Newsday Article --Reaching Out to the Homeless

http://www.newsday.com/mynews/ny-p2bottom23371301jul15,0,7666381.story
From Down-and-Out to Reaching Out

Katti Gray
Katti Gray's e-mail address is kgray@ newsday.com.

July 15, 2003

Freda Thomas moved 16 years ago from her native Atlanta to the Big Apple, enticed by its standing as one of few cities with the capacity to make a girl heady and sober her up all at once.

Feeling called to a Northern life, she enrolled and earned a degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology. Eventually, she started graduate studies at New York University but stopped, preferring instead to be in the marketplace. Because she is an artisan, Freda chose to work designing wardrobes for the stage. Then, she created and sold greeting cards to boutiques and discount retailers from an office loft in the old, now gentrifying Brooklyn Navy Yard. Today, she is a consultant to small businesses and temp worker in a multinational bank.

She, too, is a self-appointed counselor to the homeless, having tested those waters personally and, in that, learned firsthand what are a homeless being's needs. "This Is A Resource Pamphlet Providing Places To Get Food, Medical Care, Counseling and More ... " are the big words blaring from the front of a brochure she drafted and laid out on her very own home computer, had printed and passes out to the homeless at places where they gather. The brochure lists locales and informational hot lines from Nassau County and throughout parts of New York City, neighborhoods where a bad economy and sinfully inflated housing costs have pushed out of doors more people than many of us care to admit. It also lists hopeful words about having the faith to fly.

For half a decade, beginning around 1996, Freda had no roof of her own. The greeting card business had imploded and, with months of unpaid rent on her tab, the Navy Yard threw her out and has since begun signing up tenants with much deeper pockets.

For those five years, Freda stumbled through, sleeping on a couch in her office loft until that eviction notice came. Unobtrusively as she could, she began bunking out with friends, using one's shower and extra bedroom, another's stove and another's air-conditioning. Some whom she counted as friends did the favor of handing her keys to their front doors. Some did not. Sometimes a friend would allow her inside and, perhaps without intending, make her feel unwelcome, a bother. A housed woman's temperament can collide with the bruised tenderness of a woman forced out of doors. Ambivalence of that sort, from a friend doing a favor, made Freda cry.

At her lowest, she considered suicide but figured her spirit would not rest knowing that a daughter dying that violent death would surely kill her mother back in Georgia. So Freda suffered and in the midst of it, vowed that if - no, when - she emerged from the muck, she would provide a meaningful service.

"I wrote down, like in 1997, the things I wanted to accomplish once I came through the darkness. I kept those things and as soon as I moved into the apartment, I put them on the wall," said Freda, who is back on her feet again.

Untouched, the list remained there until the U.S. militia launched into its latest war in the desert. That made her angry and fueled her desire to do a deed that might forward the cause of humanity. And what came to her mind was that list on the wall and her vivid remembrance of dragging her bare essentials from one friend's borrowed bathroom to the next.

Homelessness made Freda feel "like God had abandoned me. I thought I was being punished. I could not imagine what I had done to deserve this.... Homelessness made me know what it was like to be hungry, like continuously, a long time."

She burst out laughing at that juncture.

"I knew various stages of hunger," she said, her words garbled by her unabated guffaw. "There's hunger where you can drink two or three glasses of water and, for four or five hours, you will be all right. There's hunger that is so prolonged that you can have a headache for four or five days.... When the food runs out, it's not like you're Jesus Christ, where you can pray over that macaroni-and-cheese and it will last until Sunday. Once you eat, it's gone."

That she can deliver that comedic punch - when the heart of the story is not funny - is proof of her rising through the pain and having the courage to talk about it.

Many of us forget that the potentially homeless also are regular people a paycheck or corporate scandal away from losing their shelter. The needy to whom Freda extends herself are senior citizens, children, men and women of almost every stripe and resume, color and size.

They are people stripped by homelessness and often hoping still. Outside the Church of the Epiphany on the Upper East Side - where I, curious, played some bit part as Freda's assistant in brochure delivery the other day - stood a pretty older woman, an immigrant with a tan face, wearing lipstick, copper earrings I coveted and a skirt of gauzy white cotton. She took a brochure. So did the young woman in a Victoria's Secret baseball cap, who asked whether any of the shelters listed received woman guests. So did the guy wondering what's on the menu at some other soup kitchen. He hates meat loaf and, oops, he did not mean to sound ungrateful, for he appreciates Epiphany's mealtime.

"I said, 'Honey, if you don't like it, you don't like it. It doesn't matter how hungry you are,'" said Freda, who accepts helpful hints for the homeless at fltconsult02@aol .com.

So far in her effort with the brochures, Freda said, "I have yet to meet anyone who is volatile or hostile. These people are meek and mild and touch me: They are just so thankful for a piece of paper with a little bit of information on it. ... They've asked me how come I'm doing it. I say, 'When I look at you, I see myself.'"
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