Laura Glesby photo
Conscience carried eight bags of belongings — everything she owned — to a ground floor table of the Ives library branch.
She had arrived at the downtown library on Monday morning for a respite from the 90-degree heat.
The library branch was one of the city’s eight “cooling centers” open on Monday during the first heat wave of the summer. It was quiet, patrons relatively sparse. On the Ives branch’s ground floor, a handful of people browsed for books or clicked through computers. A couple of parents had brought their young kids. Conscience, meanwhile, sat silently at a central table, lost in thought.
The city has activated “extreme heat protocols” since mid-day Sunday, designating the city’s five library branches and three senior centers as indoor public spaces to cool down during business hours. According to City Spokesperson Lenny Speiller, there have been no 911 calls for heat-related emergencies so far, but “there were two walk-up requests for assistance to officers on the street” connected to the heat wave. (Find more information about those locations and hours here; sign up for citywide alerts about weather emergencies, road closures, and more here.)
The heat on Monday was just one of many challenges ahead of Conscience, who had arrived in New Haven the night before.
At 50 years old, Conscience said she’s been homeless for more than three years. She said she once owned a house with her then-husband in California. The couple got divorced several years ago after 18 years of marriage. She chose a new name, Conscience, for herself; the word is tattooed on her right shoulder in yellow block letters. She’s not quite sure what last name to go by. She’s waiting to fill in the blanks of her family tree and “take an ancestor’s name.”
A lover of the beach, she keeps half her belongings in Hawaii-themed reusable grocery bags. She asks the people she meets about their astrological birth signs. She described losing her savings to a man who’d “sing to her in an Italian accent” yet turned out to be a romance scammer. She had “pie in the sky” state of mind, she said, and had a hard time making financial decisions with an eye for long term consequences.
She described living in a seaside California apartment for a while, then in her car. When her car got impounded, she turned to hostels and hotels. She roamed from place to place. Eventually, Conscience said, she landed in a New York City women’s shelter, where she didn’t feel safe or comfortable.
Conscience said she decided to leave that New York shelter after news broke this weekend that the United States had bombed Iran. “It kept coming up on my phone — new notifications about Iran,” she described. In her eyes, the headlines were a sign that she had to go elsewhere to find safety.
So she took a train to New Haven, where she’d been once before in her life. She’d learned through Google that the city is home to Yale University, and she found herself curious about the students and professors.
She arrived at Union Station on Sunday, where she found out that the shuttle to and from the New Haven Green was the only free bus in the city. So she took that one, then found herself in the downtown CVS. She said she called the state’s human services hotline at 211, and when an operator finally answered, she had trouble hearing what they were saying.
She decided to head back south to the police station and look for help there. Along the way, in the late Sunday heat, she said that someone she believed to be a restaurant worker stopped her to offer a bottle of water, then ultimately drove her to the police station. She said the police gave her two slices of pizza. They then took her to a 23-hour bed at the Winthrop Avenue REST Center run by COMPASS, the city’s crisis response program. The center, Conscience said, was “safe and peaceful.”
After leaving COMPASS, Conscience wandered to the library, in search of both air conditioning and information about where she can go next.
She knows that she doesn’t want to sleep outside alone. “Nighttime is the scariest. You never know who you’re gonna run into,” she said. Once in L.A., when she didn’t have a place to sleep, she stayed up and rode the bus all night. “It’s very scary.”
She doesn’t know how long she’ll be in New Haven. She keeps a long-term dream of going to Colombia, where her mother was born.
Before that, though, “I need to get my teeth cleaned,” she said, noting that she has peridontal disease. She’s trying to brush up on her Spanish. And she wants to take a DNA test to identify long-lost relatives.
For years, she’s been wandering and searching, unsure of what name to go by. She finds meaning in crystals and astrology. She hopes to excavate her own history as she figures out her next steps hour by hour.
“This whole thing about who we are and where we come from is really fascinating,” she said.
Those are long term dreams. For now, Conscience needed to plan the next hour, then the next night.
“Right now, I’m really hungry,” she said. Every so often, she leaned forward and held her stomach, exhaling through the pang. “I want to deal with that. But where am I gonna go tonight?”