Taís Moraes

by Tais Moraes

When Donna Matthews arrived with her two daughters for their first night in a homeless shelter in Jamaica, Queens, she thought she was going to stay there for a couple of weeks. As the days, weeks and months of 2005 went by, she realized she was wrong.

“I was scared, I was homeless, but didn’t want to see it,” she said. It’s been two years now.

Being homeless was a situation that she never thought she would go through. Matthews comes from a middle class family from Manhattan and lived with her parents before getting married in 1991 and moved to her husband’s house in Canarsie, Brooklyn.

In a daily report issued by the city’s Department of Homeless Services, 9,396 families were living in temporary homeless shelters last Nov. 21.

According to a report released in July by the advocacy group Coalition for the Homeless, in 2006 the number of homeless families that are new to the shelter system raised 24 percent.

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