Homeless connected to vital services

An outstretched hand and a warm “welcome home” is how John Russell was greeting people he met Thursday.

Nobody really was home — which was part of the point. Russell, chairman of the grass-roots Clark County Veterans Assistance Center, was volunteering at the fourth annual Project Homeless Connect event, a clearinghouse of services, resources, assistance and giveaways for people with no fixed address.

Hundreds swamped the Centennial Center at the Red Lion at the Quay downtown to get haircuts and dental exams, talk with housing and financial advisers, pick up free paperbacks and gently used boots — even go behind a privacy curtain for a confidential medical or mental health assessment.

“Veterans come back changed,” said Russell, a Vietnam veteran. “There are traumatic brain injuries, there’s post-traumatic stress disorder. Sometimes you come back with problems but you don’t understand you do have problems. You’re in a mode we call self-destruct.”

According to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans (http://nchv.org), veterans make up approximately one-fifth of the nation’s total homeless population, most recently estimated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development at approximately 1.56 million.

Russell’s fledgling Veterans Assistance Center wants to provide all sorts of help — medical, dental, mental, even spiritual — to those folks who signed up to serve and came back only to disintegrate.

Fragile mental health during a grinding economic downtown is a growing concern for the volunteers and professionals who turned out to help Thursday.

“I’m of the philosophy that social and medical health are closely intertwined,” said Dr. Dino Ramzi with the Lacamas Medical Group in Camas. The practice set up a clinic in one corner of the very crowded room. “If you have mental problems, you are going to have trouble staying physically healthy.”

The great thing about a centralized event like Project Homeless Connect, Ramzi said, is that someone who turns up with a physical ailment — but who clearly needs more and different kinds of help as well — can get spotted and steered to all the right resources.

“Sometimes I’m just plugging holes with bandages, but I can also walk people over to mental health or other things they need,” he said.

That’s how Chrissy Defibaugh, a Realtor and event volunteer, was helping the formerly homeless Eric Andersen — by guiding him to stations where he could get financial advice, boots and a haircut.

“You’re going to get that job!” Defibaugh told the newly shorn Andersen, with a big thumbs-up, too. She told The Columbian that working with the homeless “is a constant reminder that you and I are not too far away from this ourselves.”

“Given our economy, what we’re seeing is people who’ve never been homeless before,” said Craig Lyons, executive director of the Council for the Homeless. “They call for shelter and they have no idea what to do. They are new at this.”

Also Thursday, Clark County held its annual “Point in time” homeless count, an effort to sweep parks, railways, bridges, sidewalks and other likely locations for an actual tally of homeless people. Last year’s count was 1,093; it will take a few weeks to nail down a number for 2011. Participating in the count were Mike Gregoire, husband of the governor, and John Lee, director of the Washington State Department of Veterans Affairs.

New view

Andersen, 34, is a military veteran who served in Haiti during the mid- and late-1990s. The father of three, he said he worked as a registered nurse at Oregon Health and Science University until divorce pulled the rug out from under him. He wound up drinking too much and just “giving up on life,” he said.

For one and one-half years, Andersen said, he lived in the bushes alongside the Burnt Bridge Creek trail — near the Number 4 and Number 37 bus lines. He started pulling his life back together, he said, when his ex-wife and their three children became homeless, too — partially due to Andersen’s lack of support, he acknowledged.

“It was watching their quality of life deteriorate that finally got me motivated,” he said. Now, he said, he’s graduated from a Veterans Adminstration substance abuse treatment program, is living in a “transitional” apartment, looking to get recertified as a nurse — and looking forward to a new pair of glasses.

“I haven’t had a pair of glasses in two years,” he said. But at Project Homeless Connect, he was able to get examined and get a free prescription. “This is a great event,” he said.

It was great, too, for 4-year-old Aidun DeGroot because he had a warm place to stay and do some arts and crafts at the Friends of the Carpenter table. His parents, Levi and Danielle, said there was one simple reason for their homelessness: addiction.

“We were both on drugs,” said Danielle. “It was just too easy to slip into the pit. We lost our jobs. But we’ve been through treatment and now we’re better.”

But they lost their home, too, she said, and now they’re sleeping on a local church floor through the Winter Hospitality Overflow program. That program requires folks to vacate the premises during the day; Danielle said she’s grateful it’s there but that Aidun doesn’t really understand why his family has to pick up and move early every morning.

“It just shows how easily it can all go away,” she said. “It disappears so fast.”