Ex-homeless student now has room to call his own
Ronnell Wilson, who was on the brink of dropping out of the University of the District of Columbia as he faced his first winter on the streets, has a room to call his own after a woman read about his plight.
(Katherine Frey/the Washington Post)
TOOLBOX
   Resize
|
When the weather is especially cold, homeless folks have some tricks to survive if they don't get to a shelter. They wrap plastic bags around their feet, before they put them in the shoes.
They barter with one another for the hypothermia blankets that the city issues, draping them around their shoulders in layers until they look like gray, woolen buffaloes. Or they create an igloo with a plastic tarp tented over a park bench, the edges held down by rocks.
But Ronnell Wilson doesn't have to do any of that now.
As many of us get our standard list of New Year's resolutions together -- exercise, organize, floss -- there's nothing more humbling than meeting someone whose new beginning makes your big changes seem so small.
When I first talked to Ronnell in October, the 28-year-old was moving between the streets, the shelters and a secret hiding place on the University of the District of Columbia campus, where he's a student and was spending most of his time.
On Friday, he will wake up to 2010 in his own bed.
"It's amazing, the sounds when I wake up," Ronnell told me over a cup of coffee recently. "No sirens. No gunshots. No crazy people talking to themselves all night. I hear birds in the morning. Can you believe that -- birds?"
Ronnell came to the District to escape a family life of drugs and gangs and violence in Norfolk. He tried going to school there but had little support.
"What, you think you're too good for us now?" his friends and family would say each time he went off to class. So he got a recommendation from a professor who saw the promise in him, moved to the District and continued his studies at UDC while working nights as a cook in an upscale pizzeria.
But early last year, he was laid off and lost his apartment. He has been struggling since to stay in school.
The day after I wrote about Ronnell's unusual and admirable struggle as a homeless college student, a mom in College Park e-mailed me to let me know she wanted to help.
"I read these things in the paper every day that just break my heart. You know, kids in India, the victims of crime and poverty here in our own country, and sometimes it just feels so overwhelming, how much we don't do," she said.
