These people will be somebody else’s problem.

When the Bonita Springs City Council and other government agencies talk about cleaning up the streets, getting rid of homeless camps and removing undesirables from the city limits, they are talking about people like the 40 or so who came out to the Cafe of Life on Wednesday for a hot meal, some groceries and maybe a pair of socks.

Although they’re not all homeless, each one is barely getting by. They all have a variety of reasons for their lot in life.

Some developed drug problems. Other have issues with the law. Hurricanes are a source of blame. Trouble finding work or difficulty working in jobs available to them are constants.

“It is too expensive to live down here, man,” said Jerry Rogers, a Bonita Springs homeless man known as Tennessee.

None of the people at the Cafe of Life on Wednesday said they were natives of Bonita Springs. Some traveled from far North for the warm weather and ended up here. Others lived in the area and just settled on the city after their luck turned sour.

Of those who’ve traveled, the overwhelming message they received — and are receiving in Bonita Springs — has stayed the same:

Leave.

“They just want you to get out of Dodge. They want you out of the county,” said Jimmy Fehr, who came to the city from Naples three weeks ago and is homeless. “It is like this all over.”

Photo by Tristan Spinski

Bonita Daily News

Duane Carlson, right, a volunteer at the Cafe of Life, serves breakfast to Justino Hernandez Wednesday morning in the Bonita Springs Community Hall. The Cafe of Life is an organization that has been working to feed the hungry in Bonita Springs for the past 10 years and has repeatedly dodged the pitfalls of having no fixed location to operate out of.

Homelessness and poverty aren’t new to the city — the Cafe of Life has been giving out hot meals for nearly 10 years — but the issue was thrust into the limelight about a month ago when City Councilman David Piper called on city officials to do something about the vagrants who set up camp along the railroad tracks, saying they are often drunk or high and harass children on their way to school.

The city attorney researched creating a homeless ordinance and looked into the model used in Sarasota, which is ranked by both The National Coalition for the Homeless and the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty as the “meanest city in America” in its treatment of the homeless.

The council Feb. 1 rejected following that plan, but the issue remains. The Salvation Army has called for a shelter in Bonita Springs before the homeless residents get rounded up and shipped out of town.

Mayor Jay Arend is meeting with local religious leaders on Monday to see what the faith-based community can do to help provide social services in the city and to discuss the possibility of creating a social services campus somewhere in the area.

“Because of the cold, who knows where these people slept last night,” said city resident Bill Maybrook, who was volunteering at the Cafe of Life on Wednesday. “We don’t know how lucky we have it.”

Maybrook said he was talking to a homeless man at the Cafe a few weeks ago and was told it was the first meal he had in three days.

The Cafe of Life, which is available five days a week, was serving a hot meal of rice and beans Wednesday in addition to offering some second-hand clothes and groceries donated by Sweetbay.

Suzan Ostrander has been a regular at the Cafe of Life since she came to Bonita Springs in November. She was living in Fort Myers but moved here to stay at the Red Cross shelter in Bonita for Hurricane Wilma victims.

Photo by Tristan Spinski

Bonita Daily News

Daisy Garcia, left, and Michael Valazquez grab breakfast Wednesday morning at the Cafe of Life in the Bonita Springs Community Hall.

“I liked the small town a lot better,” Ostrander said. “You can walk down the street without people bugging you.”

In Fort Myers, people would constantly ask her if she wanted to buy drugs, she said.

Ostrander, who has two children living in Georgia, said she broke her left arm in an incident with the police a few years ago and broke her left wrist when a car hit her while she was riding her bike.

She used to be a regular construction worker, but her injuries left her unable to work from January 2001 to March 2002.

Now Ostrander still only works one to three days a week and can hardly lift anything with her left arm.

The Cafe of Life sees 30 to 50 people like Ostrander every day, said site manager Yadith Munoz. In a given week, about 150 people, about one-third of them Hispanic, will walk through the doors looking for help.

The numbers used to be a lot more, she said, but people have difficulty finding the cafe because it no longer has a permanent residence.

Mondays and Wednesdays the food is set up inside the Bonita Springs Community Hall on Old 41 Road. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, it is across the street outside in Riverside Park.

One of the main services missing for the homeless and impoverished in Bonita Springs is proper medical care, Munoz said.

Justino Hernandez was at the cafe on Wednesday and seemed noticeably disoriented. He didn’t speak English but said through a translator that he severely hurt his arm and leg with a cutting device while working as a daily laborer.

Fehr said he has great difficulty in working as a day laborer. He came into the cafe near closing time because he had gone to work at 5 a.m. and thought he had a job lined up for the day.

He didn’t have any means to get to the work site by the requested time of 7 a.m., though, and had to wait for the day labor transportation to take him north of the U.S. 41/Old 41 intersection. When he arrived at 9 a.m. the job was no longer his, and he had to go back to Bonita Springs.

“That happens all the time,” he said. “If the driver (hadn’t checked to see if the job was still there) then I would have been waiting there for a ride until 5 (p.m.).”

Fehr was working on a farm in Santa Rosa, Fla., for more than a decade until Hurricane Dennis ravaged the area. He moved to Kentucky to help a friend build a house but wanted to come south again for the warm weather.

He threw a dart at a map of Florida and decided to go to Naples. He came to Bonita Springs three weeks ago because he said he was chased out of town by the authorities.

The police are the nemesis of the homeless, said many Cafe of Life customers, several of whom refused to give their full names.

At the sign up sheet at the Cafe of Life, only about 70 percent of the people put their names down, and even then it was generally only first names. The presence of a reporter and a photographer made many of the people uneasy, Munoz said.

Rogers, along with two of his homeless friends who refused to identify themselves, said if a person looks like they don’t belong or are homeless, the police will treat them harshly.

Several said the situation with the police and code enforcement officers has gotten worse in the past month, which is about the time Piper called for a crackdown in the city.

“The police told me to tell everybody living in tents that they better move somewhere else in a month,” Rogers said. “They didn’t say where to go, just to leave.”

A woman who would only identify herself as Jesse said the police usually crack down at the start of the busy visitor season, which was also about one month ago.

Jesse said she used to volunteer to help the impoverished in the area until she came into poverty. Her husband had a drug problem and stole checks from her checkbook to pay for his habit, she said. Even after two stints in rehab, he was still addicted and stole her car and many of her possessions before leaving town, she said.

That, coupled with some unspecified issues with the law, has put Jesse in a situation where she is the person needing help instead of providing it. She lives with a friend in a trailer but barely gets by.

Fehr built a shelter when he came to Bonita Springs three weeks ago. He hauled railroad ties to his camp near the tracks and made a more secure place to stay.

“This is the first hurricane-safe tent,” Fehr said.

When the city code enforcement department came by to tell him to leave the area, Fehr took apart his structure so no other homeless person would move in.

“I didn’t spend all that work hauling railroad ties for somebody else to live here,” he said.

Rogers said he is planning on leaving South Florida altogether, and his two friends said they want to go with him. He is trying to get a bus ticket to Panama City, where he hopes to get work as a cook in a restaurant.

Rogers even shaved his lengthy beard to make him more appealing as an employee to restaurateurs.

“It is much cheaper to live up there,” he said. “You can have a place to stay for $125 a week.”

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