Annette & Jeremy's Story

Six-year-old “Jeremy” comes home to Genesis Home on a fall afternoon dressed in a tiny oxford shirt and dark slacks. He hugs his mama, “Annette,” and unzips his backpack, beaming. “The ones who are good at reading get a second-grader book!” He shows it to her, then runs to the kitchen when Annette gives permission for a snack.

This is the stable life Annette says her son needs after a shifting global economy swamped their finances and left them homeless.

“I got my bachelor’s degree in computer information systems from North Carolina Central University in 1997,” she says. “A big national bank gave me a job in Charlotte. Things were good when Jeremy was a toddler, even though his father wasn’t part of his life. But then they sent all those entry-level programming jobs overseas.

“I got laid off. I couldn’t find another job in my field. So I took a much lower-paying one with a cell phone company as a customer service rep. And I got a newspaper route. I would get up at 3 a.m., do the route, come home, and we would try to sleep another hour before I got Jeremy off to day care and went to my day job. But money was still tight, always hand-to-mouth, two jobs, going crazy. I said, ‘I can’t do this any more. I have to make a better life for us.’

“My aunt knew a sliding-scale apartment complex back in Durham. So I moved there and went back to Central to take prerequisites to become a nurse after I did the research and learned that there’s a high demand for nurses. But I still couldn’t pay the rent, and we got evicted. So I went to live with my aunt. But she and her husband were having problems. I came home one night after studying with a classmate, and I had Jeremy half asleep in the car. They had changed the locks so we couldn’t get in. We stayed with some of my friends for a few months. When we ran out of places to go, I found Genesis Home.”

Now she’s waiting to hear from the nursing programs she’s applied to. In the meantime, Annette is working full-time as a correctional officer, paying down debt and saving toward a house. Annette says Genesis Home is her family’s bridge to a secure future.