HOUSING RALLY A SMALL HOPE FOR THE HOMELESS

NOMADIC EXISTENCE IN DISTRICT'S SHELTERS FULL OF DREARY DESPAIR FOR MOTHERS, CHILDREN

Thursday night, 7-year-old Rashard "Bernie" Fountain dreamed the best dream he'd had in a long, long time. "I dreamed my Mom got her Section 8 and we got a house with a great big back yard."

But when his mother, Jackie, woke him at 5:30 the next morning, he was in a room at a D.C. shelter and his year-old brother, Brennan, was crying.

This morning, after they have been bused three miles to the Pitts Motor Hotel for breakfast, Jackie, Bernie and Brennan will join dozens of other homeless families from the District at the Housing Now! rally for affordable housing.

They plan to start marching at the Washington Monument. They don't know how they'll get there, but they're sure they will.

Like Jackie Fountain, many of the mothers with children who spend their days at Pitts waiting for meals intend to march today. There are two signs up announcing the march in the cafeteria at Pitts, but most women say they heard about it on the news. They laughed when asked if their social worker or an organizer from Housing Now! told them about it.

"They send us to all these other dumb places, MotherFest and like that; they ought to have told us about this, they ought to have a bus to take us to the march. Getting a place to live is most important," said Donna Daniels, who has lived at Pitts for a month with her husband and three daughters, ages 5, 4, and 13 months.

Lizzette Beaty, who intends to march with Anthony, her 7-month-old son, in her arms, is cautiously optimistic after four months of homelessness. "I don't know if it'll make any difference, but I hope so."

Some of the women at Pitts had not heard of the march; others were not interested when they did.

Until recently, for some of these women, homelessness and mass demonstrations were things outside their lives. The process that brought them to Pitts was a gradual one. Over time, life's myriad small fractures grew into major breaks, those breaks into faults. Although specific circumstances vary, crack cocaine is the fault that runs through the stories women recounted this week.

Some used drugs. Many lived with a man who got caught up in crack. A few, smoking with their husbands, watched their relationships burn up and disappear nearly as fast as the rock did.

"I used to give out quarters to people on the street, tell them, 'Now, don't you go spend this on wine,' " said Jackie Fountain, 33. "And here I am, homeless."

She and her two sons have been homeless since July. They have been staying at Walter Reed Hospitality House since Monday and eating three meals a day at Pitts. Mostly, they stay around Pitts all day, because Fountain doesn't have money to travel back to the hotel between meals.

Other families are more adrift. Without a permanent hotel assignment, unplaced, they remain on the "open market." Each morning they pack their personal effects and carry them all day, until after dinner, when the city hands out referrals, sending them to shelters for that night. Sometimes, it is the same room the family left that morning.

"I don't like this place," said 7-year-old Marlene Todd, who with her mother, Arlene, and 5-year-old brother, Timmie, have been homeless and on the "open market" for a week.

"It's so sad when I live homeless, just like I see on TV. The hallway is dirty, and there's some trifling people who live up here. There's a bunch of bag ladies and drug addicts here."

Marlene is looking forward to the march on the Mall. "I want to hold up a sign when we go there," she said, dancing around her mother and clapping her hands. "If I could have a wish, I'd make a wish for everybody. I'd wish that everyone had a home."

Marlene hasn't been in school for a while. Her mother tried to keep her in the school in Northeast she'd attended when they had an apartment, but, without a job, she didn't have the money to pay Marlene's bus fare to and from school.

But the children who don't go to school are learning other things at the shelter. They can define "eviction," "rent subsidy," "Section 8" and "referral." They have learned how to tell a heroin nod from a crack edge.

Yesterday, from the hill in Meridian Hill Park, also known as Malcolm X Park, you could see the Washington Monument. The children playing in the park pointed to the monument and wondered how they would get there by 10 this morning, when the march starts.

The Capitol, where the march ends and the rally begins, wasn't in sight.

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.