- April 25, 2024
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When Sandra Valentine and her son, Isaiah, 17, lived in their ’89 Thunderbird in the parking lot of the McDonald’s on Palm Coast Parkway, nights were hard. A few times, people who saw the two in the parking lot for hours called the Sheriff’s Office. Strange people wandered by at night.
“It’s scary. It’s really scary,” Sandra Valentine said. “We used to take turns sleeping because I didn’t feel secure with us both asleep.”
Now, they don’t have to do that anymore.
With the help of a local organization — Family Promise — that housed the two in churches, Valentine saved up enough money from her shift supervisor job at McDonald's to move into a new apartment in the Madison Green complex off State Road 100.
The two moved Thursday, furnishing the new home with all the things they’d had to put in storage when they lost their last one.
Isaiah, a tech and computer buff, had taken his time setting out his Transformer models on the nightstands on either side of his bed.
It had been a long time since he’d had his own space to decorate.
“The most difficult thing, I guess, was figuring out where everything was going to be,” he said. “I had to tell myself, ‘Hey, I don’t have to pack all this up in a week. I’m going to be here.’”
Path to homelessness
Valentine, a New York native raised in Florida and Puerto Rico, moved to Flagler County in 2009 after splitting up with her husband.
She’d followed him to Norway and stayed there for three freezing years — struggling to adjust to the language, the culture and the cold — before returning home.
Back in Florida on her own, she didn’t have much. She and Isaiah moved into a home with an older woman who needed help paying her mortgage. Valentine worked at McDonald’s, and Isaiah worked weekends at Publix, bagging groceries.
But when the older woman’s financial circumstances changed this past September, and she no longer needed the few hundred a month the Valentines had paid for rent, she asked them to leave.
They had no place to go, and not enough money to pay for the up-front two months of rent, or rent and deposit, that many rentals required.
So Valentine and Isaiah packed the family’s belongings into a storage unit and began sleeping in the car, keeping with them only the clothes they needed for the next few days.
But homelessness proved expensive. With no place to cook, the two had to eat a lot of fast food, and the cost added up.
“It’s not like I could go grocery shopping,” Valentine said. “I had to buy food outside, and I had to provide breakfast, lunch and dinner, so it made it difficult to save money.”
Isaiah, a strong student, began struggling in his classes at Flagler Palm Coast High School.
Valentine was afraid to tell anyone what had happened, fearing McDonald's might fire her and the Department of Child and Family Services might take Isaiah away if the agency found out the two were homeless.
But after about a month, school staff noticed and referred Valentine to the Flagler School District’s Families in Transition program for homeless children, which put Valentine and Isaiah in a local Best Western for four days and connected them with Family Promise.
A way out
Family Promise, a local organization that feeds and shelters homeless families, operates through local churches, and the Valentines began a journey that took them to more than 10 of them.
“At the beginning, I was very skeptical, because you’re moving from church to church every week,” Valentine said. “But you meet the most wonderful people. ... They have very lovely people that go out of their way to help you out.”
Valentine hadn’t been a churchgoing type, and spending so much time in churches was an adjustment.
“I knew about Christianity, but I was not a practicing person,” she said. “But going through all these churches, it brings back your faith.”
Church volunteers gave the family home-cooked meals, and left special greeting messages in their temporary bedrooms.
One woman at Santa Maria del Mar Catholic Church, learning that Valentine loves avocados, made sure to have a bag of them ready whenever Valentine and Isaiah came to the church.
Sometimes it was hard to accept so much help from other people, Valentine said.
“I grew up being humble, and I feel like I should do something for it -- I don’t just want to be given it,” she said. “But sometimes you just have to accept it, because they’re doing it from the bottom of their heart.”
The generosity of church volunteers also awakened a religious consciousness in Isaiah, she said.
“At first, it was really hard for him, because he wasn’t comfortable with the moving around in churches; he just wanted to be stable,” Valentine said. “He didn’t know what to expect out of all of this. But he’s grown. He’s changed a lot. He’s even told me, ‘Mom, here I am reading a Bible, trying to find out more about God.’ And he says to me, ‘There has to be a God, because look at how we’ve been blessed, through people who don’t even know us.’”
Staying in the churches, Valentine began saving money. Family Promise provides food and toiletries for the people it helps and counsels them to save 90% of their paycheck, after bills, to put toward a new home. Valentine did.
And Family Promise helped in other ways, providing financial counseling, giving Valentine a donated ’98 Oldsmobile with 70,000 miles on it after her Thunderbird died in December, and paying for her registration at Flagler Technical Institute, where she has started studying to become an EMT.
In between work from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and school from 6:30 to 10 p.m., Valentine looked for a place to move.
It wasn’t easy to find something affordable nearby, and Valentine didn’t want to uproot Isaiah from FPC or move so far from work that she’d lose a lot of money on gas.
When she found an open apartment at the Madison Green complex off State Road 100 for $690 a month, she took it, and moved in Thursday.
She’s confident she won’t face homelessness again.
“Unless you’re there in that situation, you take things for granted. You really do,” she said. “Once you go through it, you appreciate the things you’re given. And I take with me, from this program, that I will never find myself in that situation again. Because I know, now, what’s most important.”
