Perspective: She used to eat from garbage cans at Union Station. Now, she spends her days trying to help the homeless.
By Theresa Vargas Theresa Vargas Local columnist who previously wrote for the local enterprise team about poverty, race and people with disabilities. Email Bio Follow Columnist February 27 at 3:34 PM Tokyo Direkston wore two weeks of filth.
I first met Tokyo on Monday at the opening of a homeless day services center in Northwest Washington. It was one of those events where officials give speeches and ribbons are cut. At one point, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser addressed the crowd to discuss the importance of the center, describing it as “one stop to get people on a pathway to a permanent home.” Others gave equally impassioned speeches.
On the day the center opened in the basement of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, the crowd was a mix of people in suits and people who carried all their belongings in plastic bags and suitcases. But the next day, it was filled with only the staff and the homeless. The latter had started arriving an hour before the center opened and by noon, nearly 40 homeless men and women had come. Some took showers and drank coffee before leaving.
In 1999, when she finally entered a treatment center, she recalled yelling out, “Lord, help me” during a seven-day detox. Detox was then followed by several residential programs and eventually a stay at a D.C. halfway house. She said she was determined to follow through with the program because she realized she had never really finished anything in her life.
“I was always told I was really stupid and there was no sense in me going to college because I wasn’t smart enough,” she said. “I carry that with me to this day, that I’m stupid. At 66, I still believe that, that I’m just not worthy. Not all the time, but some of the time.”
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