Real Change News | Women share stories, solidarity

November 26, 2008
Vol: 15 No: 49

News

Women share stories, solidarity

by: Cydney Gillis , Staff Reporter

WHEEL rolls on.

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Linda Kenny didn’t plan to be homeless. But in 2004, after the end of a long and abusive relationship with a man who had supported her financially, she had a breakdown, lost her small publishing business and, earlier this year, her apartment.

The 58-year-old had already decided to move from Sante Fe, where she had gone back to school and had a job as a retail merchandiser, to Seattle, where she planned to work for the same company and study digital filmmaking at the Art Institute.

She thought she and her cat would only have to live a couple of weeks in her car. But five states and numerous mishaps later, her homelessness stretched to nearly six months. The worst part of it, she told participants of Seattle’s Homeless Women’s Forum on Nov. 19, were the times she couldn’t get to a bathroom in time.

“Many days I would stand on the corner just trying to hold all my muscles together waiting for the light to change as I felt the urine going down my leg and making a puddle in the street,” Kenny recounted. “I had made a stain on my pants. People were looking at me. This is not what I was raised for.”

Kenny arrived in Seattle in early September and now gets $11 an hour to refold jeans or refresh magazine racks at various retailers she is sent to. Three weeks ago, a chance conversation in the ladies’ room at her church — First Hill’s Trinity Parish Episcopal — led a fellow member to offer Kenny a rental room in her Ballard home.

“I am formerly homeless. As of two weeks ago, I got inside,” she told the audience of more than 100 women, who erupted in applause. Kenny says she now wants to repay the generosity that she was shown on her journey by helping homeless women get inside as well.

It was a sentiment spoken of again and again by organizers and participants at the 14th annual conference, held by the Women’s Housing Equality and Enhancement League, or WHEEL, at the University Christian Church – the current site of Nickelsville, a tent city named for Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels and his no-camping policies.

WHEEL is the women’s support and political organizing arm of SHARE/WHEEL, a nonprofit in which the homeless self-manage four tent cities and 14 church-based shelters throughout Seattle. In addition to holding the Homeless Women’s Forum, which many participants said they attend to learn about issues affecting their lives, the group’s organizers advocate for women’s shelter and participate in Women in Black vigils for those who die on the street.

For the past five years, WHEEL has also been working with the city to site a public memorial for the lost called the Homeless Place of Remembrance, which speaker Karen Kiest said is now expected to be placed at Victor Steinbrueck Park.

Kenny says she one day hopes to make films about the homeless. In the meantime, she is thankful she got off the street. She was in the church’s bathroom, she says, when Cindy Gilbrough, a retired nurse, happened to ask her where she was living.

“She said ‘my car’ and I almost burst into tears,” Gilbrough recalls. She had a room for rent in her house, she says, and offered it to Kenny if she could pay something. From there, “I went into the church and told my husband, ‘We have a new housemate.’”

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