Pa. woman opens her heart, house to homeless bus driver
On a recent morning last month, Andre Szekely woke up in a powder-blue bedroom in Malvern, Pennsylvania, and pulled a downy white comforter up to his chin, wondering if he might be dreaming.
“It’s hard to explain the feeling — I hadn’t slept in a real bed for more than seven years,” he said. “In a way, I guess I was in shock. There I was, actually lying in a bed like a real human being.”
For more than seven years, Szekely, 69, had slept in the back of his 2007 Toyota minivan — one of the few belongings he had left after a complicated divorce left him bankrupt and homeless, he said.
Since 2012, the Hungarian immigrant had kept his plight a secret, ashamed that his employer and friends would learn that he was sleeping in his van every night and showering at the YMCA after he was finished for the day with his job as a school bus driver for disabled students in Coatesville, about 35 miles from Philadelphia.
“I hid my situation because I was ashamed,” said Szekely, who couldn’t afford an apartment on his $1,600 monthly salary and the occasional extra money he takes in as a freelance photographer.
One morning, though, “I woke up and decided, ‘I’m almost 70,’ ” he said. “Why should I care what people think? I am who I am.”
In November, Szekely caught the attention of Nancy Dougherty, a Malvern real estate agent who learned about his living situation several weeks after he agreed to be profiled online by the publication Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia.
Dougherty, 59, was touched to learn that Szekely, the son of Holocaust survivors and an Israel Defense Forces veteran who had immigrated to the United States in 1978, was sleeping in his van — but happy to be alive and using photography to appreciate the beauty around him.
After contacting Szekely through a website he’d set up to sell greeting cards featuring his photos, Dougherty called him with an offer: He could stay with her.
She lived alone with her dog in a four-bedroom house, she said, and had plenty of room.
“I’ve always believed that given a different set of circumstances, any one of us could be homeless,” Dougherty said.
On a recent Monday night, Szekely agreed to give it a try and knocked on Dougherty’s front door.
After chatting in the living room for an hour or so, Dougherty showed her guest a spare bedroom and told him he was welcome to stay as long as he liked.
As he took in the tidy blue room with modern art prints on the walls, a white desk with a reading lamp and a cozy bed piled with soft pillows, “I felt like Nancy had invited me into her castle,” he said.
“In my life, I have encountered my share of depression and darkness,” Szekely said. “To actually be welcomed and to sleep in a warm place, I felt speechless.”
Szekely was married for seven years and has two grown children and two grandchildren who live in California, he said. Not wanting to be a “burden,” he said, he drives his van to visit them once a year and shares few details about his living situation.
Until he moved in with Dougherty, Szekely said, he would park his van on a quiet street after dark and climb in the back to spend the night in his sleeping bag, covered with quilts in colder months. Waking before sunrise, he would drive to the school bus depot in Malvern, where he’d bring a quick breakfast of tea and cereal to eat in the break room, then brush his teeth before picking up the children on his route and taking them to their school in Chester County, he said.
“Then in the afternoon, I pick them up again,” he said. “I enjoy the kids — I’m good with children. Some of them have faced a lot of challenges in their young lives.”
He said he hopes eventually to make a full-time living through his photography business.
Szekely said no matter where life takes him in the future, he will forever be grateful for a stranger’s kindness.
“I wake up in that lovely room and thank God I’m alive,” he said.