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REACHING VETERANS WHERE THEY LIVE -- How do you

ask a homeless man if there's anybody home? Standing

deep in the woods, Carla daSilva pauses about

40 feet from the tent and calls out.

For more about homeless veterans, use the VA Watchdog search engine...click here... http://www.you
rvabenefits.org/sessearch.php?q=homeless&op=and

Story here... http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/
content/local_news/epaper/2007/12/10/m1a_VETS_1210.html

Story below:

-------------------------

Reaching vets where they live

By RON HAYES
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

How do you ask a homeless man if there's anybody home?

Standing deep in the woods, Carla daSilva pauses about 40 feet from the tent and calls in a clear, friendly voice: "Is anybody home? We're from the West Palm Beach Veterans Administration and we work with the homeless program. Is it OK if we chat?"

Then she waits for permission to approach.

The United States is home to about 200,000 homeless vets, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. More than 19,000 live in Florida, and a 2006 estimate found about 1,400 in Palm Beach County. Most of them served during the Korean or Vietnam wars.

Now the VA is bracing for a new generation born of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If these veterans find their way to South Florida, daSilva and her staff of five at the VA Medical Center's Homeless Outreach Program are eager to help.

Housed in a double-wide on the hospital's Riviera Beach campus, the outreach program is open from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday.

Inside, homeless vets find free food and clothing, a shower, a laundry and, most important, access to an array of services, from detox to housing to job training and medical benefits. A registration form asks for visitors' Social Security or service number, military branch and service dates.

"But we don't turn anyone away," daSilva says. "If we can't confirm they're a vet, we collaborate with other community resources and refer them to food pantries, food stamps and housing resources."

Jose Sanchez, 49, came to the center after six months sleeping behind a Publix in Greenacres and scrounging food from its trash bin. An Army medic from 1975 to 1978, he served at the 97th General Hospital in Frankfurt, Germany, then traded stocks on Wall Street as part of a government-sponsored training program for vets - and he drank.

"When I got out of the service, so long ago, I drank so much I barely remember a lot of the years that have gone by," Sanchez says.

He lost his job, lost his wife and daughter, and lived from friend to friend, couch to couch, until 2002, when the 30-year-old daughter he'd last seen when she was 5 invited him to start again in Florida.

"I was so stinking drunk and dirty, she paid for me to come down," he says. "I thought it was an opportunity to start a new life, and when I got here, I just found out that alcohol is cheaper down here."

Finally, he told another homeless vet he couldn't live like that anymore. The vet told him about the VA center.

"It was March 23, 2003," Sanchez says. "I'll never forget that date. I walked all the way from Forest Hill Boulevard."

A guard found him wandering the grounds, afraid to ask for directions, and escorted him to the double-wide.

"I wasn't sure if I really wanted help," he says. "Maybe I just wanted to get cleaned up and go out and drink some more."

Sanchez decided to stay, but if he hadn't, daSilva would have looked for him.

"We spend about 75 percent of our time in the community," says Frank Badich, a physician assistant who's been with the program since a month after it opened in 2000. All day each Tuesday, and a few hours every other weekday, daSilva and Badich load the trunk of a white Chevy Classic with sleeping bags and hygiene kits, used clothes and government forms, and travel Palm Beach County on a search-and-rescue mission.

"Baby wipes are popular," daSilva says.

They never travel alone.

"We assess the situation before we go in," she says. "We'll say, 'It's just not the right time to go in there.' We're going into their homes, and we always ask permission before we go."

On a recent Thursday afternoon, daSilva and Badich decide to check out a patch of woods behind a strip mall on 10th Avenue North in Lake Worth. Thousands of drivers who pass the spot every day never suspect it's there, but the VA team knows this place well.

At the back of the mall, they tramp single-file down a vague path hugged by reeds 6 feet high. Perhaps 400 feet in is a peaceful, sun-dappled clearing. In the center, a blanket strung from trees creates a cloth roof.

Under the roof are two milk crates, crushed beer cans, plastic pop bottles and several pages torn from a girlie magazine.

"It looks like it's been abandoned," Badich says. He heads east, through the reeds, around a pond, and comes upon another blanket strung between trees. Under the blanket a dome tent has been erected, with a second blanket spread out before it like a front porch and two plastic chairs at the side.

Is anybody home? Is it OK if we chat?

Dana's home, and he's happy to chat.

"I keep a good camp, and I live pretty comfortably, believe it or not, for being out here," he says, and it's true. If you had to be homeless, this green, shady spot and Dana's setup are really quite bucolic.

Dana's 54, a weathered man with a kerchief around his gray hair and a ring through his left eyebrow. He joined the Navy in 1970, he says, assigned to a destroyer escort out of Newport, R.I.

"But I only lasted until 1972," he says. "I was 19, maybe 20, and I did some things I regret now, and when I requested the discharge they gave me it, but it was undesirable."

Ask why he's homeless and Dana takes you on a long ramble involving child support, lost jobs and a hip replacement that ends with his holding a "Vietnam Vet Please Help" sign on Congress Avenue every morning. He and his buddies call the signs "cardboard credit cards."

"I can make 60 bucks in six hours," he says. "Half-days, maybe $35. It gives me my cigarette money, food money. I don't drink alcohol. I smoke weed sometimes."

Badich and daSilva give Dana two packs of baby wipes and a toll-free number he can call to request that his discharge be upgraded so he qualifies for benefits.

"An upgrade usually takes three to six months minimum," Badich says. "You have to write a statement."

Dana was friendly, polite, articulate and apparently sober and content.

"We don't force anything," daSilva says as they trek out of the reeds. "But whenever they're ready, we're ready. You just have to swing right in and call whoever we need to call."

More often than not, that's Stand Down House, a facility off Lake Worth Road that serves only veterans. The name comes from the military order to relax.

"We're not a treatment facility at all," says Roy Foster, who founded the place seven years ago with the late Don Reed. "We're supportive services."

A private nonprofit agency that gets the bulk of its funding under a contract with the VA, Stand Down House provides vets with shelter, food, companionship and counseling while they travel to and from the VA Medical Center for detox, if needed, and other medical services. All its residents must be referred by the VA.

During the first 30 days, vets stay in the facility's main house.

"Some sleep on the floor at first," daSilva says. "It's been so long, they're not used to a bed."

Once they're healthy and stable enough to work, the vets are helped with a job search, which may include employment at the VA Medical Center, and they move into one of four nearby satellite homes, for which they're given a per-diem grant.

"Success is a tricky term," says Yusuf Ahmed, Stand Down's case manager. "We base it on written objectives, but basically it means the vet is employed, has adequate housing and is sober."

Since opening in 2000, Stand Down House has housed about 1,200 vets, including Jose Sanchez.

"The VA helped me get training," he says, "helped me get a job, helped me get back in shape, helped me get my life back in order, and it's the greatest experience in the world."

Today, Sanchez is a full-time nurse assistant at the VA Medical Center's gastrointestinal clinic. He owns a home in West Palm Beach, drives his own car, is remarried to a woman who works in the hospital's emergency room and has reunited with his adult daughter.

"I'm not ashamed to say I'm an alcoholic in recovery," he says. "I just want vets to know the help is here, but they have to come and get it. It's not for people who need it. You've got to want it."

Among the 1,200 vets who have come to Stand Down House are five veterans from the war in Iraq who arrived this year.

"After the Vietnam conflict, it was generally nine to 12 years before veterans began showing up at homeless shelters in large numbers," says Casimiro Hampton-Crockett, Stand Down House's administrative director. "These vets are experiencing homelessness a lot sooner.

"We are bracing ourselves for the numbers to rise exponentially."

-------------------------

Larry Scott  --

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