"We were one of the first families that entered Floyd Bennett, adapting as the shelter was growing," says Kimberly, who arrived with her husband and four children from Venezuela last December. That meant adjusting to the tent complex's outdoor bathrooms (a tricky thing with young kids during the bone-chilling winters and scorching summers) and learning to live with the shelter's restrictions on coming and going. But they fell into a routine all the same. In the morning she and her husband would stand outside the tent waiting for the bus that took their kids - ages 12, 9, 6, and 5 - to school. Then the couple would head to Home Depot to see what odd jobs they could pick up or what the nearby food pantries had in stock. The kids made friends at school and in the shelter. Predictability became a small comfort. Relocating, after all that, felt scary."
"My family and I feel adrift," she says. "Although it's true that the state has helped us a lot and we are grateful, we feel that we are still on the journey because we are still going from one place to another."
The family moved just before Christmas. After a stopover at the Roosevelt Hotel for a night, they moved again, this time to the Utica Hotel in Bed-Stuy, where they'll stay for the next 60 days. The commute to school now takes nearly an hour, and the kids are mostly inside when they're home. "We feel isolated," she says. But her major worry right now is what comes next.
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