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Sunday, January 21, 2007
Once a homeless drug addict, man now has hope
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
He had $6 in quarters and a list of agencies that might help someone like him — a homeless man with a drug habit who’d just gotten out of jail.
Gus Voelkel got nothing but taped recordings when he called the organizations from a pay phone. He didn’t want to waste his quarters, so he decided to give one more agency a try.
He dialed the number for Meet the Need Ministry Inc., a husband-wife outfit in Lawrenceville that feeds the hungry and provides transitional housing for men in need.
An answering machine clicked on. Voelkel, who’d been released from the Gwinnett jail three days earlier, was about to walk away. The pay phone rang. He picked up.
Jane Alvarez of Meet the Need was on the line. Stay put, she told him. The Alvarezes picked him up from a phone booth off Rockbridge Road, and took him to Wal-Mart.
“They bought me socks, tennis shoes, a toothbrush, toothpaste, comb, everything,” said Voelkel, 48, who had been incarcerated for 15 months on a theft by taking charge.
Voelkel has told me this story twice. Both times he cried. Tears of gratitude, maybe. He knows the life he’d lived landed him at that phone booth last summer, that it was his own doing. Now he’s working to make the ministry’s return call his turn-around, a switch to a less destructive course.
He was released from jail on Aug. 8. He called acquaintances for a ride, but struck out. So he hit the road. He left the jail near Ga. 316 and headed toward Lawrenceville. He had three prescriptions that needed filling, so he headed to the Gwinnett Medical Center.
Or so he thought.
He walked in vain for two days and slept at night wherever he could. On the third day, he came across a church somewhere in the Lawrenceville/Snellville area. He doesn’t recall the name of the church, but he’ll never forget what the secretary gave him — $6 in quarters and a list of area agencies that help indigents. Voelkel called Meet the Need at 6 o’clock in the morning.
“I wish you could have seen him,’’ Jane Alvarez told me. “He had blisters on his feet. He was exhausted.”
The Alvarezes put Voelkel up in a house that they use for their ministry. The men who live there must work, attend a church of their choice, participate in Bible study and avoid vices.
Some buy into the program; others don’t.
Voelkel thrived in it.
“Gus wants to make a change in his life,” Rene’ Alvarez said. “You can see that.” So did executives at Hercules Inc., a Tucker-based aviation company that supplies airline parts and aviation services. They hired him to work as a traffic manager for their warehouse off Mountain Industrial Boulevard.
“He’s had some rough patches these past few years,” said Mac M. McCuen, the company vice president. “He’s somebody you want to see succeed.”
Step by step, he’s rising. He helps out at Rene’s Upholstery, the Alvarezes’ car refinishing business, in Stone Mountain. He’s drug-free. Two weeks ago, he moved out of the ministry house and into a Duluth apartment that he shares with a roommate.
And on Feb. 15 he starts work at Hercules.
“It’s going to be awesome,” he told me.
It already is.
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