Cindy Lange-Kubick: Young mom's SOS answered

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Jackie Leafty is sitting on a curb in front of her mother’s house — 19 and pregnant and holding onto her 2-year-old son.

She is bawling.

Chris Webster is six months into this job at CEDARS Street Outreach Services, and he’s come to help this homeless girl.

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He gets out of his van, the van that roams Lincoln carrying fanny packs filled with toothpaste and shampoo and hope.

Jackie?

She looks up. (Gosh, she looks so young.)

She sees steel-toed combat boots. Curly hair sliding down a broad back. Tattoos of skulls and barbed wire inking beefy arms.

This guy is going to help me?

Two-and-a-half years later she still remembers it, sitting in her second-floor apartment, Chris’ scuffed boots by the door where she makes him take them off so he doesn’t get her carpet dirty, 2-year-old daughter Miana on her lap.

“I was a mess. I didn’t have no makeup on, I didn’t have my eyebrows drawn on and I looked and thought ‘This is the guy I’m supposed to be going with? You’ve got to be kidding.’”

Chris gets that a lot. He understands. It takes time for trust to come. Lots of young women on the street have good reason to be suspicious of men, predators who offer them a place to sleep or food for sex.

So the 26-year-old offers them something else.

Hungry? Here’s a gift card to McDonald’s.

Out of gas? This will keep you going.

Need a place to sleep? Let me drive you to the mission.

He did that for Jackie. Brought her kids presents and clothes. Got her on a waiting list for their independent living program and, in the three months it took for a spot to open up, made sure she was OK.

His female SOS counterpart at the time (he’s had seven) befriended the young mom, too, going with her to doctor’s appointments and other girl stuff.

People ask him about homeless kids in Lincoln, Chris says on the drive over to Jackie’s place.

 How many are there, they want to know, figuring just a few.

Hundreds, Chris tells them.

People just don’t see them.

“Maybe they’re runaways, maybe they’re sleeping on a friend’s couch for a while or whatnot.”

Maybe they’re under this bridge right now, he says, heading north on 10th Street.

His job is to help them with what they need, where they’re at and to try to find them something better.

“Basically I work with at-risk  kids,” he says. “I hate those social service terms. Homeless, runaway, at-risk, basically if you’re between 13 and 18, you’re all at-risk.”

Rich kids, poor kids, whatever.

He was on the verge of “at-risk” growing up, not really fitting in at his one-room school, struggling with learning disabilities. Then one day after kicking around college he found himself wearing a bright orange vest and holding a sign that said SLOW on one side, STOP on the other.

I can do better than this, he told himself.

He showed up on CEDARS doorstep with the want ads.

I realize I don’t have my bachelor’s degree yet, but these are the kids I want to work with and I’ll do whatever it takes.

He got the street outreach worker job. He got his degree.

Not being perfect helps in this field, he says.

If I was an angel, I would have been born with wings, he tells the kids.

Jackie wasn’t an angel. She got kicked out of one high school and dropped out of another. She went to juvenile detention three times and ended up in an adolescent psych program three times, too.

When she was 16 and pregnant the first time, her mom told her to find another place to live.

She bounced around. To her dad’s place. Friends’ couches. Her boyfriend’s parents.

Until that day sitting on the curb, crying.

 Since getting into Chris’ van that day, she’s gotten her own place, earned her GED, provided for her two children.

Three months after he picked her up a slot opened in the agency’s independent living program. A place to live. Help learning to manage it all.

“They got me a dresser, a kitchen table, a couch. It was a hideous couch, but it was a couch.”

Then they helped her get certified as a medication aide and Chris is trying to help her find a way to come up with tuition so she can be a certified nursing assistant.

Jackie is 22. She has dreams.

And she’s going to get up Friday and stand in front of a crowd of people who are honoring CEDARS Street Outreach Services and talk.

She hasn’t decided exactly what she’s going to say, but she’ll start with something about the day she sent out an SOS on a cell phone, and a guy with tattoos and combat boots showed up with a life preserver.

Reach Cindy Lange-Kubick at 473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com.