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Week by week in winter, Winterhaven welcomes homeless with warmth and shelter

Volunteers and Winterhaven residents gather at half-court in the gym at Trinity Lutheran Church Monday night for a brief prayer.
Volunteers and Winterhaven residents gather at half-court in the gym at Trinity Lutheran Church Monday night for a brief prayer. (Staff photo by Jen Rynda, Patuxent Publishing)

They were all there for different reasons. They were all there for the same reason.

Tamara Hawkins said the building she'd been living in had just been condemned. Stephen H. said he had been laid off, setting off a chain of events that left him without a place to live. Justin Bishop said he had bounced from job to job and from home to home. Keith H. said he had traveled in from the Houston area in search of steadier work and a new life.

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They were among more than 20 people whose shelter is being sponsored by a different group each week through a program run by Winterhaven, a Laurel-based volunteer organization that has helped the homeless during the winter months for 21 years.

Congregations and organizations have put them up in churches, schools, Laurel city facilities and other buildings. The shelters are primarily in Laurel but have also been elsewhere, including Burtonsville, Columbia and Highland.

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This week, the beds are set up in a combination gymnasium and auditorium at the Trinity Lutheran Church in Bowie. Early each morning, the group, mostly men with a few women, are shuttled to Laurel, brought back about 12 hours later for dinner, conversation, rest and perhaps a game of basketball.

Hawkins walked into the building, located off Route 197, on Monday evening, temperatures teetering around freezing, the roads slick from light snow, for her first night with Winterhaven.

"I've given guys rides to Winterhaven," said the 52-year-old, who had lived in Laurel. "I just never thought I'd be in Winterhaven."

She said she'd been homeless before, but that had been during the summer a couple of years ago. She'd slept in a tent.

"I have friends, but I don't want to say pride kept me from going to them," she said. "But they have their own situations, their own problems. Maybe this is what I need."

She'd been paying $590 a month for a room in a building that had recently been condemned. But Hawkins considered herself very fortunate that she has a full-time job as a maintenance technician at a group home in Jessup. She earns $400 a week, money she hoped to save toward rent for a new place to live.

Stephen H., who did not want to give his last name, said he once had been employed in warehouse work earning $2,000 a month. When that went, however, everything else did, too.

"I had a job. I had a house. I was married," he said. "I lost my job. I lost my home. And then I couldn't support my family."

The 37-year-old former Montgomery County resident, a father of two who did not want to speak much about his family, said he'd been sleeping in his car until it broke down and was towed. He'd been staying in Winterhaven since December, working a part-time job at a gas station in Laurel and planning on starting a janitorial business.

He sat on a pad on the floor, one of the many ringing the room, looking down through his glasses and slowly putting together the pieces of a puzzle.

"By the end of winter, I'll have another car and a place to stay, hopefully," he said. "I'm not going to be like some of these people who are homeless for two or three years. That's not my goal. They probably had the same goal two or three years ago."

Joe Gordon, a 61-year-old who used to live in Ellicott City, had been homeless for a few years. He spoke through a bushy beard, jumping abruptly from one line of thought to another, about places he'd been asked to leave, about disagreements he'd had, about his hope to have subsidized housing. He'd been in Winterhaven years ago, as well, and now was back.

"Only place I can go," he said.

'Not that big of a bum'

They arrived at the church at about 7 p.m. A couple of men picked up a basketball. Others rested bravely on pads just behind the backboard. Some smoked cigarettes outside. A few toyed with a television, trying to tune in to the college football championship game. Justin Bishop reclined on his bed, his tattooed forearms exposed, reading his Bible and occasionally exclaiming when a basketball shot swished through the hoop.

The 23-year-old had lived in Scaggsville, left for Job Corps training in Kentucky in September 2010, and returned to Maryland on a bus in March after a disagreement with a supervisor. He stayed with his mother and her boyfriend in Oxon Hill for a bit until he was told to leave. He went to a family friend in Laurel for a bit, then set out on his own, living in a tent around Laurel.

He said he panhandled, but also tried to get money by using his knowledge of automobile work to help people whose vehicles had broken down on the side of the road.

"I'm not that big of a bum," he said. "I find side jobs here and there. I've been putting in applications left and right. We can't be picky and choosy on what we want."

He said he has a 2-month-old son living in Chicago with a woman he'd dated in Kentucky.

The conversation stopped so he could get dinner: That night it was ham, scalloped potatoes, green bean casserole and other dishes — food and drink served up on foam plates and in plastic cups.

The church, which has for about a decade helped shelter the homeless during winter for a similar program run by the nonprofit Community Crisis Services Inc., has about 75 volunteers this year, both congregation members and other area residents, according to Jean Lamrouex, a volunteer and coordinator.

They served breakfast in the mornings and dinner at night, and sent the men and women off with bagged lunches for the long wait away from the shelter. Some, like Tamara Hawkins and Stephen H., went off to work. Others, like Justin Bishop and Keith H., who did not want to give his last name, would begin the day in a McDonald's in Laurel before heading elsewhere — Bishop to see his friends or to seek money, Keith H. to a library to search for jobs online.

Before dinner Monday, most gathered with the volunteers in a circle at half-court in the gymnasium, hand-in-hand for a brief prayer.

Hawkins took it all in, her introduction to a program she knew of but never thought she'd be a part of.

"I look around me, and I don't want to be here," she said. "But I'm here, and I'm grateful for places like this."

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