“… and a little child shall lead them.” Isaiah 11:6
By Scott Jenkins
sjenkins@salisburypost.com
Paul Fisher still sees the little girl.
On a dreary, drizzly afternoon in late March 2011, she sits on the concrete beside Rowan Helping Ministries, back pressed to the wall, knees drawn to her chest.
Beneath an overhang that provides some protection from the rain, she holds an open school book. A heavy coat makes it hard to tell just how old she is.
The little girl’s mother is beside her. So are a lot of others. They’re lined up for an evening meal and a night’s sleep at the shelter on North Long Street, just as they are every day.
Fisher, the chairman of F&M Bank, is a supporter of the ministry, so the line of mostly homeless men waiting for food and a cot is nothing new. The sight of a little girl in their midst … well, that is.
“I thought to myself, ‘Oh, my goodness,’ ” Fisher recalled this past week.
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Fisher and half a dozen others had been invited to Rowan Helping Ministries that day by Executive Director Kyna Foster. He’s part of a group who Foster said have been not only donors, but financial consultants and “good counsel” to the agency.
The others there were David Setzer, Wink Cline, Jim Hurley, Dave Jordan, Ralph Ketner and Fred Stanback.
Fisher said he didn’t know what the meeting was about when he arrived. Before he and the others left, they had committed to helping the agency build a new and larger night shelter and soup kitchen, and renovating the existing one.
Announcing the plans last week, Foster said 96 percent of the $5.5 million needed for the project had already been raised. Fisher said more than half that amount was pledged in that room, that day, in about an hour.
In economic times as hard as these, he calls that “a flat miracle” and one, for him, inspired by that little girl.
“I was committed to whatever they were doing before I even heard what they were doing,” he said. “I’m not sure if that sight had not been there we would have been as successful as we were, so I call that divine intervention.”
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The unfortunate reality, Foster says, is that little girl’s presence was not out of the ordinary. With Rowan County’s poverty rate doubling to 22 percent in the past four years, the shelter built in 1989 for homeless men has for a while been housing women and children every night.
“We’re seeing so many more families,” she said Friday. “We’re trying to meet every need that comes here, and we’re double-using and triple-using every space.”
In a building designed to shelter up to 40 men, that has included converting the lobby each night into a space where homeless families sleep and using a conference room to shelter sick children and their parents.
So many come for a hot meal, they have to eat in shifts.
The new facility would provide nighttime shelter for 60 men, 40 women and up to four families who will each have a room to sleep in and will share a common area, Foster said. Its dining room would serve up to 126, double the current capacity.
To Foster and others at Rowan Helping Ministries, the need was evident. So they did their homework. They asked Salisbury architect Bill Burgin to tell them how much space the agency needed for now and the future. They visited crisis assistance ministries and homeless shelters in other cities. They looked at five plans and figured up the cost.
Then, Foster said, they asked their wise counsel to consider the need.
“We couldn’t do anything unless we heard from them, ‘Yes, you need to do this’ … and we had their support,” she said.
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But before hearing a presentation from Foster and Chris Bradshaw, chairman of shelter ministries, about a hoped-for new shelter — before the meeting even began that late-March day — Fisher needed to know something else.
“I said, ‘Tell me about this little girl,’ ” he recalled last week. “I said, ‘It bothers me.’ ”
The little girl and her mother lived at the shelter, Foster told him. That evening, she would go through the line and get a meal, then shower in facilities Fisher said are “not adequate, especially for little girls. It was built 20 years ago for men, and that’s it.”
After showering, Foster told Fisher, the little girl and her mother would be taken to their sleeping quarters. Tables in the dining room are broken down and cots set up for homeless men, so the girl and her mother would sleep in the lobby, he learned.
“I said, ‘Oh my goodness. Have we gotten to this place? We’re doing this now?’ ” Fisher recalled.
The next morning, he was told, the little girl would get up around 5:30 or 6, dress for school, eat breakfast and walk across the street to board the school bus. And Fisher said he couldn’t help but wonder what the other children on that “big yellow bus” might think or say about the little girl at the homeless shelter.
As Foster related the story, Fisher recalled, the others in the room listened. And he believes her story stayed in the back of all their minds as they heard about the agency’s needs.
“… And so we proceeded with the meeting that day, and out of a meeting that lasted an hour, the group decided to do the impossible, and that was to build a new shelter and renovate the old one,” Fisher recalled.
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Fisher said he was glad to learn the little girl and her mother he saw that gray March day have found a home.
But he knows others have taken their place.
“The big yellow bus still stops at the shelter, and that’s sad,” he said.
And while even the wisest counsel can’t, on their own, solve the county’s homeless problem or turn back the rising tide of poverty, they can help the agency trying to ease the pain. And that’s what they decided to do.
“I don’t know how many organizations out there sort of have a dream and really start to work on it, and in less than a year have funding and plans in place,” Foster said. “It just seems like it’s been blessed, the whole process.”
Blessed and, Fisher says, inspired. Inspired by a little girl seeking shelter from the rain, a hot meal and a warm place to spend the night.
“I know she inspired me, and I have to say I think she inspired the eight or nine others who were in the room that day,” Fisher said. “Good folks were reminded through that little girl that something needed done.”