NEWS

Homeless for the holidays

Anna Wolfe
Clarion Ledger
Jimmy Jones, left, his daughter Charity Lemieux and her husband Chris look through donated Christmas stockings Wednesday outside The Opportunity Center in Jackson.

Amid the holiday cheer that inevitably accompanies the days leading up to Christmas, there’s one place that remains unfazed by the festivities.

At the Opportunity Center, Jackson’s only day shelter, husband and wife Chris and Charity Lemieux and Charity’s father, Jimmy Jones, spend their morning utilizing the center’s showers and laundry room.

This Christmas brings only stress and heartbreak for the three adults who live together in a tent downtown. For the first time, Chris and Charity won’t spend the day with their two daughters, 12-year-old Rebecca and 9-year-old Ariel.

“We were at the bus station one night and somebody called JPD anonymously,” Chris said. “The state came in and took them from us temporarily until we get a stable home. … It killed us both. It hurt us both badly.”

The Department of Human Services removed Rebecca and Ariel from their parents three weeks ago. The children currently live in Vicksburg, where their parents are only able to visit one day a week for an hour.

Charity collapses in tears at the thought of her girls. She dips her head into her arms, which rest on one of the many tables in the Opportunity Center recreation room.

“I’ve been stressed out not being able to have my girls,” Charity said, cupping her hands over her face. “It’s hard to keep my mind off them. I was always around them.”

The couple met and married in Florida in 2004. That’s where they lived until early 2015, when they moved to Jackson to be closer to Charity’s father. They had been living in a hotel in Orlando and when they first moved to Jackson, but they have been without a roof for three months now.

“After a while we just got to a point where nobody would hire. The hotel bill got too high, and they just told us we had to go,” Chris said.

Finding work is a challenge. Charity’s learning disability and poor vision prevent her from receiving responses to her applications.

“Nobody’s even called or bothered about it,” Charity said.

In pictures Chris took during the couple’s last visit with their daughters, the girls are laughing. Rebecca holds bunny ears over her younger sister’s brunette head.

Chris misses the girls’ silliness most. When they visited, Ariel did something she does often — she walked up to her father, taking his face in her small hands.

“She’ll come up to me and put her hands just on the edge of my beard,” Chris said, mimicking the motion by brushing his cheeks. “It makes me laugh.”

Chris and Charity know they must create a stable living environment to get their girls back — but the process is daunting. They must not only find and afford housing, but prove they have reliable transportation for the girls to get to school.

“It’s tough on them. They want to be back home, but they know we’re still trying to get everything worked out,” Chris said.

Last week, Chris started his first job since moving to Jackson at a restaurant doing food prep work.

Jones, who has been homeless on and off for a year and a half, is a retired Air Force officer.  He had been separated from Charity for much of her life, but the two were able to reconnect though Facebook.

He said he’s been fighting 16 years for benefits owed to him, adding that it’s no wonder suicide rates are high among veterans.

“What’s keeping me from doing it,” Jones said, pointing across the table to his daughter and her husband.

Chris said a worker from the Department of Veteran Affairs is working on placing the family in a home.

Life seems stagnant for the family. Their typical routine includes visiting the Opportunity Center to shower or do laundry, Stewpot or Gateway to eat lunch, the Eudora Welty library to use the computers and charge their cellphones and the park.

“It tends to get boring,” Charity said. “Especially when it rains.”

For the Lemieux couple and Jones, Christmas is just another day.

Christie Burnett, executive director of the Opportunity Center, said people in the community often feel compelled to give during the holiday season. It’s typically when Stewpot receives the highest influx of donations.

But while the day shelter sees generous people stopping by to deliver food or items on Thanksgiving or Christmas, it seems lost on some that Stewpot and the Opportunity Center are open and deal with the same obstacles every day.

“Come back the next day, everyone’s gone,” Burnett said.

On the afternoon of Dec. 23, sisters Maggie Eidt, 15, and Julia Eidt, 12, of Ridgeland handed out Christmas stockings to homeless people at the Opportunity Center. The gifts included hats, socks and scarves among other things.

“This is what the giving season is about,” Maggie Eidt said.

The holidays have been rough in the past for the Lemieux family, but they were always together.

“We’re so used to having our children there—being able to have presents for them,” Chris said. “It’s just, this year, we don’t get to see any of it.”

Christmas celebration for the tiny, fractured family is limited to tree-shaped Little Debbie cakes and stockings filled with hotel soaps and travel toothpaste.

It’s not that they’re not grateful for what they’ve been given, “It’s just not the same,” Chris said as he rifled through the packets of crackers and candy canes he received.

“You’ve got people around you in the same situation, but it’s not a celebration to enjoy,” Chris said.

Jones chimed in, “You ain’t got the ones there that you really want there.”

Contact Anna Wolfe at (601) 961-7326 or awolfe@gannett.com. Follow @ayewolfe on Twitter.