Boston Globe: For Families Seeking Emergency Shelter, Limbo Looks Like a Safe Place to Sleep

The Boston Globe provides a glimpse of life for families living in Catholic Charities Boston’s SafetyNet Shelter, which opened up right before Thanksgiving to address the critical issue of families and pregnant women in need of shelter at a time when the state’s emergency shelter system has reached capacity. To date, over 300 families are on a waitlist to find emergency housing. From the Globe:

“To people like Jamie Ewing, senior vice president of programs at Catholic Charities, the need to house homeless and migrant families is so large that it sometimes feels endless.

“As we are in the thick of it — we don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel right now,” he said. “We are in crisis mode. We don’t see this ending for a long time.”

But for families like Clairehide Junior’s, the path forward looks brighter than the past. She was told so.

The 29-year-old and her 6-year-old son, Alcide, left their northern town in Haiti and crossed the Mexico border in August. Then, California. A month later, they left to stay with a woman who could house them in Florida. It was good at first, Junior said, but weeks later, the woman said she couldn’t accommodate them any longer. She told Junior that if she could go to Massachusetts, she could get help from the state.

“I am looking for a better life. It’s not easy living in Haiti right now,” Junior said in Haitian Creole. “I continue to thank God. I want to work to help myself and my child.”

Read the full article here