Mother Is Living On Hope

Trisha Davis’ last bit of independence is a battered, leaky trailer home older than she is.

“I’m getting pretty good at cooking on a wood stove,” she said recently. The trailer has a propane stove, but she can’t afford propane.

At 19, Davis returned home to the Silver Valley from California a high school drop-out, unemployed, single and pregnant.

She moved in with her mother, and considered an abortion, or adoption. She rejected both.

She found an apartment, and a baking job. She quit in a dispute over hours and a promotion, and was evicted.

Davis signed up for welfare, which provided health care and monthly $251 checks and $214 in food stamps. She earned a high-school equivalency degree.

She tried telemarketing and baby-sitting, living in shelters, or with her mom or friends. For two weeks, she and her infant son, Michael, lived in a tent beside state Highway 97.

A month ago, she moved into the battered old trailer at Pine Creek. She says she likes the feeling of independence, of having her own place. Rent is $200 a month.

She’s now been on welfare for 2-1/2 years, and concedes that she could have handled her life more responsibly. But the father of her child, who should be paying child support, is nowhere to be found.

Under the proposed changes to Idaho’s welfare system, Davis’ cash assistance - the $251 check that pays her rent - would have been cut off six months ago. The state’s welfare reforms include a two-year lifetime limit on such checks.

If that happened, Davis said, “We would be homeless. My mom couldn’t support us.”

The two-year limit is by far the most controversial provision among the 44 changes proposed by a state council in December.

Proponents paint the changes as a tough-love approach, limiting cash but providing more child care and job training. The idea is to get people into jobs faster.

The state welfare system, as council chair Karen McGee puts it, should be “help and a jumpstart, rather than a way of life.”

“You have to have some sort of time limits,” she said.

After three applications, Davis is due to be interviewed in April for a Spokane bakery job that pays better than $14 an hour.

“I’m praying, but until then I want to live,” said Davis, now 21.

The trailer is tiny. The bathroom’s barely bigger than a telephone booth. Her son’s bedroom is a corner of the living room near the wood stove. Davis splits wood in exchange for a share of the logs, and sometimes logger friends drop off some wood. She trades baby-sitting services for diapers.

Her son’s birth certificate hangs on a wall.

Her telephone is a pay phone at a gas station, half a mile away.

Her dream: to be able to afford child care, to own a car, and to buy a home.

“It’ll all work out in the end,” she said. “If you don’t have hope, you don’t have anything.”

, DataTimes