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They start lining up in the hallway around 6:30 a.m. Sleepy-eyed but ready for breakfast, some make small talk while others sit quietly waiting for the doors to open and veteran volunteer Clark Keffer to call, "Good morning and welcome to the Jubilee Café."
At 7, the crowd shuffles into the church's dining hall. The aroma of bacon and coffee floats through the air as people find their way to tables. Regulars take their usual seats, and new guests fill the others. They come from all over the country, from Tennessee to Washington. At table 14, Louis quietly sips on his coffee and looks over the newspaper. You can't understand Howard's muffled slur because he's lost most of his teeth in his old age, but it doesn't really matter because he can't hear you very well anyway. Bill keeps mostly to himself, but smiles at people as they pass.
Volunteers walk around with menus to take the guests' breakfast orders. Ten minutes later the kitchen echoes with shouts of servers names as orders slide across the counter, ready to go to their tables. Guests munch on biscuits and gravy and apple cinnamon pancakes, and the café comes to life. A dull roar arises as hellos are shouted and the latest news is exchanged. Jay's laugh echoes through the dining hall as he talks with his buddies about last night's rerun of In Living Color.
SEYMOUR
These people eat together, sleep together and live together. Some aren't very clean. Some aren't very sane. They come from the Deep South and western Kansas, from small towns and inner cities, from broken homes and loving families. But they have one thing in common: they are homeless.
Homeless people are often invisible, says Keffer, Lawrence resident and one of the founders of the Jubilee Café, 946 Vermont St. They're given a number and food is slopped onto their plates at a soup
kitchen. They sleep on a thin mat on the floor of a gymnasium with the lights partly dimmed. They wander around town with nowhere to go and nothing to do, because there's not anything or anyone out there for them, Keffer says. Although they live in the same city as students, faculty and people who work downtown, life on the street is a far cry from the suburbia that so many KU students know.
For those living on the street, the life seen on TV is like make-believe, Keffer says. "It seems so superficial. It's normal life to a lot of people, but it's still fantasy to homeless people. It's so out there for them."
More common than you think. Nationally, there are approximately
3. 5 million people who end up homeless at some point each year. Children make up 1.35 million of them, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless, a national network of people committed to ending homelessness.
"I feel alone a lot. You're surrounded by a lot of people all the time, so you're not really lonely, but you still feel alone."
There are
Raleigh Worthington, left, and Donald, right, cross Massachusetts Street at South Park. The two are on their way to clean out a trailer near the south side of town.
— Raleigh Worthington, Lawrence homeless resident
There are two kinds of homeless people: the chronically homeless and the transient homeless. It's a fluid community, which makes it difficult to track how many homeless individuals there are in Lawrence. The City of Lawrence Practitioner's Panel counted 211 homeless people in June 2003, a 63 percent increase from 134 in December 2001. In 2005, the Lawrence Community Shelter, 214 W. $ _{10} $ th St., which also offers its services to impoverished people with homes, served 424 separate individuals between July and December.
134 homeless individuals showed that 71 percent were men, according to the panel.
The majority of Lawrence homeless are male. A 2001 survey of
WHO IS HOMELESS IN AMERICA?
Demographics of the U.S. homeless population, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless.
Raleigh Worthington, Lawrence resident, has been homeless for a little more than a year. He remembers the exact day he became homeless: Oct.. 4, 2004. After losing his job and using up his unemployment benefits from the government, Worthington found himself on the street. He now spends his days doing laundry, reading at the public library, looking for work and "dumpster-diving." He goes around town picking up aluminum cans and other metals to recycle. Behind fraternity houses is a good place to look, he says. Worthington takes his cans to the $12^{th}$ and Haskell
In 2003, 39 percent of the homeless population was under 18. In 2004, 25 percent was ages 25 to 34 and 6 percent was 55 to 64-years-old.
In 2004, 41 percent of the homeless was single men, and 14 percent was single women.
Families and children make up about 40 percent of the homeless population.
In 2004, 49 percent of homeless was African-American, 35 percent Caucasian, 13 percent Hispanic, 2 percent Native American and 1 percent Asian.
Approximately 23 percent of single, homeless adults suffer from some form of severe and persistent mental illness.
Veterans made up 70 percent of the homeless population in 2004.
In 2004,30 percent of homeless adults suffered from drug or alcohol addiction.
independence than having to be inside a shelter by closing time and getting up the next morning when the staff wakes him up, Worthington says. He says that being homeless makes him feel run-down and uncomfortable.
"I feel alone a lot," he says. "You're surrounded by a lot of people all the time, so you're not really lonely, but you still feel alone. You develop distrust of people and put this wall up around you."
Worthington sleeps mostly at the Salvation Army, 946 New Hampshire St., but he also spends time "couch surfing" at friends' homes. Every once in awhile he sleeps outside, but only by choice, he says. Sleeping outside gives him a liberating feeling and more
Bargain Center,1146 Haskell Ave.,where they pay 41 cents per pound.
Winding up on the street
More than 1 percent of the U.S. population is homeless, according to the Urban Institute, an independent nonpartisan center that analyzes urban problems.
"Who knows what is going through someone's mind who has been unemployed for a long while and is insecure about working again?" Henderson asks.
Worthington's situation is common among the homeless population. People often become homeless after losing a job or because they've been unemployed for a while.
Loring Henderson, executive director of LCS, says case managers at the shelter work with homeless people to sort out their personal problems about finding a job. They work on overcoming thoughts like "my boss doesn't like me" or "my coworkers are in a different clique that I can't join."
Besides unemployment, many people are homeless because of mental illness. Back at Jubilee, a man clad in protective earmuffs is talking to himself and eating breakfast. A man in a dirty, down-filled coat and silent headphones stares blankly into space. Another man tells a volunteer his newest conspiracy theory about why the governor needs to be impeached.
Approximately 23 percent of the single adult homeless population suffers from some form of severe and persistent mental illness, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless.
A huge percentage of the chronically homeless is mentally ill, which can make it hard to have and maintain a job. Henderson says.
Alcoholanddrugaddictionarealso huge factors behind homelessness. Keffer, one of the founders of Jubilee Café, was homeless from 1976 to 1980.The only thing he brought back from the Vietnam War, he says, was his alcoholism.
He couldn't hold a job and never had any money because he'd "drink it all up," he recalls. In his drinking days, he would leave Lawrence when his relatives were in town. It was easier to be homeless some place else. He didn't want to embarrass his family with his alcoholism, he says.
He hitchhiked from town to town, never staying anywhere more than a few days, sleeping on highway on-ramps and camping outside city limits. The longest time he ever spent in one place was a couple of weeks — maybe.
Koffe will never forget Dec. 18, 1978, he says, because it's the dav
that changed his life. While driving 50 miles per hour, he slammed his motorcycle into a passing car. He wasn't wearing a helmet. And he had been drinking.
"Everything I knew my whole life was gone — like that," Keffer says, snapping his fingers.
He lived through the accident but no longer can use his left arm, which he now tightly straps in a sling across his chest. After 20 years of atrophy, the injured arm is significantly smaller than his right one.
Some of the guests Keeper serves at Jubilee are sober. Others aren't. You can smell the alcohol as they enter the dining hall, still drunk from the day before. They stumble to their chairs and drink cup after cup of coffee in a vain attempt to get sober.
After his accident, Keffer decided to get sober. The mental, physical and spiritual bankruptcy of drinking led him to recover, he says. He joined Alcoholics Anonymous and has been sober since Feb. 17, 1983.
Of the two shelters in Lawrence, LCS classifies as a "wet shelter," meaning that people don't have to be sober to sleep there. LCS provides 21 sleeping spaces, but it's working to add 10 more, says Henderson, LCS director.
At the Salvation Army, however, the staff performs Breathalyzer tests at the door after 8 p.m. It's not a zero-tolerance shelter though, says Mathew Faulk, case manager at the Salvation Army.
The shelter has a limit of .04 percent, which is equivalent to a few beers, Faulk says. The Salvation Army has a capacity of 85, and it usually holds about 50 people a night.
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