Giving back after a turnaround
When Charli Bleu Johnson came to the Anna Ogden Hall shelter for women and children, she was an angry 14-year-old. She cut her wrists, smoked pot with the party crowd as a freshman at Shadle Park High School and got in nasty fights with her mom in the small room they shared.
After about a month, her outlook changed, she said.
“You can only be like that so long because there’s so many women, and women have a nurturing spirit,” she said.
She regained her relationship with God. Her mom, Lisa Riquelme, called it a “surrendering.”
More than three years after leaving, Johnson will return to the shelter today a put-together, 18-year-old Spokane Lilac Festival princess who is attending Spokane Community College while she finishes her senior year at Contract Based Education. She aspires to work with troubled youths and become a big-time journalist.
She will tell her story to a crowd of at least 240 ticket holders as part of the shelter’s fourth-annual “Garden Party Luncheon,” an auction and lunch event that will raise money for a new crisis center in Spokane, Anna Ogden Hall Director Debi Pauletto said. Already, through ticket sales and donations, $42,000 has been raised for the effort. The $75,000 officials hope to have after today’s fundraiser would allow them to move forward with the project, but not fully fund it, she said.
Johnson and Riquelme’s story starts not here, but in Columbus, Ohio, where they were living in a Motel 6. “I found out that I was pregnant and pretty much all the doors had shut for me there in Columbus,” the mother said.
Riquelme, eight weeks pregnant and living off child-support payments, packed her 1986 four-door Toyota Camry and drove to Spokane to be with the new baby’s father and his family, she said. She lied to her teenage daughter, telling her it was only an extended vacation.
But after a month living with the family in Spokane, the pregnant Riquelme took her teen daughter and left, fleeing a family member’s violent outbursts and a bad neighborhood.
Riquelme heard about Anna Ogden Hall, but initially was uninterested. The shelters she’d volunteered at in Ohio were rough, unsafe places.
“When I heard the word shelter, I thought of that,” she said. “When we got here, it was a huge relief.”
They moved into a room upstairs and, like the other residents, woke early when a woman sang a Christian song over the loudspeaker, and volunteered in the kitchen. Johnson made friends with some of the residents, but she kept her home a secret from her school friends, she said.
While at the shelter, Riquelme saved money for an apartment in the Riverwalk Point apartments, where they still live, with Riquelme’s 2-year-old son, Judah Riquelme-Whiston. She then enrolled her daughter in the Contract Based Education high school as a sophomore.
Last fall, a teacher at the school who had previously been a pageant girl with the Spokane Lilac Festival urged Johnson to enter. She did, competing against 250-275 girls, and becoming the first entrant from an alternative school. They judged girls largely on their school grades and community involvement.
Johnson was selected as one of six princesses.
Johnson is now attending SCC; after next summer she’ll have her Associate of Arts degree. She plans to transfer to a four-year university to pursue a degree in social work and a minor in journalism.
Johnson said she hopes her speech helps a shelter that once helped her.
Riquelme said she’d like to show audience members today in her speech that homelessness isn’t always about drugs and prostitution, that sometimes it’s about God’s divine purpose for people.
“I tell people Jesus was homeless. His disciples were homeless,” she said. “I think some people were just created to be wanderers of the Earth.”