Libier, 11, is a fifth-grader at Theodore Roosevelt Elementary School who likes math and wants to attend a four-year university. And for the last three months, she has lived at a homeless shelter in Indio with her mother, older sister and toddler brother.
"Some of the kids at school do make fun of me about it, but it really doesn't matter," she said as she whirled around in a chair with her mahogany ponytail flying. "They aren't friends."
Libier is one of about 70 children who live at Martha's Village & Kitchen and attends the elementary school a block from the shelter. Children from the shelter make up 10% of the elementary school's student body, Principal Kyle Bunker said.
Poverty isn't unusual in the eastern Coachella Valley, where many families live in run-down trailer parks or ramshackle housing, but the homeless shelter can offer hope to families in trouble.
Families, headed by one parent or both, are referred to the shelter from Corona, Moreno Valley and San Bernardino County. They can stay for up to 28 months, but the average stay is less than a year.
"There's a lot of poverty at this end of the valley, and a lot of social services are needed," Bunker said. "We try to help out as much as we can."
Martha's Village & Kitchen is part of Father Joe's Villages, a nonprofit network of shelters for homeless families, youths and HIV-positive adults in San Diego and Riverside counties and in Mexico. Father Joe's Villages calls itself a "homeless rehabilitation organization" that attempts to address the underlying causes of homelessness: domestic violence, mental illness, drug addiction, and the difficulty of finding work that pays a livable wage.
The network uses an array of programs and social services to give its clients the counseling and job skills they need to become self-sufficient.
Martha's Village & Kitchen, which most people call Martha's, was started in the kitchen of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church in Indio by Gloria Gomez and Claudia Castorena in 1990. In 1998, the small parish kitchen that at first served only 30 meals a week to the homeless became part of Father Joe's Villages. Martha's now serves 750 meals a day and in 2000, with private donations and public grants, built a $10-million, 120-bed homeless shelter.
Sometimes the help Martha's provides come in the form of clothing. Many students at Roosevelt wear uniforms, but buying one is often beyond the means of poor parents.
