“I feel myself getting back to the person I really am”
All that Sharda wanted for her kids was hope. But hope’s hard to find when you’re sleeping in a car as a family of four.
“Mom,” her young daughters would ask, “when are we getting a house?”
With the holidays on the horizon — as well as the cold nights of the season — Sharda wondered the same thing: When? Nobody wants to spend Christmas cramped in a car.
“It was really hard,” Sharda says. “That was not something I wanted to go through, or put my kids through.”
But thanks to friends like you, Sharda can now share that story in the past tense . . . because your kindness led her to City Rescue Mission’s family shelter. Since they walked through our doors, Sharda and her girls have felt safe, warm and filled with hope.
Sharda has needed that hope for a long time. At just five years old, Sharda saw her mother killed in an act of violence. “I’ve always been traumatized by that,” she says. Then, at age eight, her father passed away, leaving her orphaned. More recently, she was in a difficult relationship.
Job loss led to an eventual eviction, which led to her homelessness and sleeping in a car. When her wallet was stolen, along with her social security card, birth certificate and credit cards, she desperately needed help for her and her daughters. That’s when Sharda turned to the Mission.
“I really appreciate the Mission,” she says. “They really care. They tend to you, and help you do what you need to do to land on your feet. I feel myself getting back to the person I really am. That’s a big blessing.”
Our team is also helping Sharda get those vital documents replaced, so she can apply for jobs and housing. She wants to go back to school to study business, and she dreams of running her own restaurant someday.
But for now, she’s happy she can tell her girls it won’t be long before they’re in their own home again, hopefully just in time for the holidays.
