Faith in Times of Hardship
How a Brown Student Grew in His
Faith While Living Homeless
ELIZABETH JEAN-MARIE
Kevin Simmons went to Brooklyn Technical High School,
one of the best high schools in the state of New York. He
excelled in their Gateway to Medicine Program, which
involved a curriculum of advanced science and math
courses. In his junior year of high school, Kevin continued to
thrive despite his family’s big move: to a homeless shelter.
Kevin didn’t grow up with much. His family of four lived
in a small apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where he
had to share a room with his sister who was ten years his
senior. But Kevin looks back at his childhood fondly.
“Growing up there was actually pretty fun. Pretty much close
to everything, close to downtown…a library was close by that
I went to almost every day, my video game store, McDonald’s
and everything in between. It was great,” said Simmons.
Home-life started to become stressful for Kevin’s family
when his father, Billy Simmons, hurt his back on the job at
the New York Presbyterian Hospital. Due to his inability to
work, financial strain was placed on his family. Meanwhile,
the price of living in Park Slope continued to rise. Kevin’s
mother, Mary Simmons, worked as a clerk at the New York
City Hilton Hotel. The stress of her work led to health issues
of anxiety and high blood pressure, causing her to also
leave her job. At the end of Kevin’s sophomore year, his
parents knew that moving was inevitable; they were fearful
of the possibility of having to retreat to a homeless shelter.
Kevin wasn’t aware of how dire the financial situation was
for his family at the time. He was just worried about making
friends in school and doing well in his classes like any
other teenager. Even as his family was being evicted and
registered to live in the New York City Homeless shelter,
Kevin still had a sense of naïve optimism about the situation.
“It didn’t really hit me immediately. I was thinking ‘Okay,
we’ll get out of this eventually.’ Then after a while, your brain
just starts noticing, ‘Hey, this isn’t home,’” said Simmons.
Everyday after school, Kevin would go the New York
Public Library to use the computers since he didn’t
have any access to one at the shelter. The local
library had a 30-minute limit for computer use.
“I remember trying to make it like a game, like a Mission
Impossible race to the finish line. Let’s say I had to write
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CORNERSTONE Magazine
an essay. I would have to break up my essay by section,
draft most of it out by hand, and for those 30 minutes, I’d
just type. I didn’t have time to waste,” Simmons stated.
After Kevin finished his schoolwork at the
library, he would return to the shelter.
“You go inside, and there’s this security check, you
know, like the one that you see in airports. You had to
put your stuff on a conveyor belt and walk through a
metal detector because people would bring weapons,
drugs, alcohol, things like that,” said Simmons.
Kevin shared a room with his parents while his
sister lived in a separate women’s shelter.
“We’d been moved around a lot in that shelter, but from
what I can remember, our first room was green. Not grass
green, but puke vomit green. It was pretty disgusting and
what made it even worse was the fact that the exhaust pipes
ran into our room. It would smell really awful,” he said.
There’d be some days when my parents
were just straight up depressed. And
I’d say ‘Don’t worry, God will work
it out somehow, I know He will’
Their room was an old bathroom that had been refashioned
into a bedroom to accommodate people in the shelter.
They had three beds, a small metal counter, and an old
graffitied mirror. They moved in at the beginning of the
summer without any form of air conditioning, just in time
to feel the full force of New York’s humidity and heat.
Meals were provided in the shelter’s cafeteria. For
breakfast, there was an option of a small box of Corn
Flakes or Raisin Bran, with a half pint of milk. Kevin used
to love Raisin Bran growing up, but after a year in the
shelter, he “never wanted to eat Raisin Bran again.”
“The conditions in the shelter were pretty
bad, but the bathrooms—the bathrooms
were the worst part,” he recalled.
With the cleaning janitor coming in sporadically at best,
the bathrooms were always dirty. They’d have the smell
of urine and leftover waste. A woman on Kevin’s floor
had a son who was disabled. He had difficulties using the