In the News
Daddy Finds Some Help
Back From the Brink of Homelessness
Photographs by Channing Johnson
Story by Peter Jamison
Reprinted with permission from The Valley News
Making ends meet was never easy. During his years in Florida, Sergio Colon worked as a barber, his wife as a clerk and manager at a Wal-Mart. Creditors were always at the door. The couple even declared bankruptcy in 2003 to get out from under a rising mountain of debt.
But they brought in enough to make the $800 monthly rent on the house in North Port, Fla., where they cared for their five children. And there was enough, Colon said, to keep life “normal.” The kids got new shoes when they needed them. His wife, Deana, had grown up in poverty, and hated the sight of a bare refrigerator. She kept the larder stocked—sometimes with more food than they needed. Colon even made time to pursue a bachelor's degree in psychology at the University of South Florida.
Then Hurricane Charlie hit. The 2004 storm killed 35 and wrought an estimated $14 billion in damage, according to statistics from the National Weather Service. Deana's parents were forced to leave their homes because of storm damage. Soon afterward, Deana left her husband, taking three of the children with her.
To this day, Colon said, he is unsure why she left. But he knows this with certainty: Her departure marked the moment when he became afraid.
“I always feared I was going to be homeless after my spouse left,” he said. Today Colon, 42, doesn't appear indigent. He is articulate, clean-cut, with bright green eyes and sculpted blond hair that is just beginning to gray. On Tuesday, he was wearing an olive polo shirt, brown slacks and sandals—a wardrobe that seemed to fit with his relaxed manner. And he does have a home: a spare, two-bedroom cottage with carpeting and mostly bare walls on Fairview Terrace in White River Junction.
That's now. But what Colon dreaded did come to pass. He and his two sons moved into the Upper Valley Haven, the White River Junction homeless shelter for families, in August, not long after they moved to the Northeast.
In December they moved out again, into the house on Fairview Terrace.
In an interview at his home last week, Colon sat in one of the two armchairs in his living room, beside a window framing a sunny spring morning, and sketched the trajectory that led him and his sons to lose, and then regain, a place to call home.
After his wife left, Colon said, holding a job down was hard.
The younger of his two boys, Cameron, has fetal alcohol syndrome. He suffered from neglect and abuse before the Colons adopted him at the age of 4, Colon said. Cameron would often lash out in school, in one case head-butting a teacher who tried to restrain him. Colon said he was often called away from work in the middle of the day to retrieve his son from school. The bachelor's degree in psychology was put on hold.
Meanwhile, Colon said, money was getting scarce. His wife's departure had cut his household income in half, and he was having trouble working enough hours to pay the bills.
“When you're making $5,000 a month, and then you go down to $2,000, and then you go down to $1,500, it just gets harder and harder,” he said. And at the threshold of poverty, Colon said, “one wrong move"—a broken-down car, an unexpected medical bill—can send a family into a tailspin.
Hoping to improve their lot, Colon and his sons—Cameron is now 8 and Ethan is 10—moved to Lyndonville, Vt., where Colon had a close friend. But he had trouble finding housing, and a veterans representative from the labor board in St. Johnsbury (Colon served for in the Navy from 1988 to 1990) recommended that he turn to The Haven in White River Junction.
“I was terrified at first, because I was afraid I was going to lose my boys,” Colon said. He worried that government agencies might take his children away because he was homeless, and he worried about what it would be like to raise a family a shelter.
But when he first saw The Haven, he said, he began to feel at ease. “When I drove up to the building, I was just amazed, because it's a very nice building. It's not like a home. It's still an institutional setting. But it's clean. It was beautiful."
Colon and his sons moved into one of The Haven's “pods”—a suite of rooms that they shared with four other families. Their lives were organized around a tightly controlled schedule. The boys had to be bedded down by 9 p.m. Dishes had to be washed right after dinner.
Colon was required to start looking for work. Cameron and Ethan, he said, thought the shelter was “great.” And Colon said he didn't make any bones about explaining to his sons their sudden change in lifestyle. “I was just straightforward with them,” he said. “I told them that daddy's having trouble. That things have changed since mommy left and daddy needs some help.” After more than three months, Colon and his boys left The Haven. He had found a job working part-time at the Kmart in West Lebanon, but the hours weren't as flexible as he would have liked.
He would prefer work that fits better with his role as a full-time dad, and is looking into getting his cosmetology license in Vermont, so that he can resume barber work (Colon is already licensed in Florida). One serious tantrum aside, Cameron is doing well at White River School, Colon said.
Money is still tight. Rent for the house on Fairview Terrace is $1,000 a month, a sum that is offset by Cameron's disability checks from Social Security, as well as Colon's adoption subsidy for the two boys. The Haven helps out with food.
On the weekends, the family can't afford to do much. Colon worries about the cost of gas, or the temptation of buying something for his sons while out and about, so mostly they stay home.
But the boys are happy, Colon says, and he is too. He set aside the money refunded with his last tax return to buy Ethan a Nintendo DS handheld video-game system for his birthday this year, although he couldn't afford a game to go with it—Ethan's one game came from his aunt, Colon's twin sister.
Colon says he still is intent on finishing his bachelor's degree, perhaps working one day as a counselor for disturbed children. And his goal is to buy a house—somehow—within the next two years. But the trick to getting by, Colon says, is to focus day in and day out on the small stuff. His boys are happy. He seems proud he was able to buy his son a birthday gift at all. “If I don't think about the big goal, but think about these short-term goals, I feel better,” he said.
Peter Jamison can be reached at pjamison@vnews.com or (603) 727-3234.