- April 18, 2024
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Flagler Beach resident Marjorie Bostwick, 43, has done a lot of business coaching in her lifetime, but it was especially hard to do it homeless, she said.
“I was determined not to let it break me, not to let it control me,” she said. “I was trying to get my life back together.”
Moving forward took grit and a can-do attitude.
But, she said Saturday to women assembled for a Samaritan Ministries workshop at the Shepherd of the Coast Lutheran Church, it also took the right clothes.
Bostwick and other Samaritan volunteers modeled business outfits assembled for less then $10 — shoes included — from local thrift stores, and gave the dozen or so women in the audience pointers on how to create a job-interview-ready wardrobe on a shoestring budget.
Alliance Financial Planners financial coach Eddie Herrera, host of the twice-a-month radio show “Faith, Family and Finances,” spoke to the women about emergency budgeting, and Samaritan Ministries assistant Patsy Eldredge helped prepare a rack full of free donated clothes for the attendees.
Samaritan Ministries
Samaritan Ministries was created by another Flagler Beach woman who overcame a hard past.
Lorraine Vickery, 60, suffered through a childhood with polio and a family that rejected her.
After a painful breakup on 1982, she bought a gun, left her daughter at the girl’s father’s home, and went home to kill herself.
She couldn’t do it.
Vickery went to Crescent Beach the next morning to think, and found herself pleading for help from a God she wasn’t sure existed.
She enrolled in World Evangelism Bible College and made helping others her life’s work.
She created Samaritan Ministries in 2001, hoping to help women struggling to break out of poverty or abusive relationships.
“I kept seeing women come in and try to make changes in their life, but they kept going back to the same family, the same boyfriend,” she said. “We founded this with the hope of filling gaps in services,” she said.
The program runs on about $3,000 a month, she said. All of the money comes from donations.
Vickery also created Cafe Barnabas, an education and internship program that certifies women as food handlers and employs them to do catering.
Some women the group helps have been fighting poverty for years, she said.
One young woman Samaritan Ministries aided came to the organization with a sick child, no work and no transportation. She’d never learned to drive and didn’t have a car or a driver license.
Now she has both.
“We took turns taking her out driving our cars. It was kind of scary,” Vickery said, laughing. “But we got her a license.”
Samaritan Ministries also helped her enroll in adult education computer classes and find a job, where she makes $11 an hour, Vickery said.
In an instant
Not all of the women Samaritan Ministries help came from such a hard background. Bostwick went from middle class to homeless in 24 hours.
She had been a stay-at-home mother married to a well-paid city official, she said, when she and her husband began arguing. She wanted a divorce.
The two fought, and in one argument in 2011, Bostwick chucked a wedding album at him.
She missed, but he called the police, pressed charges and filed a restraining order.
Bostwick was jailed, and got out 24 hours later to find that her husband had closed their joint accounts. The restraining order barred her from returning to the home they’d shared or seeing their daughter.
And just like that, the middle class stay-at-home mom was homeless.
She got out of jail with the clothes on her back and a little money in her wallet.
“I started walking. I had no idea where I was going or what I was going to do,” she said.
Friends who’d learned her release time drove around until they found her. She spent the next three months staying at friends’ houses and learning to live with thrift-store clothes and food-stamp dinners.
And she began working for Samaritan Ministries, creating a workshop called “Becoming the woman God wants you to be” to help other women.
Many of them, she said, found themselves in poverty after leaving an abusive relationship. For women who’d been jailed, she said, it was especially hard to recover.
“That experience stays with you. The mug shot stays. It sticks with you for the rest of your life,” she said.
In jail, she said, “I sat there with all of those women and heard their stories. And all of them had been put there at the hands of a man,” she said. “And what was scary was none of them knew where they’d go after jail.”
For many women struggling with poverty or abuse or pulling themselves up after jail, Samaritan Ministries assistant Patsy Eldredge said, Samaritan Ministries provides that guidance.
“I’ve been in the place where these women are now, and I understand their struggle,” Eldredge said. “It’s a huge need. There’s a lot of poverty and need in our community.”
