TO BE A WOMAN AND UNHOUSED

As the sun beamed down harshly upon her, Jessica Kelly opened her eyes. Morning had arrived in Las Vegas. The cold concrete beneath Kelly made her back ache.

In dozens of tents and mattresses nearby, people awoke from their sleep, while other tried to seek more rest despite their circumstances.

At the time in 2020, a pandemic was brewing, but for a 36-year-old woman like Kelly waking up on the street, there were more pressing matters to attend to. Like bodily functions.

Ever since she lost the roof over her head in April 2020, Kelly and her girlfriend have lived outside, bathe outside and even bleed outside. Given their financial straits, they were fortunate when social services provided them with menstrual pads or tampons, and they used public washrooms to clean themselves. Showers were infrequent as they rarely found water and soap for a wash. Often, they resorted to T-shirts, socks, baby wipes or wash rags to clean themselves up.

Kelly is what experts refer to as someone who suffers from “period poverty,” which refers to women without access to menstrual products, reproductive education or cleaning facilities, among others. Period poverty affects about half a billion people globally. Here in the United States, it affects nearly 17 million women.

Period poverty is often exacerbated in the U.S. by “pink tax,” a phrase that describes the cost markups of many health products for women. The American Medical Association supports legislation in some states that aims to eliminate the informal supplemental costs that women face.

Homeless count

Love (and Love Lost) on the Street

When she was 24 years old, Kelly went into a corner store to buy nail polish for her then-girlfriend. A friend, along with that woman’s teenage daughter accompanied Kelly.

People at the store already knew Kelly, who they associated with gangs.

It wasn’t just gangs. Kelly had already done a six-month stint in the county prison for robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. A few months after she got out, she entered the store. And they immediately went on high alert.

Jessica Kelly at the Los Angeles Mission. Photo by Tannistha Sinha.

Recognizing her, Kelly says, the store-owner told her, “We're going to call the police.”

In their interchange that followed, the owner called Kelly, who is Black, the N-word, she says as part of the account that follows.

Kelly’s friend responded by spitting in the man’s face, and a brawl ensued — four men versus three women and a child. She punched one of the men, who fell down and dislocated his elbow.

But the real loser of the fight was Kelly, who already had a criminal record. She was eventually sentenced to prison for 12 years; she served 11 of them behind bars. At the age of 35, she got out in 2020, just in time for the pandemic.

When she got out of prison, there was a chance that her life might change. She started seeing a woman who made her feel like “everything was peaches and roses.”

But soon everything started falling apart. They ended up on the streets of Las Vegas. Day after day, for a whole year, Kelly lived in a cheap tent and took care of her girlfriend, who was struggling with an addiction to alcohol, while Kelly did her best to fend off attackers on the street, such as those who tried to take advantage of them or rob them.

Finally, she decided to seek help from social workers to find a place to live in. Her girlfriend refused to follow her. “She didn't want to go on the path that I wanted to go,” Kelly said.

Her parole officer suggested that Kelly seek help at Los Angeles Mission, an organization that works with people without a place to live. A year later — in February 2022 — she graduated from the program there.

Period poverty

Kelly does not remember the last time she could have a safe and private menstrual cycle.

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf is the co-founder of Period Equity, an organization advocating for equitable menstrual policies in the country. Of the early pandemic days, she explains, “The crises that so many communities around the country, particularly low-income and marginalized communities were facing — whether it was a combination of being a health crisis and an economic crisis and a racial justice crisis in this country — none of that was new. The pandemic heightened it in exponential ways,”.

Weiss, who coined the term “menstrual equity,” says that the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act (CARES Act), passed early in the pandemic, considered women’s sanitary products, including tampons and pads, to be qualified medical expenses.

This meant that many American women could use untaxed income from their health savings accounts to make such purchases.

Women who tend to have far fewer resources in programs like SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) — once known as “food stamps” — and WIC (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children) do not cover period items, classifying them as “luxury products.”

This leaves some of them to find makeshift solutions when they menstruate, like using toilet paper, which can have harmful health effects.

Bamidele Iwalokun, head of Immunology and Vaccinology Research Department at the Nigerian Institute of Medical Research, said that such practices place women at risk of serious infections that pass through the vagina cavity and enter the bloodstream.

“These issues existed before the pandemic, but we know that this virus is making the situation worse,” says Rosamund Ebdon, the director of policy at the humanitarian organization Plan International.

Today, around 17 million people menstruate while in poverty in the United States.

For Angelina Gallegos, menstruating while unhoused in Los Angeles caused her enough difficulties that she would go to a 99-cent store, fill up a cart with menstrual products, and and walk out without paying. Police later arrested her for this.

Unable to get a slot in a homeless shelter — she didn’t have a caseworker who saw to her well-being — and with no access to clean bathrooms, she would sneak into restaurant lavatories where she would try to change pads before she was shooed away.

At other times, she would simply try to find a quiet spot away from the chaos of her daily life and sit up straight to avoid a mess when she was menstruating.

“Society sees you in a different way and how they treat you just because you're homeless,” Angelina said. “Because they see you with a [backpack] bag, they automatically sum you up and size you up to be this person who is just going to be taking up their space.”

Monique Alvarado, organizational developmental project manager at Los Angeles Mission said they had to limit the intake of unhoused people during the pandemic due to strict COVID-19 protocols from the county’s health department. There were no emergency guest shelter beds during the pandemic, meaning that those willing to join the year-long program had to go through a round of COVID-testing and quarantining offsite.

“For a while, we actually had outdoor tents, climate-controlled with bunks,” she says, adding that before bringing such people into the program, they had to go into an observed quarantine.

Giselle Del Valle, a case manager at the same organization, said that when shelters for the unhoused population started to close down to combat COVID-19, the mission had to follow suit. Del Valle saw the fear in the eyes of the women seeking shelter, many of whom were fleeing abusive relationships. The organization housed 30 women at the time. Over the course of two years marked by the pandemic, Del Valle learned about how menstruating while unhoused affected some women. Some explained to her that they used methamphetamines when they felt unclean; to help them cope with feeling of being “dirty.”

Social services had to maintain social distancing too

Dana Marlowe, founder of I Support the Girls, a nonprofit organization which collects and distributes menstrual products to people facing homelessness or period poverty, said the foundation went through a shortage of funding and volunteers due to stay-at-home orders during the pandemic.

Before the pandemic, the organization banked on volunteer groups from the University of Maryland, George Washington University, American University, Johns Hopkins and the Girl Scouts, who would take turns to pack and deliver menstrual products. When the volunteer pool dried up, Marlowe saw an outpouring of volunteers who offered to help remotely.

But the organization needed manpower to write the thank you notes, send the tax receipts, to count the number of tampons in their inventory and to move the boxes from one room to another. The demand for products grew steadily.

Marlowe said that because people were hoarding menstrual products in the beginning of the pandemic, it caused scarcity. Donors reached out to her with money to buy the products or vehicles to deliver them. But the shelves were empty.

Today, their volunteer base, now vaccinated, has regained its strength in numbers, where everyone abiding by a strict masking policy, come in and help with their work after a regular process of signing in, sanitizing and temperature checks.

“This was really unfortunate to see the supply chain shortage just on the demand side because people were freaking out. These are people with extra money to spend on buying seven packages of tampons instead of the normal one or two that they would buy every few months,” said Keiser, managing partner of impact at Madami, a social innovation agency focused on menstrual health.

Keiser believes that donation of menstruation products is not a long term way to structurally address poverty. She said period poverty is a “fancy term” for trying to encourage people into understanding the importance of menstrual health and having one’s period with dignity. “I firmly believe that period poverty reinforces the fact that women are responsible for their poverty, which is not the case, right?,” she said. “It's your fault that you can't afford products because you're so poor. No, the problem is that tampons are seven or eight dollars a box.”

Some volunteers did not want to expose themselves to the pandemic because of their age, said Lysne Tait, Executive Director of Helping Women Period, a nonprofit organization, supplying menstrual health products to people experiencing homelessness or low incomes. Tait said many of the volunteers at her foundation are over the age of 60 and did not want to risk their health. In several ways, the volunteer base decreased in the college town in Lansing, Michigan, where the organization is based. With one setback after another, their inventory decreased heavily during the pandemic and even fewer people were able to deliver them. Moreover, with shelters closing down during the initial months of the pandemic, it was harder for them to contact more people, owing to the home quarantines and skepticism surrounding in-person contact.

When the need for menstrual products went up, she decided to organize four food pantries a month instead of their usual two, to help deliver menstrual products at the end. She said the organization increased their distribution from 560,000 items in 2020 by another 200,000 in 2021.

Happy Period, a nonprofit organization based in Los Angeles, observed that after the racial reckoning brought about by the Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd, funding for Black nonprofits increased, but was short-lived. Much of the attention from the press and people following BLM fizzled out in a few months. Suddenly, it was not on their “agenda” anymore, according to Chelsea VonChaz, the founder of the organization. “Companies and brands made a lot of promises, right?” she said. “It is performative activism. Once 2021 came, it started to shift and die down and people kind of went back to their regular old racist selves.”

VonChaz said that even though people are talking about periods more openly and contesting the existence of pink taxes, there is still a long way to go. Bringing positive change like the waiver on taxes on menstruation products in Michigan, was one such step. Coming to terms with one’s period is always a journey, especially among young girls and nonbinary teens as their bodies change drastically during puberty, she said.

With the high demand for period products, some organizations like The Pad Project, an organization that works with American and international nonprofits to advocate for menstrual equity and inclusivity for “menstruators” as a whole, including nonbinary and transgender people, got requests for period underwear during the pandemic from food banks and homeless shelters in Los Angeles.

Tricia Callender, Head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Thinx Inc., a New York based company that makes period underwear which can be worn during menstruation as an alternative to pads and tampons, says it is a more sustainable option, compared to traditional menstrual products. This is because the products “sit in landfills for centuries,” according to her.

“Unhoused people often do not have access to laundry that period underwear requires, so we are mindful of this when we consider donations; also for this reason we previously partnered with pad and tampon brand Aunt Flow and, as a team, made period kits of pads and tampons, that we donated to local shelters,” Callendar said.

As America continues to grapple with the pandemic, Kelly completed her career development program at the Los Angeles Mission. She still gets flashbacks of people’s disapproving looks when she tried to use public bathrooms when she was unhoused. After leaving the mission, she found a job as a janitor and vows to never turn away someone who is looking for a safe place to clean themselves.

She knows what that felt like.

“I am very optimistic,” Kelly said. “I will not allow my past to determine how far I’m going in life.”

Maryalice Freeman.

Maryalice, who now works as an assistant chaplain at the Los Angeles Mission on Skid Row, was once a resident there. In the 1990s, she was unhoused and grappling with a cocaine addiction. When she decided to seek help at the Anne Douglas Center, the women's wing of the LA Mission, she says it changed her life. In this podcast, she talks about her life on the streets and how she changed it around.

Mary Lou Jackson, 38, has been in a homeless shelter for two months now. She says it was a series of choices and circumstances that led her here. She was living with her children in Maine when she found out that Zander, her teenager, was transgender, they fought constantly, until he decided to live with his father in Delaware.

Jackson packed up her bags instantly, quit her job and moved to Delaware to be near Zander. She moved in with her father-in-law who also suffered from ailments and needed her help.

“I really just don't know who I am without my kid to take care of,” Jackson said.

Mary Lou Jackson with her second child. Photo curated from her Facebook page.

Jackson is part of one of the fastest growing numbers in the unhoused population in the United States, with 34% of the total homeless population comprising families. Out of this, nearly 84% are headed by women. Without stable housing, they have lesser access to proper health care, especially while trying to avail affordable and good quality care during pregnancy.

These women also experience a higher number of issues during childbirth as compared to the general population, almost three times more likely to have a preterm delivery and 7 times more likely to give birth to an infant who weighed less than 2,000g. Other issues include having a small-for-gestational-age newborn. In the country, preterm birth rates and low birth weight rates among unhoused women exceed national averages.

Jackson’s identity as a mother was soon disrupted when her child’s father said he and his fiance would be moving to North Carolina and would not be able to care for their teenager for a couple of months. When he came back to get Zander back, Jackson says she “kind of lost it.”

She started working at an Amazon warehouse in October 2019. It was physically draining for her. To unwind, she ended up with “the wrong crowd” and started drinking and using recreational drugs like acid, ecstasy and mushrooms. “I would definitely say it was my life crisis,” Jackson said. “I was being a teenager all over again.”

It was while working at the warehouse that she started bonding with her supervisor, Jess, also a single mother, and who also wanted to straighten up her life away from all the drinking. They started confiding in each other. Jackson went over to her house quite often to help her cook and clean. Jess ended up offering her extra room to her. In August 2020, they started living together and “lifting each other up.”

After a month, they started fighting.

Jackson attributes their fight to Jess’ “unmedicated” bipolar disorder that led to full-blown arguments. A month later in September, Jackson started casually dating a man named Dave, who was her ex-boyfriend from two decades ago. He slowly started becoming her pillar of support.

She says he was the “complete opposite” of the people she was hanging out with. He did not drink or use drugs and had a “very calm lifestyle,” which helped her focus on her life again. They had always wanted a family with children but never got the chance to settle down.

This would upset Jackson because she found out she was perimenopausal, or a transition around menopause. Her chances of getting pregnant were almost nil.

But in Jackson’s mind, she wanted to set things right after what happened with her first child. “I wanted to do it right the next time,” she said.

And then, a month after she started seeing her ex-boyfriend, she got pregnant.

This prompted Dave, her boyfriend, to take time off. “He needed time to accept that and process,” Jackson said. So, they took a break from the relationship for a while. The news of her pregnancy, she says, made Jess, her supervisor and roommate, “jealous” and made her fight for Jackson’s attention. But as long as Dave and Jackson were struggling to make their relationship work, she was fine. It eventually led Jackson to decide that she needed to leave.

In January 2021, three months into her pregnancy, she moved back in with her father-in-law, whose deteriorating health and refusal to go to the doctor, was proving to be overwhelming for her.

In the backdrop, the COVID-19 pandemic was waging.

That is when she started reaching out on Facebook, requesting family and friends for leads on temporary housing. By then, she had quit her job at Amazon and was working at the Burlington coat factory. She started off as a receiving clerk and then got promoted to a greeter position, which meant she had to count the number of people entering the store and wipe down their carts with sanitizer, owing to COVID restrictions.

The pay was less. But the work was physically easy on her.

She found out she was a high risk pregnancy with gestational diabetes and pre-eclampsia. When her company found out, they started cutting her hours and finally, left her out of the work schedule altogether. Two weeks later, the company told her they were laying temporary workers and she was laid off.

Unemployed and pregnant, Jackson had to file for unemployment.

She ran into an old family friend, who used to be her daycare provider when she was a child. She contacted Jackson on Facebook and said that if needed a place to stay, she had a camper on her farm. Soon, Jackson moved in.

She did not have a car and had to rely on her partner, Dave, who was living an hour away, to get to doctor’s appointments. Since her pregnancy was critical to her health, she had to go to the doctor every two weeks, then every week and then, multiple times a week. This was putting a lot of pressure on Dave to save money.

Jackson kept waiting for an answer on her application for unemployment. She kept asking the state representative of Delaware, the governor and the senator’s offices for answers. Living off of her tax returns was proving to be very difficult. Finally, the representative, whom she went to high school with, got back to her. They found out her case was flagged for additional review, which meant there was a three-month waiting list to get an answer on unemployment.

Her mind went in loops: answer. Unemployment money. Delivery her baby safely.

Three months later, her unemployment request was denied with no explanations. Meanwhile, the denial got sent to her old address and when she found out, it was too late to appeal the decision.

“I have no idea where I'm going. What's going to happen? My baby's going to be born soon,” Jackson kept thinking. At the same time in September 2020, Zander, her transgender firstborn, was abandoned by his father who could no longer take care of him and was living in Texas with his grandparents. They refused to let him visit Jackson. So, she was not only fighting to have a place to stay and take care of her newborn but also her son.

Despite her situation, she tried to keep her stress levels under control. She had been away from Delaware for a long time before returning to the state years later. She had lost her support system. Her mother and stepfather lived in Maine but did not want her in the house.

“When I lived with them, I helped them out of financial burdens,” Jackson said. "They have an extra room in their house and still their response to my situation is, ‘Jesus loves you, I'll pray for you.’ And that's it.”

After her baby was born, she was still in the camper. It had started leaving due to heavy rainstorms. She decided to stay with Dave.

It was chaotic. The trailer they were living in had Dave, his mother, his sister who had recently given birth as well and Jackson’s teenager who had returned when she got a place to live in.

“So we're all crammed in like sardines and aggravating the crap out of each other,” Jackson said.

In November 2021, she found out she was pregnant again. Meanwhile, her relationship with Dave was also deteriorating. A week before the Christmas of 2021, he told her he no longer has feelings for her.

With a teenager and a newborn baby, she felt her life was falling apart. Dave would stay out all night to avoid taking care of the baby. She also started noticing how Dave was completely dependent on his mother for basic sustenance. He could not hold down a job, contribute to bills or help with cooking. When their son was born, “He is completely spoiled,” Jackson said. “He would sit and play video games all day long and his mom would do his laundry for him. It would take every ounce of me to bite my tongue and say ‘you're worried about spoiling the baby, but you're not worried about spoiling the 39 year old living in your house.’”

Mary Lou Jackson's sonogram of her second child. Photo curated from her Facebook page.

She started reaching out to social services to enquire about emergency housing. They directed her to the New Castle County Hope Center, an hour away from Magnolia where she was staying.

In January 2022, she moved in at the shelter. On some Mondays and Tuesdays, Dave comes to look after the children, giving her some time to do paperwork and clean the room. He also buys diapers and wipes for their newborn.

Her mental health has been in shambles. “There's definitely a lot of crying, a lot of anger,” Jackson said. “The feeling of having no help at all and nobody to reach out to…when I do reach out, not getting the answers, all of that is just so frustrating that you can't help but be angry. This isn't the way things are supposed to go.”

She tried hard to explain to Medicaid supervisors that Zander, her transgender teenager has a history of self-harm and suicidal thoughts. She still could not get medical coverage for him to go to therapy and buy medicines. “[It] was a six month battle,” she said.

Today, she feels she has a lot to be angry about.

She felt Hope Center is comfortable but it is not suitable for mothers. They did not have any resources to help her during her pregnancy. They had a private room with a microwave and a mini fridge but she did not have a car.

Eight months pregnant and living off of a food stamp with a limited space to store food, was challenging. The rules at the shelter said she had to be with her children at all times. So, they would all take the bus together to go to the grocery store.

She has been applying for work at home positions, especially in breastfeeding peer support roles.

On April 11, almost a week before Easter, the shelter asked Jackson and her family to leave Hope Center because she was “a liability.” The state had “warned me ahead of time” that they were looking to place them elsewhere and to be ready. They said they would not move them until they had a place in mind.

She requested them not to take this step. “I didn't feel moving from this nice shelter to a motel was really what was best for my children,” Jackson sent in a message to the reporter. “They basically told me I had no choice.”

Her teenager stayed home from school that day. At 11am while they were at the laundromat, they got the call that they needed to pack their bags and check in an hour away at 3pm.

They told her the name of the motel and since they were putting her back in the area she is from, she knew the place was not comfortable, but when they actually got there, it was a different place than she was thinking and it was much worse. “I tried to put aside all I've heard about this place and about all the prostitution and drug dealings and we went to look at the room,” Jackson wrote in the same message. “Thankfully my baby was with his dad for the day, also in preparation for this.”

When they entered the room, her teenager started laughing uncontrollably while she burst into tears. “Even my teen repeatedly asked how this was supposed to be okay,” she wrote.

“The beds had blood stains, the carpet that you could tell used to be red was stained black and torn....no shredded. All the furniture was warped wood with broken splintered pieces. There were rusty metal pieces of the furniture poking out. The sink counter was cracked and chipped. The bathroom ceiling was peeking and molded. It was absolutely unsafe for my baby at the very least. He crawls and walks now. I wouldn't even take him into this room ever.... I have seriously seen crack houses that looked better than this motel room. I couldn't fathom how the state was okay with paying $490 a week for it.... Especially when I could rent a house for $1200 a month and it would be so much nicer.”

She called social services and told them there was no way she could stay there with her children and asked them to please call her back with any other housing options. No one received her call or called her back. She is living off her tax refunds with which she had hoped to rent a place. But no one wants to rent their place to her because she is unemployed, even when she says she could pay them six months upfront.

“So now that money is getting blown in a long stay hotel room and I'm hoping it lasts until this next baby is born,” Jackson said. “I have no idea what the plan will be after that.”

Vinny Vega dreaded shopping for clothes with his foster mother because she insisted he dress like a girl. He fought with her about the shirts he wanted to wear until his face burned red and tears stained his cheeks, at the humiliation of having these conversations at clothing stores.

“I don't feel comfortable. I can't feel comfortable and female,” Vega, who has been living with his foster parents for seven years, said to them. But it always fell on uncaring ears.

Vega, 21, is one of the 250 transgender and unhoused youth at the Thrive Youth Center, an organization that shelters the LGBTQIA+ community from discrimination and homelessness in San Antonio. The entrance to Thrive has a wall with a mural of two unhoused people on it that says “I thought I would never have to sleep on the outside.” At the top is painted “Haven for Hope,” the name of the homeless shelter under which Thrive operates to assist unhoused trans youth in particular. The gates are always locked and can only be accessed by staff members. Security guards patrol the area. Unhoused people wait outside the gates, some trying to access services, others smoking cigarettes or talking in small groups. Inside the gates are tall buildings, including housing units and administrative offices. There is also a large field in the center, where families, veterans and other unhoused residents at Thrive lounge in the sun or sit at the tables talking to each other.

In this podcast, we will talk to residents of Thrive like Vinny, people who work there and lawmakers.

Vinny Vega's story

Why Gwen Stacy rejected Christianity

Advocacy and a fight for survival

Who is on whose side?