EVERY SUCCESS STORY IS A GREAT STORY
Kacia Wilkinson   Every morning, Kacia Wilkinson walks into the living room of her new apartment and looks up at the photograph on her mantle—12 friends from her days on the street. “Half of them are dead now,” she says matter-of-factly.
Kacia had grown up in a fishing village north of Boston, with a childhood full of anger and pain. She began drinking alcohol at the age of nine. Soon after Kacia turned 15, her mother died of a brain aneurysm. Her abusive stepfather had died two years earlier, and now Kacia found herself very much alone in the world.
After bouncing from one foster home to the next, Kacia became pregnant and got married at age 16. Though she was ambivalent about the pregnancy, the idea of bringing a new life into the world inspired the hope that she could provide her own child with more safety and stability than she herself had experienced. But the baby was born prematurely and did not survive. During the following year, a devastated Kacia began using heroine for the first time. It numbed the pain of her loss.
At 20, she had a son, and two years later, a daughter. But her marriage had become increasing violent, even more so after the children were born. Kacia knew nothing of welfare, housing assistance, or any other support, but she knew that she must leave — for her own safety and for that of her children.
“After that, things went downhill,” she says with the same tone she uses when she speaks of her dead friends in the picture.
Kacia found that she was unable to provide for her children. When they were five and three, she reluctantly returned them to their father’s care. In her mind, this was the most compassionate decision she could make. “I had dragged them through enough,” she says now, 17 years later.
It was not long before Kacia became homeless. By the age of 30, she had been homeless for five years and learned that she was HIV-positive. “When I found out,” she recalls, “it gave me reason not to care.”
In the years that followed, Kacia was in and out of jail, in and out of detox, in and out of many other programs to which she was referred or ordered by the courts to attend.
Kacia is very open about those years: “I started walking the streets to support my habit. I lived by the waterfront. I stayed on the Boston Common.” When she was 35, she met Rob on a park bench in the Common. They lived on the streets for 2 years, drinking together, taking care of each other, loving each other.
They didn’t use shelters, but stayed wherever they could remain together, often under Longfellow Bridge, connecting Harvard and MIT to Massachusetts General Hospital and Beacon Hill (the aristocratic part of town). In the shadow of this bridge, they first met Cheryl Kane, Jill Roncarati, and Jim O’Connell — outreach clinicians from the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program. “They were always in my face,” she says with a smile.
With the help of Betty Snead at Boston HCH, Kacia was admitted to the Safe Harbor shelter for people with HIV. She and Rob describe “looking day in, day out for housing we could afford.” Finally, after volunteering at the Boston Living Center, she was able to obtain subsidized housing through a group called AIDS Action. “I busted my hump to get what I have now,” she says. “I used all the resources that were out there. Rob and I have been on Section 8 for 2 years.”
Her days are still difficult. In addition to her HIV, Kacia wrestles with hepatitis C and other liver disease. She was just put on the liver transplant list. “A lot of times I put on a façade,” she says, describing how she keeps getting up each day. “Some issues still haunt me. But I’m not stupid like I thought I was. I want to give back what’s been given to me. Today I’m living large…for the first time in my life, I’m content.”
When Kacia and Rob speak about their days and years on the streets, Kacia says, they remember that they were “like family,” but the general public out there “didn’t see us as people. Most of the people we lived with on the streets were very intelligent. We were people with lives,” she recalls. Then she mentions the photo on the mantle and adds, “We’ve lost a lot of people on the streets.”
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