ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, December 9, 1996 TAG: 9612090005
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Good Neighbors Fund
SOURCE: BETSY BIESENBACH STAFF WRITER
Life is complicated for Yvette Ondell, 24. She and her two small children live in an apartment in a drafty old house. When it's cold, they squeeze together in one room around a kerosene heater. There are squirrels in the attic, she often has to wait two or three hours for the water to build up enough pressure to fill a sink, and she is two months behind on her $225 monthly rent. She has applied for public housing but is on a waiting list.
Her only income is $291 in Aid to Families with Dependent Children and $315 in food stamps each month. She cannot afford to work, she said. Even with overtime, paying $135 a week for day care for two children would eat up whatever she could earn from the minimum-wage jobs she is qualified for.
Her children's father just started paying child support, she said, but it has yet to reach her because he has to first reimburse the state for the overdue payments before she will see the money.
She has other family in town, but they aren't able to help her. And if it weren't for the Presbyterian Community Center, she wouldn't have electricity, either.
The center's caseworkers screen applicants for the Roanoke Area Ministries Emergency Financial Assistance Program, which is supported by the Roanoke Times' Good Neighbors Fund. They gave Ondell a grant from the fund to pay the electric bill last year when she lost a job a few months after she was hired and taken off AFDC.
"I had to ask for help," she said. Sometimes, stretching her monthly check "gets kind of close."
"They're really nice," she said about the center's staff.
Ondell also takes parenting classes at the center, and "it helps a lot," she said.
Ondell's AFDC benefits are scheduled to end next year, but in a way she is looking forward to it, she said.
"It's better for me to get off it. I get tired of staying home [instead of working]. It's just for my kids' sake, anyway."
She hopes to be able to train to become a cosmetologist someday, but she's not sure where the training will come from, or who will watch her children while she works.
But Ondell is still optimistic.
"With the new year comes a new life," she said, smiling.
Checks made payable to the Good Neighbors Fund should be mailed to The Roanoke Times, P.O. Box 1951, Roanoke 24008.
Names - but not donation amounts - of contributing businesses, individuals and organizations, as well as memorial and honorific designations, will be listed in the newspaper.
LENGTH: Medium: 55 linesby CNB