The city’s homeless

Wanda Jackson, Zana Miles and Valencia Loud hiked into a homeless tent encampment behind a tin-sheet fence that read “no trespassing” in spray paint.

It had five tents, three filled at noon Tuesday.

As part of Team 2 for the Odessa Homeless Coalition’s annual homeless count, the three friends gripped survey worksheets to be filled out and a cardboard box filled with socks to give the men and women bunkered down here who were willing to answer questions that may better assess the city’s homeless situation.

These homes were filled. No one moved in dirt path-ways in this makeshift community. Instead, they fought off a January cold front under dusty sleeping bags and blankets.

This tent city is part of a sometimes hidden, sometimes unidentified homeless problem. The Odessa Homeless Coalition wants to identify it, and volunteers like Jackson, Miles and Loud hit the streets to better access it. Elias Carrasco, a City of Odessa code enforcement officer, accompanied them.

There was a man who went by “Hillbilly” and his female companion, Terry, in a two-person, red tent. They sat cross-legged and passed a hand-rolled cigarette. Two men who said they might as well be identified as brothers, despite no blood relation, rested on mattresses in a blue four-person tent, and a young man who didn’t want to be identified or photographed was alone in a tent under a pecan tree with a camouflage blanket over him.

An outdoor living room/kitchen was between the tents in the overgrown field behind a boarded-up gas station on Second Street. A package of dry pinto beans, a lighter, a half full bottle of vegetable oil, novels and other rag-tag needs sat on a table.

Sweatshirt hoods and winter beanies covered heads.

This wasn’t the Bowery in New York, and it wasn’t skid row in Los Angeles.

It’s Odessa, and it could have been any day this year, and these men and women could have been here. They’re part of a growing dilemma inside the city limits, coalition leaders said. While the economy skyrockets with higher oil prices, some are still huddled, fighting for scraps.

One slip, and a man can bottom out in an Odessa field, Miles said.

“It could happen to anyone of us,” Miles said. “I wish more would realize that.”

Odessa’s homeless are women and some families, too. Last year, a similar homeless count identified 220 homeless in the city with 15 families and 26 children, according to the website for Odessa LINKS, a nonprofit agency. And the homeless coalition’s leaders expect to find more this year.

“The population is diverse,” Anabel Spencer, Odessa LINKS executive director and coalition member, said after the afternoon count.

The diversity lived in the tents.

Miles asked one of the brothers, Tex Holland, what he considered his racial makeup.

“I’m a Texan,” he said.

Like Hillbilly, he’d been in the military, the 59-year-old said. He doesn’t have an identification card, which is typically a necessity to get additional help.

“That makes it tough,” he said.

He drinks alcohol. Ever since he lost his wife three years ago, he said.

He’s willing to work.

“What kind of job?” Miles asked.

“Something inside out of this weather,” he said.

A fire pit was cold and ashy.

“We just want you to know that we love you,” Miles said.

Meanwhile, Jackson interviewed Hillbilly and Terry.

Terry talked mostly.

She’s 50. She ended up here from Gaston County, N.C. She has three daughters back in North Carolina, she said. She used to clean houses. Terry talked a lot about God’s blessings and finding money for a motel room for the night in order to fight off the frigid cold front.

Hillbilly, 51, is her life companion. He nodded mostly at the questions and his hands shook in the cold.

They don’t use the shelters here because they can’t stay in the same room together, Terry explained.

Neither has an identification card.

These are the things the coalition needs to know, Spencer said, in order to better serve Odessa’s underprivileged society.

For Terry, the visit was a great start to the help.

“We’re so blessed by the good Lord that you take the time to see us in this cold weather,” Terry said.

Then she hugged Miles.