LEE

PHOTO BY RANDY BACON

LEE’S STORY

I come from East St. Louis, Illinois and I moved here in 2001 from prison after serving twelve years through a work release program. Been here sixteen years, worked thirteen years, and I’ve been fighting for disability for the last three and a half years. All my family is in different states and I’m here by myself. I want people to realize that everybody homeless like myself is because of situations. I can no longer work. I’ve had knee surgery and back surgery and I’m having major neck surgery in January. And like I said, I worked thirteen years with these conditions. I’ve been shot twice and I have a lot of pain so I can no longer work.

I’ve been homeless off and on for three years. I was with someone but pretty much when I lost my job and became unemployed, that deteriorated my relationship. I was unable to help financially and that put a strain on the relationship, and so as a man I decided to leave. I went back a year later, my condition hasn’t changed, disability hasn’t decided to say yay or nay, so I’m still fighting disability and going to the doctor. I was always there in her home. But without finance I lost everything. So I came out here to the streets. I went through a network, and read about the information because I knew I couldn’t sleep on the street. So I’ve been in different men’s shelters, still fighting for disability.

The hardest part about being homeless is not having a place to call home. It prohibits me from going to see my family. If I leave the shelters, I lose my bed. So until I get my own place, I can’t even visit my family. And I don’t want to burden them with getting hotels to come see me. So pretty much I can communicate with them, but if I had my own place I could go see them. That’s been my biggest stressor.

My biggest advice would be don’t take for granted how you could end up being homeless. Because everybody homeless didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to be homeless. It’s always circumstance or situations that cause for a person to be out in the streets. And in my condition, being homeless, I don’t think I could even survive without these shelters. I don’t think people should judge people without even knowing what’s going on. They go through the stress, emotion, people dependent on drugs…everybody has a situation that has caused them to be out here on the streets.

My dream for the future is real simple. I’ll be fifty-four in thirty days, and all I want to do is spend as much time as I can with my family and be able to stay sober and continue to work on my health. I have five different things wrong with me so that fight is never going to end. And I just want to be able to visit my family and have my own place where they can come visit and live out the rest of my life as best I can.