Back on My Feet Gets Our Intern Running With the Homeless

Summer intern Kelsy McCraw attended a Back on My Feet run one morning in July. She thought she’d go out, do one run with them, and then do a quick report. But after that initial run, McCraw, a former soccer player at Washington and Lee University, was hooked. She spent five weeks running with the BoMF group. Below is her report.

Sheretta Bodem is shy—not bashfully shy like a child, but hesitantly shy like somebody who’s never been able to depend on anyone. This tough-skinned 25-year-old is about 5 feet 2 inches tall with a curvy figure that is usually hidden in t-shirts, pants, and sneakers. A baseball hat sits atop her braided black hair, slung so low that it just shades her dark brown eyes, as if to reiterate her don’t-mind-me timidity. She sits across the table from me in a back storage room at Dallas LIFE, as she tells me why she walked into the shelter’s doors last November.

She’s a woman of few words, most of Bodem’s answers to my questions are succinct and to the point, but the tall wall she’s built was how she learned to survive.

Bodem says she was spoiled growing up—she always did and got what she wanted. Her mother was a truck driver, so circumstance may have edited the scope of those desires. Nevertheless, her mostly absent parent gave her little in the form of life direction. When her mom would go on her three-month driving stints, Bodem and her younger brother would stay at their less-than-attentive aunt’s home in Richland.

With no discipline, Bodem dropped out of high school at 17 because, as she explains it, it just didn’t seem that important. So, she settled at her aunt’s house with no job, no schooling, and no desire for either. Bodem describes this time in her life as “nothing,” just doing nothing and no plans to change it. At 21, she had her daughter, and at 23, her son. Bodem ruled out living with either of her children’s fathers. “I didn’t want my children to grow up in that kind of environment,” she says. Her “nothing” life at her aunt’s lingered on for a few years until her aunt began clearly favoring one of her children. Bodem wouldn’t elaborate about what happened other than “some other stuff happened…just bad stuff.” She says she really had no choice but to move out. At this point, she had lost contact with her mother and brother. So, with no other place to turn, she sought out Dallas LIFE.

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