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Homeless Bed Down For Night In Winter Hospitality Shelter By PATRICIA DADDONA Norwich — With rain, wind and even snow threatening this week, the Central Baptist Church opened its doors downtown Sunday night to about a dozen homeless men and women in the city. Jim Chenette, a carpenter who hasn't worked in eight months, claimed a canvas cot in a corner near a fire exit until William J. Johnson, the case manager for Reliance House Inc., told him he needed to move away from the door. “I can't do the work (carpentry) no more,” Chenette said as he relocated to the middle of the room, where other men in their 40s and 50s shifted the cots from a scattershot arrangement into two neat rows. |
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Homeless Norwich resident Jim Chenette takes a nap before assisting in setting up cots at Central Baptist Church, which is opening its doors to the homeless community of the city. Chenette is sleeping under the portrait of the Rev. Minor G. Clarke, who helped found the church in the 1800s. |
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“I got no money coming in,” Chenette continued. “I got no house.” Over the years he said he has framed and Sheetrocked houses, condominiums, and buildings at the Providence Place Mall and Connecticut College, he said. Now, he suffers severe pain from a split vertebrae in his back. Undiagnosed aches radiate from his hip to his knee cap. “There's got to be something else I could do because I can't do carpentry no more,” he said. “I tried it. I lost two jobs in one week — one in one day and one in two hours.” Each winter, the city provides a nighttime shelter like this one for the homeless. Local churches take turns keeping a large room open from 7:30 at night to 7:30 the next morning. This Sunday, the first of many to come, Johnson and the men unrolled sleeping bags that had piled up around a plastic cooler marked “Kitchen Pots and Pans,” then signed in for the night. Lee-Ann Gomes, the director of social work for Norwich Human Services, asked each person a few questions privately on one side of the room. Near a small kitchen, as people settled in, one man lifted foil from a tray of sliced pumpkin pie, then carefully covered it again, waiting until it was offered. At the other end of the table, plastic cups, forks and knives were set beside a basket of croissants and some coleslaw. “It could happen to you,” the Reliance House Web site's homeless outreach page warns, noting that 3 million people are homeless in this country and two–thirds of them have experienced mental illness. “You think about it,” said Sam Powell, originally from New London, referring to his own fear of homelessness before it became reality. “You say, ‘I never thought it would happen,' but you see other people here, and we're all in the same boat. There's no shame there.” At first, Powell hadn't wanted to talk about it. “It's not one of the good days for me, down deep, you know,” he said. As he sat on the edge of a cot and leafed through the classified ads of a newspaper, he changed his mind, and spoke with optimism of finding work and “better pay” — that is, enough to afford a room of his own. Powell had only been working for a moving company for a month when he got fired because “me and my boss didn't see eye to eye,” he said. Bunking with friends “was getting kind of hectic,” he said. Although his friends insisted he stay with them, he said he didn't want to impose and left when he heard about the hospitality center. Others had not had anyone to stay with for some time. Chenette and others said they had “camped” in the woods to survive. For now, Powell said he is relieved he has a warm room to stay in. “I'm glad it's here,” he said of the center. “Oh, yeah, definitely... that there's people that care, taking the time out from being with their families. You can't be down. You got to pick your feet up and go again because there's something out there for everybody.” Return to ‘In the News...’ Page |