It was enough."

Terrified, she took their daughter and escaped. First, they ran to Connecticut.

But he found them there.

Then they fled to Philadelphia. He found them there, too.

Terrified for her safety, and for her daughter's future, Merida dropped the child off at her brother's house in Kansas where she knew the now 10-year-old would be safe and loved and could heal from all that she had witnessed.

Then Merida kept running. She ran all the way to South Carolina, finally to Charleston.

But here, with no job, no money, her mind and body scarred, she ran up bank overdrafts. Then she faced criminal charges, too.

In May, she came to One80 Place and planned her new life. She turned herself in to police, served her jail time and returned to the shelter last month. Now she is rebuilding.

"I decided to stay here and not run anymore," Merida says. "I want to get myself together."

She arrived with only a bus ticket her brother paid for - no driver's license, no social security card, no birth certificate, no money, no job and no car. Escape had meant leaving home with nothing but her life and her daughter.

Today, One80 Place staff are helping her file for divorce, apply for Medicaid, get food stamps and a bus ticket. They also helped her find potential employers along the bus lines. Merida figures she applied at 60 places before finally, a month ago, landing a job in a local Chick-fil-A kitchen.

She loves it, and few things these days make her more proud than a paycheck. She is paying off her $2,500 in overdraft charges, plus probation costs, and then hopes to save enough to go visit her daughter.

She pulls out a small photograph of a smiling girl with brown eyes and dark hair she hasn't seen since last year. Merida hopes to land a second job so she can save more.

As far as she knows, her husband is in Guatemala, his home country. "But I'm still looking behind me," she adds.

Next, she will scout out housing options with help from the One80 Place staff.

"I would have been living on the street," she says. "Thank God they were here for me."

'All I could do was pray'
Timothy Isaac Wilson's father died when the boy was 7. His single mom did her best but in many ways lost her child.

"My father was the streets," Wilson recalls. "But at home, my mom taught me to pray."

He would need it.

Because while the streets took him in, alcohol took him over.

Wilson started drinking in early high school and never stopped, not until after he landed at a homeless shelter three decades later, spent and lost. Even then, he didn't stop. Not at first anyway.

Wilson arrived at One80 Place a year ago after he'd "lost everything."

He lost it all because of his alcohol addiction and the fact that he hit his girlfriend. He pleaded guilty to criminal domestic violence and served 17 days in the county jail. His boss, who had tried to get him help, let him go. His landlord served him with eviction papers.

Wilson got out of jail with no job, no home and no help.

"I didn't know what I was going to do or how I was going to do it," Wilson says. "All I could do was pray. It turned out, that was all I had to do."

He was convinced that the Timothy Isaac Wilson who hit his girlfriend wasn't him, not the him he felt lived deep down, the one drowning in alcohol. Still, he couldn't stop drinking.

On his birthday last year, he went to a bar and got so drunk that he fell off a bar stool and cracked his head hard enough to wake up in a hospital.

One80 Place, which has a no-alcohol rule, booted him. Wilson landed on the streets for more than a month before he got serious about needing - and sticking with - help.

The shelter's staff took him back in with a warning: "This is your last chance."

Wilson found help at Alcoholics Anonymous, one alcoholic helping another. On Nov. 18, he says, he celebrated one year sober. Now 45, he has a safe place to stay in One80 Place's new shelter for men and has held a job in a local marina's kitchen since this summer. He's saving and planning to move into his own apartment nearby in the next week or so. He's also getting help with depression and anxiety at the local mental health center.

"Everything I lost, God has given it back to me," he says. "I've just got to be thankful."

God also gave him a gift, he says, to write biblical poetry. One recent day while walking through the men's shelter, he recites it in a haunting, rhythmic spoken-word form that blends the grim passions of the streets with the articulate pain of a boy whose promise was lost there. Until now.

Ticket to a new life

When Samoya Hall boarded an airplane in Colorado and watched the door close, she tried to imagine the new life awaiting her in an old city on the Atlantic Ocean.

She pictured a life without fear and violence where her kids wouldn't witness the horrors of domestic abuse again.

"It was an historic day in my life," Hall recalls. "When they closed that plane door, I started a new chapter in my life."

It was just a month ago when she and two of her daughters, who are 7 and 9, left their old lives. When the plane took off, one daughter turned to Hall and said, "This is the best decision you ever made!"

Hall partly smiled, partly cried for all that her children had witnessed.

"They have seen so much," Hall says. "Now we're trying to move past what we have been through."

She didn't know anyone in Charleston, but a domestic violence group bought her a ticket to escape to a new life with her kids thousands of miles from her ex-boyfriend.

But when she landed, the battered women's shelter where she had planned to stay had no record of her call. So she went to One80 Place, desperate. They took her in that night.

During a quiet moment last week while her girls were at their new school, Hall recounted the five years she spent with her ex-boyfriend. They were filled, she says, with violence, including many times he pounded her face until she was bloody and a few when he even tried to strangle her.

The last time was four years ago. She landed in a hospital, blood vessels in her eyes burst, a giant knot on her forehead, nose swollen, bleeding from injuries to her face.

Her boyfriend spent seven months in jail. Hall spent time planning her escape.

Suddenly a pregnant single mother, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms entered the spaces in her mind that fear once filled. On the worst day, she called social services to come get her four children and keep them safe.

It would take a three-year battle to get them back, to prove she could care for them.

"I knew I loved my kids enough," she says.

That's when the domestic violence group bought her a plane ticket to Charleston.

Two of her six children are with her and have enrolled at their new school. Two who are younger will come once Hall finds a job and a new home. Her oldest lives with his father, who isn't the man who abused her. A cousin with no children adopted her baby girl so she could grow up away from the abuse.

These days, Hall is going on job interviews in her field of medical billing.

"I'm thankful. It's not about the roof over your head. It's about what goes on under that roof," Hall says. "And now we are safe, and my kids will be able to thrive."

She also plans to use her nightmare to reach out to other domestic violence survivors in her new hometown.

"Homelessness becomes part of the cycle because you've lost yourself," Wilson says. "Now I am going to be a voice for people suffering domestic violence. I'm not going to be a victim again."