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No Comments [ Add Comment ]Leaders: Friendship, love, support can change lives
By JaNAE FRANCISReverend works to bring hope to hopeless
Editors note: The recent shooting deaths of two prostitutes prompted the Standard-Examiner to take a look at the status of prostitution in the city through the eyes of the women who sell themselves, the police who try to keep the situation under control and the people who try to help them. Their stories started Sunday and conclude today.
OGDEN -- When Teresa Tingey was killed July 13, one of the Rev. Tricia Chavez-Miller's first thoughts was of Tingey crying a few days earlier because she missed her children.
The prostitute who went by the street name of Wyoming had not seen her children in a year and a half.
Chavez-Miller knows well the feeling people on the street may have about wanting to change something about their past or present and having drug addiction become the master of their lives.
She said she was abused by a father and stepfather and stayed in an abusive marriage for years until her now-ex-husband threw her out of a car while traveling 45 mph.
Drugs and partying went along with her lifestyle then.
"I used to have a pattern of thinking that I was not worth better," she said, adding she doesn't want to go into detail about her past.
"God's taught me to come out of it," she said. "He sees me as a new child, a new creation in Christ Jesus, and I've had to work hard to put off the old person and put on the new one. I don't live in the depression of what used to be."
Chavez-Miller sees the pain she's caused her family, especially since some of her children followed in her footsteps. Their habits now are causing grief in the lives of her grandchildren.
"Things make you look back on your choices when you were a mom when you are a grandma," she said. "You reap what you sow."
Chavez-Miller has been clean for 29 years.
"You just keep praying that what you do for other people's children will come back to your family to sow seeds of love on them," she said.
Chavez-Miller was ordained a minister in the Church of God, but she doesn't preach from any pulpit.
Instead, she sits in a worn T-shirt and pants on a porch covered in peeling paint, next to a table and chairs stacked with day-old bread and dented cans of food. A pot of dirt in the middle features a single stalk of corn about 4 inches high.
A large safety pin holds her keys -- and her crucifix -- to her chest.
"God has a better plan, and there are people who are willing to stick their neck out and create steps for others," she said. "... I think one of the main things is offering hope to hopeless people."
So, the retired woman with a Social Security income has chosen to live in the heart of Ogden's drug and prostitute zone on Adams Avenue.
She spends her time feeding feral cats and watching out for women seen by society as hopeless. In the evenings, she teaches a men's Bible study, a women's anger-management workshop and a 12-step program at Weber County Jail.
While she hasn't had much luck getting the half-dozen prostitutes who are her friends to commit to change, she knows of at least one life she's turned around in the nine years since she moved here from Montana.
Chavez-Miller was behind a neighbor's house recently and a woman who was helping the neighbor paint turned to Chavez-Miller and asked if she recognized her.
"She said she'd been clean and sober for six months and that she'd been in my jail class," Chavez-Miller said. "Boy, after all this, it pierced my heart."
Sitting on her porch on a recent evening, she pointed to the parking lot of the Department of Workforce Services. Employees are there to try to help people with a new life, but Chavez-Miller also sees prostitutes propositioning for clients in the parking lot.
Chavez-Miller waved to a pregnant prostitute whose due date is quickly nearing and sighed with concern for the unborn child.
The reverend can tell you how long it has been since she's seen a particular woman on the street, whose pimp has given her a fresh black eye and who has AIDS.
Chavez-Miller does everything she can to persuade the women to try a better life.
"It took someone confronting me really harshly to make me wake up and want to change," she said.
So she's working to first be a friend to those she wants to help.
"You have to realize that God loves people," she said. "The only way you can touch people is get to know them and care about them."
She said the free food on her porch often gets people off the street to visit her house. Then she searches for ways to pour out love in ways in which the people might eventually listen.
"You just hope and pray that some way you will get ahold of them so that they will get ahold of themselves," she said.
"You are talking to someone who is not there. You are talking to someone who lies about everything that comes out of her mouth. You are talking to someone who is high on drugs, that has a pimp hanging over them, that if they don't do everything just right will beat them."
Trying to be their friend definitely has its costs.
"I've had my life threatened," she said. "Somebody put a black flower in cellophane on my doorstep the other day."
She told of a man walking back and forth in front of her house and brandishing a switchblade. Her car windows have been shot out and a set of new tires slashed.
Chavez-Miller was served an eviction notice at her home a few days before Tingey's death. And since she's been interviewed in the press following the incident, a house she was looking to rent up the street suddenly was condemned by the city and the cat she was feeding there disappeared.
She is hoping God will help her find a way to rent a different house even though she has limited income.
"When you get this kind of attention," she said, "the people who are not with you are against you."
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