Homeless, but Hoping for a Return to College

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Homeless, but Hoping for a Return to College

Steve Demain at the Create shelter in Harlem, where residents are ages 18 to 26. He described the two months he spent at another shelter, on the East Side of Manhattan, as “scary.”

Like many people his age, Steve Demain checks his Facebook page, reads the news, writes e-mails and surfs the Web on his laptop. But unlike a typical 20-year-old with a laptop, Mr. Demain is homeless.

“If you have the Internet, you have unlimited access to unlimited information,” Mr. Demain said one recent afternoon at Create, a homeless shelter in Harlem for young men. “I use the laptop to look for housing, colleges and jobs.”

His computer is a result of a $425 donation from The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, in conjunction with Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New York, one of the seven beneficiary agencies of the fund.

Tall, lanky and baby-faced, with a scraggly beard, Mr. Demain has a dream of returning to college and studying philosophy, a subject, he says, he fell in love with during his one year at College of Lake County in Illinois: “It’s the study of thought; how beautiful is that?”

His hope is to one day become a professor.

Mr. Demain grew up in a middle-class suburb of Chicago. But as a teenager his relationship with his family, particularly with his father, became strained. His father, Mr. Demain said, often spoke to him harshly, and they fought constantly. “There was really not a thing I could do right in his eyes,” Mr. Demain said.

In summer 2009, Mr. Demain visited a friend at New York University. Two days before Mr. Demain was to return, his mother told him over the phone that his father did not want him back. “Basically I was stuck,” he said.

Mr. Demain’s father, Dan Demain, declined to comment. His mother, Aimee Demain, in a telephone interview, declined to describe the situation at home, saying only that “Steve decided that it would be better for him to leave.”

She added, “I miss him terribly.”

At first, Mr. Demain’s friend helped him with money for a hotel, but after a month, he felt he had no choice but to turn to a shelter. Before being placed at Create, he spent two months at the Bellevue Shelter on the East Side of Manhattan.

“Bellevue was scary,” said Mr. Demain, who remembered sharing a room with seven other men and a bathroom with 35. “I was with a bunch of guys who were old enough to be my dad, hearing them talk about going to jail, robbing people, smoking crack. It took a long time to get adjusted, but I had to adapt.”

Mr. Demain said he was lucky that one resident looked out for him: a nightclub bouncer named Jimmy who had become homeless after being kicked out of an ex-girlfriend’s apartment. “He’s basically the reason that nothing happened to me there,” he said.

Arriving at Create was a big relief. It is still a homeless shelter, but the residents there are all between 18 and 26. Today, Mr. Demain shares a sparse, dormitory-style room with one roommate. It has a bathroom, two beds, two lockers, two fans and two closets.

His counselors at Create have been impressed with Mr. Demain’s ability to make friends, despite the obvious differences in his background compared with many of his peers.

“My first impression was, oh my God, this kid has victim written all over him,” said William Boone, responsible for monitoring the progress of clients at Create. “But he started blending in with guys that traditionally even tough guys would have a hard time getting along with. There’s some element to him that attracts people. He has an accepting-type personality.”

In April, Mr. Demain found work at the Kmart in Pennsylvania Station. Since then, he has been working 35 hours a week in the store’s electronics department, making $7.75 an hour. His counselors at Create put aside 60 percent of his paychecks in savings for when he moves out of the shelter. Mr. Demain has applied for subsidized single-room occupancy housing and is waiting to hear if he has been accepted.

“My goal is for spring or summer next year to get back in school,” Mr. Demain said. He would like eventually to pursue a degree at Hunter College, but he knows it will be challenging.

Stephanie Ali, the vocation coordinator and mentor at Create, is confident that Mr. Demain has what it takes to succeed.

“He just needs a chance,” Ms. Ali said. “The good thing about Steve is he bounces back, takes it all in stride and just keeps on going.”

"Every year since 1911, New York Times Neediest Cases Fund has provided direct assistance to children, families and the elderly in New York. Articles will appear daily through Jan. 30, illustrating the difference that even a modest amount of money can make in easing the struggles of the poor.

Last year, 10,428 donors contributed $6,280,242, which was distributed to those in need through seven New York charities."

Can Microlending Save Haiti?

A Fonkoze client’s business.

Linda Boucard of Fonkoze met with clients.

More than a million Haitians live in tent cities, like Léogâne’s, shown in June

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Can Microlending Save Haiti?

Since the earthquake, microbanks have been working to keep credit flowing to businesses like this fabric store.

Muhammad Yunus was microcredit’s pioneer.

VENANTE LINO, a small-business owner who lost nearly everything in the devastating earthquake in January, stood in line here along with dozens of other impeccably dressed women, all waiting to pay the latest monthly installment on the emergency loans they received to rebuild their businesses.

Mrs. Lino approached a folding table in the courtyard of one of the few remaining buildings in this town, located near the quake’s epicenter. She emptied her pockets of cash and gave all $40 to the loan officer.

“Every day, I wake up and ask God to make this better. Many days, I don’t think he’s listening,” says Mrs. Lino, a 63-year-old grandmother who lives under a tarp in her backyard with three grown children and four grandchildren, surviving on the meager income from a small food and cooking-oil business she reopened this summer with loan money. “Without this help, I don’t know where my family would be.”

Here in this once-bustling coastal town about 20 miles west of Port-au-Prince, more than 30,000 people — a third of the population — died as a result of the quake. Throughout Haiti, the toll may be as high as 250,000, and the economic effects have been staggering. The country’s economy is expected to contract by as much as 9 percent this year, and more than a million residents live in tent cities. And an outbreak of cholera, as well as a hurricane early this month, have left the nation even more vulnerable.

Especially hard hit are the tens of thousands of small-business owners, known as ti machann, who sell everything from heating oil to school uniforms from their homes and are often the sole breadwinners for their families. Because Haiti’s credit markets remain frozen, people like Mrs. Lino would have had almost no chance to rebuild if it weren’t for microbanks like Fonkoze, Haiti’s largest, which gave loans to the women in Léogâne.

In the best circumstances, sustaining a “bank to the poor” is no easy feat, but in Haiti after the earthquake, the challenge has been extraordinary. Even before the quake, 80 percent of the population lived on less than $2 a day. Today, while some 50 nations and organizations have pledged a total of $8.75 billion for reconstruction, less than 15 percent of the total promised for 2010-11 has arrived. (The United States has not yet paid all the $1.2 billion in reconstruction funds it pledged.)

Haitian microbanks provide a crucial lifeline to the poor, but their financial situations are sometimes nearly as precarious as those of their clients. Moreover, the banks are operating in a country that lacks many of the basic building blocks for businesses — reliable transportation, communication and supply networks — thus making the challenges all the more complex.

Their importance to hundreds of thousands of Haitian borrowers and savers gives these little institutions an outsize importance, making them “simply too big to fail,” said Greta Greathouse, a consultant with the United States Agency for International Development’s microsavings and lending program in Haiti.

“You are dealing with a very vulnerable and fragile population,” she said. The banks “need to get stronger on a permanent basis so they can offset the operational risks that come with Haiti because of the earthquake and the inherent risks that are unfortunately a way of life for the country and its people.”

MICROCREDIT banks, or microbanks, were pioneered by Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank, which started 40 years ago by giving loans of a few dollars each to poor entrepreneurs in Bangladesh. In 2006, Mr. Yunus received the Nobel Peace Prize for this work.

In most cases today, microcredit clients start off with loans of as little as $25 to start a small business. The loans are often given to women who tend to spend their earnings directly on their families and communities. Many borrow in groups of five or more, and all members of the group work together and are responsible for repayment.

Some microlenders provide only loans, while others also offer education and health services. Partly because costs are so high, effective interest rates are often significantly steeper than those at traditional banks. In Haiti, rates range from 30 percent to 55 percent a year.

“Haiti is one of the most complicated environments for anyone to do business, let alone a small lender with an extremely poor clientele,” said Alex Counts, president of the Grameen Foundation, a nonprofit in Washington that fosters microlending. “Appropriate levels of interest are important, but it’s also essential these organizations continue to do the important work they do.”

One of the largest of Haiti’s microcredit groups, Finca Haiti, wrote off almost a third of its portfolio after many clients died in the earthquake or lost their homes and businesses. A staggering 53 percent of its borrowers were late on their payments. After losses of its own, ACME, another Haitian microbank, raised additional capital this summer.

Fonkoze, Creole for “shoulder to shoulder,” was started by the Rev. Joseph Philippe, a Haitian priest, in the mid-1990s. It has 45,000 clients and 43 branches across the country, but it lost $2 million in the three years before the earthquake. In 2008, after losses from a particularly bad hurricane season, the organization considered closing its for-profit bank and incorporating that division’s 24 branches.

Over all, the share of microcredit clients in Haiti who have defaulted or are at risk of doing so has risen to 18 percent, more than double the rate of a year ago. The international standard is 2 to 3 percent. Several of the Haitian microbanks, particularly some very small ones, could close or reduce their operations if their portfolios don’t improve, according to microbanking experts in Haiti and elsewhere. It’s likely that some will have to consolidate in order to survive.

Microbanks in other countries are increasingly aiming to become self-sustaining so they don’t need to continually raise funds to pay operational expenses. Some have transformed themselves from nonprofit into for-profit banks, raising questions of whether altruism and capitalism can co-exist. India’s largest microlender, SKS Microfinance, went public this summer, raising $358 million, and other banks may do the same.

While most microbanks in Haiti remain nonprofits, and have less financial transparency, Fonkoze started a for-profit bank (in addition to its nonprofit arm) in 2004 and reports both divisions’ earnings. It operated at a loss for three years but has stabilized after $15 million in donations this year.

Haiti has had natural disasters before, of course. But the earthquake’s impact on the nation’s banks was staggeringly high, in no small part because of the damage in Port-au-Prince, the capital, which accounts for 60 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. The banking sector, already fragile, was crippled. Out of 1,800 microbank employees in the affected region, 600 lost their homes. A quarter of the $38 million in outstanding microcredit loans in the region could end up defaulting, according to an analysis by Ms. Greathouse.

Despite the risks and financial costs, several Haitian microbanks are expanding, saying their loans are one of the only paths to self-sufficiency for the growing number of poor people in Port-au-Prince and the countryside.

For example, after losing a third of its 12,000 clients after the earthquake, Finca added back 1,000 clients this summer with the help of a grant from the Citibank Foundation. It’s a risky move: the percentage of Finca Haiti clients who are more than 30 days behind on their payments, a standard known as portfolio at risk, remains at 35 percent.

In July, after its director was ambushed in an attempted robbery, the bank moved its headquarters from the capital to a nearby coastal city, Saint-Marc, according to Rupert Scofield, the president of Finca, which is based in Washington and operates in 21 countries.

When it comes to doing business, “Haiti is probably the hardest place in the world right now outside maybe Afghanistan,” Mr. Scofield says. “It always seems just as things get stabilized, something else happens to pull the country back.”

Anne Hastings, Fonkoze’s co-chief executive, has become something of an international aid celebrity: she was a high-profile attendee of the Clinton Global Initiative conference this fall in New York. (The bank’s profile rose significantly in the days after the earthquake, when it was one of the only banks operating outside Port-au-Prince, and Ms. Hastings secured American military assistance to airlift $2 million in cash to desperate clients.)

Soon after the quake, Fonkoze wrote off 10,000 loans — almost a quarter of its total number — with funds from the Red Cross and others. The bank then gave each client a new loan and a one-time cash payment of $125, at a total cost of $8.5 million.

In recent months, the bank has broadened its health program and aggressively stepped up its operations, particularly in rural areas where poverty rates are highest and seem to be growing.

The bank has enlarged a loan program, called Ti Kredi, or Little Credit, to reach poor families that are not ready for larger loans. Ti Kredi offers loans of just $25, shorter repayment periods, additional support from loan officers, and literacy and health classes.

In another program, clients are offered goats or chickens so they can sell milk or eggs, as well as a weekly stipend of $7 to help with expenses, and to ensure that they don’t need to kill the animals because they are hungry.

SINCE the summer, Fonkoze loan officers have canvassed the lush, mountainous region on motorcycles, in pickup trucks or on foot to sign up as many as 3,000 new clients and to meet with existing ones to monitor their progress and to collect loan payments.

One recent rainy day, Steve Werlin rode for more than an hour on the back of a pickup truck outside Mirebalais, a small, central plateau town two hours north of Port-au-Prince. Mr. Werlin, a regional Fonkoze director, was on his way to meet Marie Ange Joute, a 30-year-old mother of two. Ms. Joute joined Fonkoze in September and lives with her children, mother, sister and niece (who was sick with a severe eye infection) in a small mud house with a tin roof on a 20-by-20-foot parcel of land. The house, which Ms. Joute inherited from her father, is her only asset, and she said the family had sometimes gone without food and medical care over the last year.

She has no business background but recently received two chickens and a goat from the bank and started selling eggs and heating oil from her house. To save enough money to expand her inventory, she joined a savings club with 10 local Fonkoze clients. Each woman saves a third of her weekly stipend so that once every 10 weeks, they get a lump-sum payment of $20 for larger purchases.

Clients are required to do many things on their own, and face penalties if they cannot meet certain goals. On the day of the visit, Ms. Joute had yet to build a shed for her goat, which could become sick in the rain. So she was told she wouldn’t get her stipend the next week unless the shed was built. (Fonkoze gave her materials and training to build the shed, and she complied.)

“I want to make my own money and care for my family,” she said. “I want to provide for us if something goes bad. I know how to work.”

AFTER the upcoming presidential elections, Haiti’s government is expected to issue new banking regulations, including rules for microlenders. They aren’t regulated now, though they have appealed for years to the government for rules that could bring more certainty to the industry. If a microbank went out of business, for example, it is not clear what would happen to the many clients who deposit their savings in the bank.

Fonkoze has 200,000 savings accounts, totaling $14 million. Currently, it uses those funds to make new loans, and it says that all of its accounts are secure. Because it was able to write off risky loans early this year, according to James Kurz, a senior Fonkoze financial adviser, its portfolio at risk has fallen to 5 percent in recent months.

If Haiti’s economy doesn’t improve and the country cannot stem various other problems, even some people who have managed to eke out a living with the help of microcredit could face more difficulty.

Sainte Anne Louis sells sodas, canned goods, clothing and homemade peanut butter outside her home in Mirebalais, yards away from a construction site for a new rural teaching hospital. She says her sales have fallen by nearly half this year, in part because it has been hard to secure enough inventory.

Mrs. Louis, 54, supports her entire family, including her husband, two daughters and their families. She worries about what will happen if things don’t improve soon. “We are grateful for what we have today,” she says, “but we pray tomorrow will be better.”

For parents of war dead, the combat doesn't end

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For parents of war dead, the combat doesn't end

Lee Ann Doerflinger's son, Thomas, was killed in action in Mosul, Iraq, on Nov. 11, 2004, at age 20. Thomas had requested to be buried in a cemetery near his parents home in Maryland.

The conclusion of combat operations in Iraq this month can't ease the grief for one mother. 'His part in this conflict is over,' writes Lee Ann Doerflinger, who lost her son five years ago.

Reporting from Silver Spring, Md. — The week that Army Spc. Thomas K. Doerflinger was killed in Iraq at age 20, a friend in the neighborhood brought his parents a felt banner with a gold star. Tradition holds that a grieving mother hangs it in her window until the war is over. As it turned out, the war outlasted the banner.

Years passed; the red border faded. Repairmen who came to their door on leafy Collingwood Terrace would innocently inquire, then stammer their condolences. The Doerflingers didn't feel right displaying a kind of grief that was never going to go away, so after a while they put the banner in the hutch.

Endings can be complicated for families of the fallen.

When President Obama announced the conclusion of combat operations in Iraq this month, Lee Ann Doerflinger didn't feel any closer to that magical "closure" everyone talks about. In some ways, she felt worse.

It didn't help when, channel surfing, she caught footage of the Stryker brigade pulling out of Iraq for the last time. It was the end of a mission Thomas helped launch — he drove a Stryker armored personnel carrier with a dashboard like a rocket ship's. For years she had prayed for the safety of the brigade; now they were out of harm's way and here she was sobbing on the couch — "oddly bereft" was how she put it. Another earthly part of Thomas shutting down. No more pretending he wasn't really dead, just deployed.

"Maybe someone can understand this even if I can't. It's as if that last piece of Thomas now goes too," she wrote on her blog, "We Remember," a chronicle of losing a child to war. "His part of this conflict is over."

It isn't that they haven't all moved on. A friend of Lee Ann's remarked the other day that losing Thomas isn't the only thing she talks about anymore. At 55, she has three other children, a baby granddaughter and Richard, her husband of 33 years, who anguished in his own way. She isn't sure she ever saw him cry.

By the Pentagon's count, 4,412 service members have died in Iraq. Thomas was No. 1,258 or 1,259; Lee Ann was never sure.

The five years and 10 months since he died have been a long slog forward and back. You expect birthdays to be hard. You don't expect to get ambushed while housecleaning by a 4-year-old phone bill with his cell number on it. One day you're undone by a storage closet full of his clothes. The next day you're sitting peacefully on your sister's sun porch watching the cats play.

"I was almost 50 when Thomas was killed. You sit down and calculate your life expectancy at that point and say, how long do I have to live with this grief? But I think Thomas would have asked me to take what came and see what happens," Lee Ann says from her dining room table, where they can all sit again. They couldn't at first. It was just too hard. Thomas had always occupied the chair to her left.

***

His mother wouldn't sign the enlistment papers -- if anything happened to him, she'd never forgive herself. So Thomas waited until he turned 18 on July 6, 2002, and signed them himself. His grades were terrible, even if he did earn an International Baccalaureate degree from Springbrook High. He hated homework. College would be a waste.

The whole family watched him graduate seven months later from basic training at Ft. Benning, Ga. Lee Ann was surprised at how proud she was. He wound up at Ft. Lewis in Washington state, home to the Stryker brigade. Saddam Hussein had been captured, a good sign. How long could the war last? She said goodbye to him in a Taco Bell parking lot across from the base. He got in a cab and did not look back.

"He was a Stryker driver who didn't like to drive," Lee Ann would later write. He was assigned to Mosul in northern Iraq. His vehicle was damaged in combat, so he volunteered for other positions. On Nov. 11, 2004, he was rear air guard, the soldier who sticks up out of the hatch. They were finishing up for the day when a sniper shot him in the head.

She has told the story so many times now she gets through it pretty well. It was Veterans Day. Lee Ann turned on National Public Radio at 1 p.m. Firefights in Mosul. Surely if it were bad she already would have heard. She curled up on the couch with an action-packed science-fiction novel -- time travel, soldiers in battle. Out the window, two uniforms were coming up her walk. Was it her eyes or the book? They knocked. It occurred to her that her life was over.

"I sent Matthew downstairs. I didn't want him to see me when I heard the news," she says. Matthew is the youngest of her children. He was in seventh grade when his only brother was killed. Now he's 18, with the outlines of a beard, in the kitchen perusing the contents of the fridge. He hears his mother's voice break, comes into the dining room and pats her shoulder.

The ripple effect of war is vast. The Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, or TAPS, estimates that for every active-duty service member killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, six family members are "significantly impacted." At last count, the Doerflingers belong to a club of 10,392 parents.

"They live with this every day. It's not like you can say your grieving is over now, or because the war is over you shouldn't be grieving anymore," said Michelle Joyner, spokeswoman for the National Military Family Assn. in Virginia.

People started showing up at the two-story house the Doerflingers moved to when Thomas was in fourth grade. There weren't enough chairs. Thomas' sisters — Anna, older, and Maria, younger — took it hard.

Lee Ann and Richard picked out a plot and a headstone for their boy, according to instructions Thomas delivered in the hallway one day while holding a basket of laundry. If anything happened, and of course it wouldn't, he'd said he didn't want to be buried in uniform at Arlington. He wanted to be buried in civilian clothes in the local Catholic cemetery. The Army, he told his father, had him for five years. But "eternity is mine."

***

Support groups stress that military families will need assistance long after the last brigade pulls out of Iraq. The combat might be officially over, but 50,000 U.S. troops are still there, in side arms and body armor, to provide support and training. Another 100,000 are in Afghanistan. American forces have been at war longer than at any other single time in history.

But the public is fickle in its concern, distracted by foreclosures, unemployment, Lindsay Lohan's latest lockup. Another widow receives the folded flag. The kitchen overflows with food. The phone won't stop ringing. The nation tunes in and out.

The Doerflingers walked like robots through that first year after Thomas was killed, doing what was essential, nothing more. They leaned on faith and the people around them. A parish nun made sure Lee Ann ate. The PTA cleaned the house and planted her garden bulbs.

Sokhannath Ieng, the scheduler at G Street Fabrics, where Lee Ann fills in, called one day and said it was time to come back to work. She had lost 11 relatives in Cambodia's killing fields; Lee Ann went.

The couple grieved in different ways. Richard, 57, dove into his work as associate director of antiabortion activities at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Lee Ann blogged, calling herself "a middle-aged housewife who decided one day to write all of this down."

June 26, 2006: "It did seem at first that his death would be the end of laughter for us, but that has turned out to not be true at all."

Jan. 29, 2007: "No one told me that one of the hardest parts of being a mother would be having to comfort my fourteen-year-old son because his brother died two years ago on a dusty street half a world away."

July 6: 2008: "I woke up early this morning, remembering the day that Thomas was born. He got me up early that day too."

Months passed, and the moments when she felt better started coming closer together. Around the four-year mark, they adopted a puppy, took the first family Christmas photo without Thomas, and put away the banner with the gold star.

Lee Ann watched a lot of television. She stumbled on an episode of "Clean House," about a guy who couldn't get rid of his dead mother's stuff. She thought of the portable closet of Thomas' clothes in the basement. Time to let it go.

Anna got married. This spring, baby Leah was born. The 11th of every month stopped feeling like an anniversary. On Thomas' birthday, Lee Ann was too busy to get to Mass. She blogged: "[I] felt a bit guilty about that. I suppose it's in the natural course of events that our lives sort of close over the hole left by this loss." That night, Richard and Lee Ann enjoyed a chocolate cake in their son's honor.

Friends ask how she's doing: "I'm still standing."

She wants to go to Mosul. People walk the beaches of Normandy and the streets of Hanoi. She wonders if Iraq will ever be safe enough.

"I want to see the buildings he saw, feel the climate he felt. I was in the place where he was born. I want to be in the place where he died," she says over a second cup of coffee in the dining room. A pile of junk mail is stacked high on Thomas' chair, where, even now, no one ever sits.

faye.fiore@latimes.com