Covenant House is a place of refuge for teens

    Jessica, a student at a magnet high school in New Orleans, had lived in a crazy home environment for so long that she was beginning to think her mother’s explosive tantrums were normal and perhaps even justified.
    There was the day she cleaned the entire house, she thought, from top to bottom, but, of course, she was wrong.
She was always wrong. Her mother told her so, so it had to be true.
    “I left a spot on the floor, and she got really mad,” Jessica said. “She said I was dirty and trifling and didn’t clean it up right. She was hitting me. I think she was having a bad day that day.”
    The bad days, painted and framed by a bipolar mother, continued to mount, as though this was a bizarre version of the movie “Groundhog Day,” where every crazy day replayed the same crazy scenes.
    “She was abusive and she would say mean things to me and blamed me for everything that happened in the house,” Jessica said. “She was crazy. You have no choice but to accept it because that’s what you’re going to be around. I couldn’t do anything.  That’s your mother. If you hit her back, that would have been worse.”
    The craziness finally pushed Jessica to take action. She had tried escaping her bizarre existence by moving in temporarily with friends, but “once you start staying there they get fed up with you being there.”
    So, Jessica said, she went “from house to house to house.” Finally, with nowhere else to turn, Jessica took the advice of a friend last year and walked through the doors of Covenant House, a refuge on North Rampart Street for homeless teens.
    She has been rebuilding her life and her self-esteem ever since, said Jim Kelly, who served for 10 years as the co-president and chief executive officer of Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New Orleans but returned earlier this year to Covenant House, the program he started from scratch in 1986.
    “It’s great to be back with these kids,” Kelly said. “They are really good kids. People look at them and can’t really see that. That’s why I constantly say they are good kids. They need to hear it.”
    Jessica, for example, spends her weekdays at school and doing homework, and she also works several evening shifts at McDonald’s. That’s about a 50- to 60-hour workweek.
    Like the other teens at Covenant House, Jessica banks 80 percent of her earnings with Covenant House to build up a stake that eventually will allow her to rent an apartment on her own. In addition, she’s had to pay personally for court costs associated with her mother, and she pays for her school fees and the $55 a month bus pass.
    Covenant House’s primary goal is to reunite teens with their families, but that’s not always possible. Kelly said the number of homeless or at-risk teens served by Covenant House has doubled in the last four months, the result of an increase in outreach and close collaboration with social service agencies.
    Also, the teens at Covenant House know who among their peers need these services, and they have acted as recruiters, telling friends, “You really need to come in here and get off the streets. These people really want to help.”
    Kelly made the decision after returning to Covenant House to remove the iron gate at the main entrance on North Rampart. The gate used to be kept closed, but now it is gone. The only sign of the gate that once was secured to the red brick pillars are the tiny holes that held the metal screws.
    Kelly says the open-door policy sends a simple message to homeless teens: “We are here for you, 24/7.”
    As always, the kids put things into perspective for Kelly. When he was running Catholic Charities during Hurricane Katrina, he and co-president Gordon Wadge went to the Superdome to see if they could help the stranded evacuees, and a woman in her early 40s shouted to him, “Hey, Mr. Jim! Mr. Jim!”
    “I was thinking, ‘The only one at this age calling me Mr. Jim had to be a former Covenant House kid,’ and that’s exactly who she was,” Kelly said. “We talked and laughed and I was checking on how she was doing. I remember saying to her, ‘You’re going to be OK.’ She looked at me with a twinkle in her eye and said, ‘Yeah, you know, this is nothing.’”
    Kelly called that his “great thank you from God” in the midst of the storm.
    “Katrina was nothing to her,” Kelly said. “These are kids who have been through hell and back.”
    Jessica says Covenant House has given her the courage and strength to dream big.
    “I went down to ‘American Idol’ when it was here,” she said. “I’ve taken modeling classes. They’ve allowed me to see the better of myself. I want to go to LSU for nursing or to be a dental assistant. If I can save up the money, maybe I’ll be a chemical engineer.”
    And if she had not found Covenant House? “To be honest, I would probably be dead,” she said. “If I got kicked out and had nowhere to go on the street, you can fall easily for anything. Usually, a life like that ends up dead.”
    The relentless loop of craziness has stopped. “I feel very proud of my accomplishments,” Jessica said.
    Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at [email protected].