I have a lot I can talk about. Hollywood has been extremely challenging, eye-opening and important. Just this past week I have dealt with giant, difficult issues that have made me grow in so many directions and have changed the way I view the world. I want to share one story that I got to experience this week that gave me hope and happiness, while also made me question the traditional ways things are always done.
I met Lonnie (not his real name) on Wednesday when I, along with two co-workers, went to bring him to the DMV to get a California State ID. I never realized how important identification was in a person’s life until I heard about it firsthand. To board a plane, use a credit card, rent a house, get a bank account, go to a bar, buy cigarettes or even get a library card, you need to have some form of identification. I assumed that this was an easy process and most people could simply stop by a DMV and the rest would handle itself. For those who are homeless or those who are in the US illegally, the simple process becomes immensely complex.
At the DMV, I happened to sit down right next to Lonnie and for about twenty minutes, I was privileged enough to hear Lonnie’s story through his own slurred speech and crooked teeth. He explained that he was a veteran who fought in the Vietnam War. He was a father to two daughters he adopted as babies. He was a husband and an adulterer. He was a friend and a brother. He was all of these things, but who is he now? He considers himself nobody. He is homeless. For many years he slept in the same cardboard box in front of an old building just blocks away from our community house. I don’t know exactly how Lonnie got to this point, but it was a mixture of mental illness, lack of benefits and support from being a veteran and a nasty divorce. Lonnie would say hi to the outreach workers, but would never take in their offers to get shelter or receive services. That all changed on a really lucky day of a street sweep. During these “sweeps” the LAPD clears an area of homeless people and calls in PATH to help advocate for the homeless and help talk them into going into shelter. Otherwise, often, the LAPD will arrest them. It was during one of these days that Lonnie finally felt ready and trusting enough to get into shelter.
After many months of working with services, receiving medication and working hard with a case manager, Lonnie was on his way to permanent housing. The first big step?An identification card. This card to Lonnie means that he is no longer nobody. He can now prove to others along with himself that he is a person with feelings, emotions, ideas and dreams. This identification card is also the next step towards housing.
After waiting for about two hours, Lonnie fills out the paperwork and goes up to the front. You can tell he is nervous, but he has three people next to him to support him. It is extremely important that the three of us (A veteran worker, my co-workers and I) are there. It is very obvious that if he would have went alone, treatment would have been very different than when we all were next to him in our PATH shirts. He fills out all the proper paperwork and hands them to the clerk. The clerk look them over and tells us that he needs an official document that is stamped by the VA to be able to give him an ID. We all look sullen, thank him, and start to walk away, thinking, maybe another day. Just then, Lonnie pulls out of his wallet a tiny, shrunk up piece of paper folded multiple times. He opens it up and there he has the exact document stamp and all! The clerk takes it in the back for a long time, comes back and says that they’ll accept it. To boot, he waved the fee. Lonnie had a big smile when he took his ID photo.
That old building a few blocks from our house that Lonnie slept outside of for so many years is now turning into permanent housing through a partner organization of PATH’s. Lonnie is the first on that list for an apartment.
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