``Don't you hear me crying, can't you hear my plea?
I'm not asking for a miracle, won't you please help me?
My whole life is crumbling, it's about to corrupt
Time is running out, Lord, please lift me,
Lift me up.''
- ``Lord Lift Me Up,'' by Thomas, 15, a foster care child at Child Enrichment Center.
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Thousands of homeless exist in Augusta each year
Homeless slide show
A day on the streets
Money for homeless services
Agencies say resources low
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By Tom Corwin
Now George waits at a railroad turnstile on Greene Street for a day's work mowing lawns or roofing, gets his dinner out of the trash at Bojangles, and sleeps on foam padding beneath a pavilion near the Salvation Army shelter.
He knows it's his own fault - he got caught up in crack cocaine, drank too much and lost it all, including his wife and children. He just wants another chance to get his life back and to get off the street.
``It's really hard with no address and no phone number to get back up in the world,'' he said. ``A lot of us homeless, we don't have nowhere to go, you know?''
Monday is his 34th birthday. All he wants is to be somewhere else.
Growing problem
Those who work with the homeless in Augusta say the problem stems from every illness in society - poverty, alcoholism, mental disease, child abuse, spouse abuse, drug abuse, lack of health insurance and just plain bad luck. Thus a dozen different agencies seek to treat the symptoms by sheltering, feeding and clothing those they can. Sometimes there is counseling, sometimes there is success but more often they see some of the same people over and over.
As part of the consolidation plan last year, Augusta had to detail how it would treat what it estimated was 1,052 homeless in the area. But in the fiscal year ending in July, one of the area's main assistance agencies, Catholic Social Services, reported helping 5,804 homeless and turned away perhaps a thousand more because there was not enough money. The Salvation Army reported serving 1,500 people during the same time period.
National estimates on the homeless are sketchy - in 1988, 500,000-600,000 used emergency shelters or soup kitchens while the Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates about 7 million were homeless at some point in the last decade.
Locally, the agencies can't say for sure how big the problem is because only recently have they started to coordinate their records. They do know one thing - as their funding gets cut and as the country moves to cut off welfare benefits, the growing problem is going to explode.
``This group of people is going to be doubled,'' said Maxine Miller, director of Catholic Social Services.
And yet they may still be hard to see.
Sitting in her living room, she would look like any other mother in her clean white blouse, giving a visitor a slightly embarrassed smile while her three children race around the house kicking a beach ball. But Jaylie Coll is the face of a nearly invisible segment of the homeless, those not technically considered homeless because they have moved in with friends or relatives, but local agencies consider them part of the problem.
Ms. Coll, 33, knows all about that. For years when she was living in El Paso, Texas, she and her husband fought over his family's meddling in their marriage. Sometimes, he would boil over and hit her, she said.
``It got to the point I think it was affecting my children,'' she said. ``There was no peace in the house.'' Abuse often drives women to flee with the children and they often end up homeless, advocates say.
Last January, she fled to her brother's house in Augusta, where he is stationed at Fort Gordon. But she quickly realized his house was too small for her and her three children. She started looking for help.
``I was desperate,'' she said. ``I was pestering everybody trying to find somebody who could get me housing.''
Ms. Coll lucked out - in March, she moved into one of only 11 transitional homes in Augusta, designed to give homeless families months of stability while they sort their lives out. The home also provides necessary supplies such as diapers and food for daughter Zuli, Ms. Coll's 22-month-old perpetual motion machine. The family must set out and work toward goals and receives counseling and tutoring along the way.
The little grayish-green house in the Harrisburg community had been condemned and was donated to Urban Ministries, who, with donated labor, got it back into shape. With carpet and freshly painted white walls, it is as nice as any other on the street. It was there that Ms. Coll studied for and finally passed her high school-equivalency test. She would have gone to Augusta Technical Institute, but last month, she decided to move back to Texas and take a friend's offer of a free trailer home. Her oldest boy, Junior, 16, misses his friends in El Paso.
But it wasn't easy to leave.
``I really love this little house and I'm going to miss it,'' she said.
But it has served its purpose - her life has turned around, and she is moving on.
While many of the homeless are locals down on their luck, some are people who spent their last dollars to come to Augusta only to be put out on the streets by relatives, said Rebecca Wallace, executive director of Urban Ministries.
``It's amazing to me the people who will get in a car and drive to Augusta like it's some kind of paradise,'' Ms. Wallace said.
Most are from larger areas but neither local providers nor homeless advocates in Atlanta were aware of any dumping of homeless into Augusta.
Outside system
With his full white beard and a bag of cans slung over his back, Percy Garnett bears an uncanny resemblance to Santa Claus. But he is another face of the homeless - those who have learned to survive outside the system.
``I bought a new Cadillac every year,'' he said, grinning. But he also racked up a felony record with convictions for gambling and ``selling corn whiskey,'' he said. He was tossed out by a niece eight years ago and has been on the street since. And he is angry his record is being used against him now to keep him out of public housing.
``They're for low-income old people,'' he said. ``That's got nothing to do with what I did years ago.''
Actually, Mr. Garnett has lived in public housing twice before and his record is grounds to legally bar him from staying there, management director Leroy Williams said.
``Some people change as they get older, some people don't,'' Mr. Williams said.
One person Mr. Garnett can count on is singer James Brown, who grew up in Mr. Garnett's neighborhood and still remembers the man's kindness to him as a boy, Mr. Garnett said. Larry Fridie, Mr. Brown's special assistant, said the singer will often stop and give Mr. Garnett whatever he has in his pocket.
``Whatever comes out, that's what he gets,'' Mr. Fridie.
Artistic expression
While agencies battle the physical problems of families, there is still the toll it takes on the children, scars that become visible through art.
Inside the Child Care Enrichment Center, Andrew leans over the canvas mural spread out on the floor and carefully paints a purple box within the borders of his square. He slowly fills in the box with red, then yellow triangles, and fills in some borders around the box with blue. With each brush stroke, he repeats a mantra of how he wishes his stepfather were dead, of how he wishes to escape. He flashes from cocky to morose in the same sing-song tone of voice, the same half-smiling expression on his face.
``I like mine,'' he said, looking over the other paint-smeared squares where other children have painted pictures of angry moms and rainbows. ``Mine is the best. I hate myself.''
He's 14 years old, a runaway, and caseworkers at Child Enrichment Center say he is one of the worst abuse cases they've ever seen.
To protect the children's identities, The Augusta Chronicle agreed to use fictitious names for children at the center.
When the paints come out as part of a program through the nonprofit Art Factory, the children unburden themselves of horrors they carry from broken families and tough lives on the street. The President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities released a report in April that praised art programs aimed at homeless and at-risk youth for helping the youngsters develop self-esteem and steer them from crime.
But painting causes Andrew to remember.
``My mom used to get mad at me because I used to draw pictures of my soul being sacrificed by my stepdad because he was evil and stuff,'' Andrew says flatly. ``I feel sorry for all those kids who never get to experiment with art because their parents are against it.''
``Some of us do it anyway,'' says Thomas, quietly, as he sits at a table in the art room behind another youth, Michael. He has with him a black notebook of poems written out carefully in black calligraphy. His unfinished novel is written from the perspective of the abused son of the town's most prominent judge, ``a boy who gets well over $200 a week for an allowance,'' he writes. ``Well, as odd as it may seem, not all the money in the world could replace the one true thing that I so longed for - love.''
The things he writes about are true, though he is uncomfortable, and won't talk about the past. He has also has a hard time saying where he is now.
``How should I say where I am?'' he asks a center employee nearby, then turns back. ``Don't say shelter. I hate that word `shelter.'''
Dealing with shame
The children aren't the only ones who deal with shame. George is really the man's middle name - he wouldn't give his real name because he hopes to return soon to SRS and he doesn't want his past and future co-workers to know what happened to him. He says there are only three ways out of ``the shed,'' the pavilion where many homeless men sleep at night, tormented by flies, mosquitoes and occasional raids by the police.
``The first is jail, and I'm not EVEN trying to go to jail, un-unh,'' he said, as he walked past the carefully trimmed hedges of Sacred Heart Cultural Center.
``The second is to get a job, a good job, but you know that's hard,'' he said.
He doesn't say what the third way is. He doesn't have to.
A few minutes earlier, George had charmed his way into using the phone at the Salvation Army Thrift Store to make his daily call to Georgia Regional Hospital. He has been trying for weeks to get into their drug rehabilitation program, which only has a certain number of beds. But while he was trying to explain his situation, he was ordered off the phone. He borrowed a quarter and is now on a pay phone at a nearby service station on 13th Street.
He listens for a while and then he smiles.
``Oh I'll be there,'' he said. ``I'll be there with bells on.''
He had an appointment for 4 p.m. last Saturday.
No one has seen him since.
At least now he is somewhere else.
Staff Writer
Just four years ago he made $40,000 a year at Savannah River Site, a college-educated technician with an accountant for a wife and a nice trailer home in New Ellenton.
``There's so many homeless families doubled, tripled and quadrupled in homes,'' said Lynda Suarez, homeless coordinator for CSRA Economic Opportunity Authority. ``When a child sleeps on a floor and then is getting up and going to school, we are not providing the healthiest environment we can provide.''
Mr. Garnett, 76, proudly declares he has never worked a regular job in his life, preferring instead to run the gambling and whiskey houses that used to line Ninth Street.
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