Years spent homeless no barrier to med student

“I don’t feel like it was hard. You go through each day, you take everything day by day.” Chelesa Fearce

NEW HAVEN — Chelesa Fearce knows how to make a home for herself.

That’s true at Yale University, where she’s a firstyear medical student and a doctoral candidate in chemistry. It was true at Spelman College in Atlanta, surrounded by other intelligent, supportive AfricanAmerican women.

And it was true when she and her family had to stay in a shelter, after losing their home because her mother, Reenita Shepherd, couldn’t afford the medical bills for treatment of nonHodgkin’s lymphoma, which kept her out of work for years.

Fearce may have been homeless, but she’s never been held back.

“I don’t feel like it was hard,” Fearce, 24, said. “You go through each day, you take everything day by day.”

She didn’t have a lot of friends and wasn’t able to have sleepovers, but that was partly because she was more focused on her studies.

“My sister was very popular,” she said, despite being homeless. “I also took college courses in high school, so I didn’t hang around. … I just sort of stayed to myself, not with other students.”

Fearce, her mother and her sister Chelsea, who’s a year older than Fearce, lost their home when Fearce was in fourth grade. By the time Fearce went to Spelman and her mother was well enough to work and find a place to live, the family grew by two: Nicholas, now 11, and Cayleigh, 10.

After losing their apartment, “we stayed in shelters, and my mother did have a car, so sometimes we did stay in the car,” Fearce said. Other times, they would stay in a hotel or with friends.

For the first two years, Fearce went to stay with her grandparents in Columbus, Miss., where she was born. Her grandfather’s nickname for her is “Little Whip.” Her grandparents gave her stability, giving her responsibilities such as washing the dishes and ironing. They have a small farm with fruits and vegetables like corn, spinach, figs and tomatoes, as well as two or three pigs.

Returning to her mother, Fearce met up with the realities of homelessness: “not knowing if you’re going to have food to eat, a place to stay, just basic things you have to think about all the time.” Reenita Shepherd could not be reached for comment but told The Atlanta JournalConstitution earlier this year that “Life is good.”

She had no computer, “so it was hard sometimes to get work done,” she said.

But while many classmates did not know she was homeless — her high school was on the other side of town — when she was named valedictorian, with a 4.5 grade point average, the homeless liaison at Charles R. Drew High School in Riverdale, Ga., suggested she go on the local news to talk about it.

She had applied to Spelman, a historically black women’s college in Atlanta.

“Then the story came out and they said, ‘OK, she has resilience,’” she said of the Spelman admissions officers. She didn’t answer a phone call because she was practicing for her graduation speech the next day. It turned out to be Spelman, offering her a full scholarship.

It doesn’t upset her that she’s become well known because of having been homeless for eight years.

“Not at all, because I can’t change my background or anything, and I’m the one who chose to reveal it,” she said. She said the most positive memory of her time spent being homeless was “having my brother and sister and just wanting to be a good role model for them.”

It was important to Fearce that people understand that not all homeless people are drug addicts or people who don’t want to work. “I think people just stereotype homeless people all the time. There can be other situations that happen and we’re also people. We’re smart, have families and things just happen.”

According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, 553,742 people experienced homelessness on a given night in 2018, and 180,413 of them — almost a third — were members of families. Almost 4,000 people were homeless in Connecticut that year. Many, like Fearce’s family, were forced out of their homes by an inability to pay medical bills.

Through it all, Fearce kept up with her studies. During the summers she took part in an Atlanta program for disadvantaged youth, teaching children fire and gun safety and working in a doctor’s office.

“I think I was always focused,” she said. “My mom, before she got sick, was an Early Head Start teacher, so she taught us the importance of education at an early age.”

She can’t recall a moment when she decided to go to medical school, Fearce said, though her mother’s illness was “a catalyst to my wanting to be a doctor.”

Fearce