Homeless teen finds real-life success
By MALCOLM GARCIA
The Kansas City Star
The Kansas City Star
Thursday, August 14, 2008
If your family didn’t do right, then you didn’t either. That was the way most folks felt, no matter how you really behaved. A last name went a long way. She attended high school and worked two part-time jobs but was moving every three months, one step ahead of something bad happening.
She tried to keep positive people in her life. She stayed with a preacher. She lived for a time with her grandmother, who always encouraged her to look at the upside of difficult situations. But she knew that if she stayed, eventually the drugs infesting the lives of those around her would catch up and put her on the street.
So Jamechia Prater, at 19, rode a bus for a day and a half from Gadsden, Ala., to Kansas City, Kan., where a friend from her hometown lived. She stopped at every little-bit bus station along the way and saw homeless people sleeping on grimy floors. Just looking at them tired her even more. She took with her four suitcases, one filled mostly with textbooks because she intended to graduate from high school.
Now, two years later, seated at a Starbucks in a T-shirt and jeans, the biggest concern Prater has is whether she will live on or off campus at Drake University.
“It would be cheaper off,” she says with a cheerful smile and Southern-tinted assurance, offering no indication of the burdens and hurts that landed her essentially homeless in the Kansas City area in 2006. Her black, curly hair dances on her shoulders, brushing aside bad memories.
“I just wanted to better myself.”
Researchers estimate that each year at least 5 percent of youths experience homelessness. The same factors that contribute to adult homelessness poverty, lack of affordable housing, low education levels, unemployment, mental health problems and substance abuse can lead to homelessness for young people. Beyond these factors, youth homelessness is largely a reflection of family breakdown.
The National Runaway Switchboard handled more than 175,000 calls last year. Callers frequently identified family dynamics as a problem. The agency also found that 77 percent of the callers were female, and 55 percent identified friends and relatives as their primary sources of survival.
Prater avoided Kansas City’s streets by moving in with her hometown friend. The house was raggedy and cold.
“You got a job?” the mother asked. “We’re about to be evicted.”
Strange, strung-out people came by, walking in without knocking. Prater found a job at a QuikTrip, enrolled in high school with the help of a homeless liaison officer for the Kansas City, Kan., School District and rented a basement apartment, just four walls and a bathroom.
She looked out cobwebbed windows, eye level with the ground. She bought a beat-up Mercury Grand Marquis to get around.
The apartment didn’t work out well, unless three or four break-ins in a month is working out. She retreated to her car, put her clothes in the trunk and lived in it after school, parked in vacant lots and behind abandoned homes. Prater did that for about a week, although it felt like an eternity, really, until the car was towed for lacking tags.
The school district turned her on to Ozanam, a Kansas City agency that assists youths and young adults through counseling and transitional living programs.
“She was tired of living on the street,” recalled Dorothy Loyd, director of Ozanam’s Pathways Program. “Most kids come in and don’t believe we’ll do what we say we’ll do for them because most adults haven’t done anything for them.”
Prater stayed in one of the program’s apartments, attended Wyandotte High School and won a scholarship from the Kansas City chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners. She was assigned a mentor, Jeri Bartunek, founder of Bartunek Technology Group in Overland Park.
“I thought, ’Oh my God, here’s a girl from Alabama,”’ Bartunek said. “I’m from Clinton, Missouri. What will we have in common? But Jamechia is one of the brightest young women I’ve met with so much potential. If she says she’ll do something, she does it.”
Last year, Prater enrolled at Drake, in Des Moines, Iowa. A good school, she knows. She often wears a blue Drake T-shirt and gray Drake sweat pants. Bartunek bought her a laptop and helps with tuition and books. They speak at least once a week.
“I have expectations,” Bartunek said, “and Jamechia has to meet them. Like keeping a B average at least.”
Prater is working toward majors in law, politics and society, and philosophy, with minors in insurance and Spanish.
Insurance? Well, she’ll need a job when she graduates, she explains.
She would have stayed this summer in Des Moines, but the university requires all students to leave the dorms for the summer break. Homeless again, she returned to Kansas City and slept in her car with all her clothes and heaps of books and suitcases. Then she stayed with Bartunek, but felt guilty. Bartunek had already done enough. So Prater called Ozanam.
I don’t have anywhere to go again, she told Loyd. I’m kind of homeless.
The agency put her up in an apartment.
“We’ll do it for her every summer, whether we have the funds or not,” Loyd said.
Prater has considered visiting Alabama and forgiving the people caught up in the drug mess that ran her out. She should, she thinks, whether they ask for it or not.
It all has turned into a blessing because she probably would not be at Drake if she hadn’t left. She’ll forgive them, she decides. Just not yet.
She remains optimistic about everything else. Life has taught her, as has school. She has retained most of what she has learned, mastering the one lesson that eluded her for so long.
She’ll be OK.
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