GREENFIELD — For all the discomfort and tight conditions, the stigmatization and wary, judgmental glares that came with living in a hotel-turned-homeless shelter was the worst part of the experience, said Brianna Gabry of Turners Falls.
She and her three daughters spent seven months living in the Colrain Road Days Inn after fleeing an abusive relationship at home.
“‘How dare you waste our tax money?’ I heard that a lot,” Gabry said, watching her 6-year-old daughter Lailah happily windmill a length of white chain she’d found in the parking lot behind The Salasin Project on Main Street in late September. “It was just… hurtful. You don’t know somebody’s situation unless you ask. To generalize and think that everybody is abusing the system just because we’re on food stamps or get MassHealth, or live in a shelter… there are people using it appropriately. Sometimes families fall on hard times, and we’re all just trying to survive.”
Gabry’s cramped room, designed for a day-or-two stay, wasn’t exactly the Ritz-Carlton, either. It was equipped with just a mini-refrigerator with no way to store frozen food, she said. All of the family’s cooking had to be done in a microwave, which limited their options, and a lack of storage space meant storing food on the floor.
“We did a lot of cereals and sandwiches. I’m lucky I had family in the area, and I was able to go to their house once a week and do dinner,” said Gabry.
The children weren’t allowed to use the parking lot as a play space, instead being forced to walk, or, if the family was lucky enough to have a vehicle, drive, down Colrain Road to the Green River Swimming and Recreation Area to play outside. Hotel tenants could only qualify for four overnight stays at a friend or family member’s house per month, and they had to obey a 10 p.m. curfew, which Gabry said prevented some tenants from taking certain jobs where the hours didn’t match up.
Throughout her stay, Gabry was attending classes at nearby Greenfield Community College, where she’s a nursing student. Most nights, she found herself poring over textbooks and completing homework on the bathroom floor — her daughters slept in the beds, and she couldn’t keep the lights in the main room on without waking them.
“I had to drop two classes during that timeframe, because it was either have cranky kids in the morning because I kept waking them up, or just not do my homework until I get to school,” she said.
Lailah slept in the same bed as her mother while her sisters shared the other — she got so used to it that she still does it today.
Gabry also met regularly with social workers from ServiceNet and the Housing Authority, who tried to help tenants address the underlying causes of their situation, apply for benefits, and work toward transitioning to stable housing. They helped her find funding to pay overdue utility bills that had piled up before she left her previous home, which made it hard for her to find permanent housing.
She still works with her stable housing worker, she said, and hopes to get a job at the Brattleboro Retreat when she finishes school. Soon, the family will move into permanent housing with the help of the federal Section 8 housing voucher program.
“It’s about ‘How can we keep this housing?’” Gabry said. “‘How can we not end up in this situation again?”
— TOM RELIHAN