Finalist: Greg Jaffe of The Washington Post
Nominated Work
KISSIMMEE, Fla. — Rose Jusino was waking up after working the graveyard shift at Taco Bell when a friend knocked on her door at the Star Motel. The electric company trucks were back. The workers were about to shut off the power again.
The 17-year-old slammed her door and cranked the air conditioning as high as it would go, hoping that a final blast of cold air might make the 95-degree day more bearable. She then headed outside to the motel’s overgrown courtyard, a route that took her past piles of maggot-infested food that had been handed out by do-gooders and tossed aside by the motel’s residents. Several dozen of them were gathered by a swimming pool full of fetid brown water, trying to figure out their next move.
The motel’s owner had abandoned the property to its residents back in December, and now the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic was turning an already desperate strip of America — just down the road from Disney World — into something ever more dystopian. The motel’s residents needed to pay the power company $1,500.
“This is the third time they’re back here!” one man fumed as the power company workers, protected by sheriff’s deputies, pulled the meters from the electrical boxes. “The third!”
“We a bunch of sorry ass men!” shouted a former felon who had served prison time on cocaine and battery convictions. “If our kids go without light, it’s because of our sorry asses.” He castigated his neighbors for spending their stimulus checks on drugs and alcohol, and then peeled a $20 from a three-inch stack of cash.
“Who else? Who else?” he called out as he dropped the bill on the sidewalk. “We need money!”
Soon the pile was growing, and the Star residents who gave were angrily accusing those who hadn’t of freeloading. “Nobody trusts nobody,” yelled a woman in a tank top and red pajama pants who tossed a $50 bill onto the sidewalk.
“I paid my rent,” shouted someone, who tossed in a $10 bill.
An elderly woman covered in bedbug bites threw $1.88 into the pot. “It’s all I got,” she said.
They were still $525.12 short.
Rose hung on the edge of the crowd, thinking about the $40 she had stashed in her bedside table. The motel she called “hell on earth” and “this malnourished place” had been her home for the past nine months.
She worried about her 65-year-old grandmother, who had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and needed power for her daily oxygen treatments. She worried about her mother, who suffered from bipolar disorder and was forgoing her medicine to save money. She worried about her neighbors, whose tempers were already frayed by the stress of the pandemic, joblessness and boredom. Gunshots at the motel were becoming a regular occurrence. The power company had cut off the motel two times earlier in the summer. Rose knew that no electricity made everything worse.
She walked back to her room for the $40, threw it on the pile and headed to another shift at Taco Bell.
When she returned home in the evening, the power was back on, but she knew it wouldn’t last long. The next bill, which included unpaid charges going back to March, was for $9,000 and it was due in five days.
The aging motels along Florida’s Highway 192 have long been barometers of a fragile economy. In good times they drew budget-conscious tourists from China, South America and elsewhere, whose dollars helped to pay the salaries of legions of low-wage service workers; the people who made one of the world’s largest tourism destinations — “the most magical place on earth” — run.
In tough times, the motels degenerated into shelters of last resort in a city where low-income housing shortages were among the most severe in the nation and the social safety net was collapsing. Now they were fast becoming places where it was possible to glimpse what a complete social and economic collapse might look like in America.
The pandemic had heaped crisis on top of crisis. The 2008 housing collapse and recession had caused the tourist market to tank at the exact moment the foreclosure crisis was forcing thousands of homeowners and overburdened renters from their homes. Struggling motel owners began renting rooms to the only customers they could find, those who had no place else to go.
In the decade that followed, the tourists returned to Orlando by the millions. Executive salaries at companies such as Disney and Universal soared. So did local real estate prices, buoyed by a booming market for gated, luxury vacation homes.
But almost nothing was done to address the reality that many service workers had emerged from the recession saddled with stagnant wages, bad credit or eviction records that made it nearly impossible for them to rent an apartment and return to a normal life. Many spent much of the past decade stuck in motels with restful names — the Paradise, the Palm, the Shining Light, the Star, the Magic Castle — that belied an increasingly grim reality for both the owners and tenants who found themselves trapped together.
At the Palm, scars of the past recession and the current collapse were evident in the motel’s cramped lobby, which was full of broken air-conditioning units and mattresses stacked to the ceiling. A dozen loaves of donated, day-old bread sat on a table by the front door.
Next door at the Paradise, a leak in the roof had caused black mold to bloom across the walls of one of the rooms. Cockroaches scurried across the floors of others. At the motel’s front desk, a sign warned guests that “due to shortages” there was a charge for toilet paper: $1 a roll.
“We can’t afford to fix anything right now,” the clerk confided.
The owner, who had emigrated from Bangladesh, complained that more than three-quarters of his 40 guests were weeks or months behind on their room bills. Many had jobs or were collecting unemployment insurance, he said, but were refusing to pay because they were protected by the state’s eviction moratorium.
“This kind of business never brings good people,” the owner said, “only bad people.”
Up and down the highway, motel owners told the same story of mounting bills, customers who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay for their rooms and buildings that were slowly falling apart because there was no money to fix them.
The worst of them all was the Star. A six-foot-high wall of trash bisected the parking lot, and children rode their bicycles through big puddles of raw sewage that spilled from a broken pipe. When Rose’s family landed at the motel earlier this year, after a few years in a house followed by a string of increasingly dilapidated motels, she felt as if she had hit “rock bottom.” The hot water didn’t work, and the toilet was clogged with hypodermic needles and crack pipes, she said. Rose’s grandmother and her 12-year-old brother, J.J., shared one bed. Her mother and stepfather took a second bed. Rose had a mattress to herself.
Rose’s grades suffered, she got into a fight at school and was suspended from her high school’s JROTC program, which had been a source of stability and pride in her life.
In April she started a gofundme account, hoping it might help her escape the Star. “Moving from hotel to hotel just want to be stable with my family,” she wrote in her pitch. But it drew no donations.
A few weeks later, she moved into an abandoned room near the front of the property that cost her $100 a week. Her brother, who had grown weary of sharing a bed with his grandmother, upgraded to a mattress of his own.
Rose cleaned the dog feces off the room’s floor and scrubbed her new room’s soiled mattress with bleach and Pine-Sol. Then she bombed the place with bug spray to get rid of the roaches and tracked down a working air conditioner from another room.
By early August, it was clear that it was just a matter of time before the motel was permanently shuttered. The power company had its demands, and the water company wanted $57,000 by January.
Some residents bought gas-powered generators. Some searched nearby trailer parks for a place that might take them. Others tried to blot out their anxiety with drugs and liquor. Rose waited and tried not to worry.
“Just gotta survive,” she said.
For much of the past year she had watched a gated community, consisting of 1,000 vacation homes, take shape just across the six-lane highway from the Star. All the while, her family sank deeper into poverty. The lesson for Rose was inescapable.
“The economy just keeps going up, up, up, and the minimum wage is staying the same. So how do they expect people to be able to pay their rent and pay for their car? That’s why more people are ending up in these hotels. There’s not enough resources out there to help us be able to help ourselves.”
A few miles west of the Star Motel on Highway 192, the Rev. Mary Lee Downey was reaching the same conclusion. The pandemic, she worried, was pushing the Orlando area to the brink of a collapse far more serious than the 2008 recession.
That recession had led her to start the Community Hope Center, which had helped hundreds of families escape the motels. Still, the total number of motel families never really shrank despite the decade long run of economic growth.
What was happening at the Star drove home the problem. Many families had filled out forms seeking help from a program administered by Downey’s organization that would pay two months rent and their security deposit if they could find an apartment they could afford. “Trying to find rental or anything to get us out of here,” wrote Maykayla Harper, who was 20, pregnant and earning about $9 an hour at Burger King.
Rose’s family had filled out the same form.
The problem: There were almost no apartments for people earning less than $25 an hour. To Downey it often seemed as if everyone — local government officials, residents at the Star, congregants at her church — expected her 19-person charity to fix a problem that had festered for more than a decade.
Before the pandemic, Downey had planned to build a 200-unit apartment complex on 5.5 acres that the Methodist Church gave her in 2018. All of the apartments would be reserved for the area’s lowest wage earners.
Downey estimated that she would need to raise about $15 million to make it work. But this summer, just as the economy was sinking, a consulting company that she had hired to study the feasibility of a fundraising effort told her that she wouldn’t be able to pull in more than $3.5 million.
“Maybe we should consider buying the Star,” one of her board members suggested.
Downey quickly concluded it would cost far too much to buy and renovate the decrepit motel. Instead she suggested they consider buying the Magic Castle, a shabby, purple 107-room motel where Rose’s family had stayed off and on over the years.
The owners, who purchased it in 2005, were asking $4.7 million, more than Downey could afford. But she thought that if they were willing to be flexible on the price, she might be able to buy the motel, rehab the rooms and use them as temporary bridge housing.
As word spread that Downey might buy the Magic Castle, some motel owners questioned whether she was tough enough to kick out drug abusers and other problem tenants. “Mary has a heart of gold. She’s tireless,” said one motel owner who has worked with Downey. “But it isn’t the 99 percent nice that runs a hotel. It’s the 1 percent nasty.”
Downey had different reservations. If the recession persisted, wages stagnated and the unemployment rate stayed high, the families she took in might be stuck in rooms for years on end. She had started her charity to get families out of motel rooms. Buying a motel felt a bit like surrender.
Five days after the residents raised the $1,500 to turn the power back on at the Star, it went off for good. No one from the state or county government showed up to help the motel residents, some of whom were too old and infirm to survive the blistering August heat for more than a day or two.
The list of people and agencies that had abandoned the Star as it descended into near-anarchy and filth was long and growing. The owner had disappeared in December. Osceola County Public School employees stopped visits to the motel around the same time. It was too dangerous, a school official said.
The county’s Human Services Department said there was little it could do to help the people stuck there. The county didn’t have any homeless shelters, and local officials weren’t going to spend money to help people find refuge in safer motels.
“We want them out of the hotels,” said Celestia McCloud, the county’s director of human services.
Even law enforcement officials seemed to avoid the Star. Sheriff’s deputies provided security for power company officials when they turned off the electricity. But a few days earlier, when an enraged resident fired a gun at one of his neighbors, it took deputies more than 45 minutes to arrive at the motel.
On the day the lights went out for good, one of the few people who came to the Star to help was Barbie Austria, who runs a small homeless ministry out of a black Dodge pickup truck. While Downey’s Community Hope Center worked on the larger issues that trapped families in the motels, Austria’s focus was narrower. On the day the power went out, her priority was making sure no one died.
Austria, 58, wore her long black hair in a single braid and carried a loaded pistol and extra magazine in her fanny pack. When she felt she was being watched at the Star, she would quietly place her hand on its grip.
Her first stop was Room 129, where Richard Sheldon, 82, lived with his bedridden partner, Allyson Jones. She knew that Sheldon and Jones couldn’t survive more than a day or two in the heat.
Sheldon’s journey to the Star had begun six years earlier with his wife’s death from lung cancer. In the months that followed, his discount ticket business went belly up, and the bank foreclosed on his three-bedroom house. Since then, home had been a series of increasingly run-down motels, ending with the Star.
Most mornings Sheldon made his way across the motel’s parking lot, his aluminum walker scraping the blacktop, to the bus stop where he caught a ride to Walmart. There he usually bought two tins of dog food for his Chihuahuas and a 12-ounce bottle of Caliber vodka for Jones, who downed the booze to dull the pain of several recent strokes.
“It’s been hard on me taking care of her,” Sheldon said. “But it’d be harder on her if I didn’t do it.”
Sheldon and Jones brought in only about $1,500 a month in Social Security and disability payments, which meant that most motels were beyond their budget. Austria found a $1,000-a-month motel that would take them and promised that she would help Sheldon and Jones with the bill until she could find them a cheaper option.
A dozen residents gathered to help Sheldon load his possessions into Austria’s truck and tell him goodbye. An elderly woman from Room 127 hugged him, tears streaming down her face, her eye blackened from a fight earlier that day.
“You got to go where it’s okay,” she cried.
“We’ll miss you, Mister Richard,” said a mother who was raising two young boys in a room on the second floor and spent many evenings stumbling around the parking lot in a drug-induced haze.
“I imagine I’m gone for good,” Sheldon told her.
“He’ll be back,” another neighbor muttered under her breath.
Austria maxed out her credit card helping a few Star residents move into safer motels: a single mom from Puerto Rico and her 3-year-old daughter; an elderly man who served time in prison decades earlier and spent his evenings sweeping the sidewalk in front of his room; the young pregnant woman who worked at Burger King and had filled out the form for the Community Hope Center’s housing program.
Each day Austria visited the Star, new people pleaded with her to get them out. She turned down a 61-year-old woman whose room was thick with swarming flies. Her husband had died in the motel room earlier in the year. “This is not me. I’m a neat freak,” the woman pleaded as her 5-year-old granddaughter watched. “I just get depressed.”
Austria decided that the woman’s problems were too severe to dump on a struggling motel owner. The toll of it all was wearing on her. She had been working in the motels on Highway 192 for more than a decade but had never seen a situation as desperate as the Star.
“I feel lost,” she said.
Later that evening, a county commissioner called her for help hauling away the growing hill of rotting garbage in the Star parking lot. Austria had organized a similar effort a few weeks earlier, handing out shovels, marshaling volunteers and finding a company to haul away the trash.
This time she told the county commissioner she wouldn’t help.
“We don’t need another trash pickup,” Austria said. “We need to abandon ship.”
After the power went out at the Star, Rose’s family spent the last of their savings on a week’s stay at the Magic Castle, where the rooms were going for $39 a night. The plan was to buy time until they could come up with a plan.
Her stepfather had applied for a dishwashing job at Chili’s but didn’t get it. Rose was temporarily out of work, too. One of the employees on her shift at Taco Bell had tested positive for the novel coronavirus, and she couldn’t go back to work until she proved she was virus free.
“Everything has got a waiting list or costs too much money,” she texted her manager.
Her boss replied with an address of a testing site that was 11 miles away. But neither Rose nor her parents had a car. So, it wasn’t an option.
Now she was sitting alone on the Magic Castle’s third-floor landing, a quiet perch that overlooked the motel’s empty parking lot and swimming pool. Another steamy Florida morning was turning into another scorching day.
She had moved to the Orlando area with her parents when she was just a toddler. Her family’s house outside Providence, R.I., was purchased to make way for an airport expansion.
“I’d love to go back to my hometown,” her mother had said earlier that morning.
“Our hometown,” Rose corrected.
“But they don’t have nothing,” her mom continued.
For a few years, when Rose’s grandmother was working as a manager at the Rodeway Inn, they all lived in a small house in nearby Poinciana, Fla. Her neighbors owned a trampoline and took her out on a water scooter. Rose had a friend who lived in a house so big that it seemed like “a mansion.”
“I thought we’d be there forever,” she said.
But her grandmother suffered a heart attack and the family income shrank to about $2,000 a month, the sum total of her mother’s and grandmother’s disability checks. Home became a series of motel rooms. Rose celebrated her 15th birthday at the Duo Boutique Hotel. Her parents couldn’t afford a present that year so her stepfather, an amateur tattoo artist, offered his services as a gift. “Don’t get anything stupid, and don’t get it where anyone can see it,” Rose’s mother warned.
Rose pulled the Gideon Bible from the nightstand and flipped through it for inspiration before landing on Jeremiah 29:13. “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.” The verse grabbed her like the lyric to a great pop song. “It was so clear,” she said. “It made perfect sense.” Her stepfather inked it across her back.
Her plan was to finish her senior year of high school and enlist in the Air Force. The previous summer she had visited Robins Air Force Base in Georgia with her high school’s JROTC program and thought “it was like heaven.”
The gyms where the troops lifted weights and played basketball were bigger than any she had seen. The meals were cheap and plentiful. “I got a plate and figured that it was going to be at least $13,” she said, “but it was only $2.” Her squadron won an award for being the best on the base.
The military offered her something that had eluded her for most of her life. “It’s a home wherever you’re at, and I’ve always wanted that,” Rose said. “That’s what the military gives you — stability, hope, more than a lot of things can offer.”
Her family had four days left at the Magic Castle. Rose’s mom was thinking about sending Rose, her brother and grandmother to live with Rose’s 21-year-old sister in Orlando. For now, though, home was still the Star, where residents were fighting over generators and gunshots rang out nightly.
Rose needed to pick up some clean clothes from her room, so she and her brother headed off to the motel, which was about a half-mile down the highway. They passed a woman begging for change at a traffic light, stores hawking discount Disney T-shirts, an Asian massage parlor and a recently shuttered Quality Inn, where they had briefly stayed in January.
“This is the crackhead area,” Rose said. “Up there is more the prostitute’s spot.”
She pushed open the door to Room 236 and was greeted by a blast of hot air that smelled of cat urine, cockroaches and mold. She didn’t flinch. Inside, Rose had tacked a Puerto Rican flag to one of the walls. A broken television sat atop her dresser along with a plastic trophy from Taco Bell that praised her “hard work and dedication.”
“Only five or six people out of 30 got one,” Rose said of the trophy.
Her brother eyed the room’s silent air conditioner. “That thing used to blow,” he said. “When it came on it felt good in here.”
For Rose, the hardest part of living at the Star was the feeling of isolation. Rose’s co-workers across the street at the Taco Bell wouldn’t go near the motel. Nor would her ex-girlfriend, who had broken up with her right before the pandemic hit. Some days Rose blamed her life at the motel and her inability to afford “nice things” for the failed relationship.
“People come and people go,” Rose said. “Money comes and money goes. Nothing is forever.”
“Family is forever,” her brother replied.
“No,” Rose said. “Not even family.”
She stared out her window at the piles of rotting trash, roving pit bulls and the long-abandoned swimming pool. Her brother dashed outside to meet a church bus that was giving away free lunches in the motel’s circular driveway.
The heat was stifling. Rose mopped her face with her T-shirt. “Damn,” she said. “We’re stuck.”
As summer wore on, trash piles at the Star continued to grow. The raw sewage from a broken pipe spread farther across the parking lot. Someone ransacked Rose’s room and stole her clothes.
Finally, in early September, Rose’s parents found a way out, at least for now. A Kissimmee-based real estate agent, who provides aid to motel families and had helped them in the past, paid $3,000 in deposits and application fees for an extended-stay suite in a run-down resort community. Their new landlord agreed to overlook the fact that Rose’s parents had poor credit and had just started new $9-an-hour fast food jobs.
The rent for the new place was $1,350 a month. For it to last, Rose’s stepfather, who was starting at Burger King and Boston Market, would need to work 50 to 60 hours a week. Rose’s mother, who can only work part time because she collects disability, needed 20 hours a week.
Neither of her parents could afford many sick days. Nor could they absorb any unexpected expenses. Rose wanted to go back to work, too, just in case they needed the money. But her mother pressed her to focus on her grades.
“This is your senior year, the big year,” she told her. “Don’t do that to yourself.”
For the first time in months, Rose had a clean, safe place to sleep. She didn’t have to worry about gunshots or the electricity going out. For the moment, she wasn’t totally stuck.
Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this story.
KISSIMMEE, FLA. — The pandemic had forced them from their home. Then they had run out of money for a motel. That left the car, which is where Sergine Lucien, Dave Marecheau and their two children were one recent night, parked in a lot that was tucked behind a row of empty storefronts.
Sergine eyed some men gathering by a fence in the opposite corner of the blacktop.
“I just heard some f-bombs,” she said.
“I’m not worried,” Dave replied.
Days earlier, Dave had started a $14-an-hour construction job and expected to collect his first paycheck in the morning. If all went as planned, this would be their last night sleeping in the car.
“I see a guy doing drugs over there,” Sergine said, glancing at the huddle of men.
“Ginnie, this is a good spot,” Dave insisted.
The spot was six miles from the main gate of a shuttered Walt Disney World, the engine of Orlando’s vast tourism economy, which in the best of times had struggled to keep its armies of low-wage workers housed, clothed and fed. Now the pandemic was revealing just how fragile and cruel that economy could be, as thousands of those workers found themselves on the edge of eviction and homelessness, living in cars or squatting in abandoned motels.
In late May, Vice President Pence met in Orlando with executives who described the catastrophic damage to Florida’s tourism industry, after a record 131 million people visited in 2019. “If we don’t get back to work quickly, it’s all over. It’s all over,” the CEO of a large hotel and convention company told him.
“We’ll get this opened up,” Pence replied.
Even when the economy was booming, Dave and Sergine had lived in a state of near homelessness, shuttling between seedy motels that had become a shelter of last resort for thousands in the Orlando area. Last year, after six years of the motel life, they had saved enough to finally make it out. They bought an RV and rented a spot in a quiet and clean mobile home community. Sergine promised the kids they would never go back.
Now all that was gone. In theory, they qualified for a $3,400 federal stimulus check, but they had no bank account or address to collect it. In theory, Dave was entitled to unemployment, but as of May only about 43 percent of the state’s 1.1 million claims had been paid.
Their reality was another night in their 15-year-old Saab hatchback, the promise of a paycheck and then, maybe, an upgrade to a run-down motel room. Their last meal — eight hours earlier — had come from the McDonald’s dollar menu. Jayden, 12, hunched over a spiral notebook sketching robots, squinting to compensate for the glasses that had broken a few months earlier and had never been replaced. Phoenix, 7, complained that her parents had promised to buy her a basketball.
“I’m trying to teach you that you need food. You need water — you don’t need a basketball,” Sergine told her.
But when she looked away, Dave handed his kids $1 each — the last cash he had — and soon, the family was heading to the Dollar Tree, deciding that a moment of unexpected joy was more important than food. Phoenix picked out a jar of pink slime. Jayden eyed a bag of chips but settled on a spiral notebook. He would rather draw than eat.
Then it was back to the parking lot that was filling with the homeless. Dave blew up an air mattress for the kids that spilled out of the hatchback. When a man approached the car, he yelled, “Get away! Corona!”
When a second man in soiled clothes started to urinate about a dozen feet from the spot where Jayden was sitting and sketching, Dave cursed at him and ran him off.
“That’s why I don’t want to be here,” Sergine said. “We gotta move.”
They were loading up when the man reappeared, clutching a broken umbrella he had plucked from a nearby dumpster.
“I pee in the grass! I pee in the grass!” he screamed and charged at Dave, who grabbed a two-by-four from the ground and hit him hard in the back. The man, who appeared mentally ill, cried out in pain. Dave, Sergine and the kids fled to a better-lit, but more open and exposed, McDonald’s parking lot.
“Just one more night,” Sergine assured herself.
She set her phone alarm for midnight so that as Thursday turned to Friday, she could check whether Dave’s first paycheck had hit their account. She could hear the clatter of raccoons foraging in a nearby dumpster and the hum of cars rolling through the drive-through. At 12:01 a.m. she looked to see whether Dave’s paycheck had shown up in his account.
Nothing. They were still broke.
THEY HAD COME TO ORLANDO FROM BROOKLYN in 2013, drawn by the area’s warm weather and seemingly endless supply of low-skill jobs. A few months after arriving in Florida they were short on rent and had to check into a run-down motel on Highway 192. For families with bad credit, no savings or prior evictions, the motels were often the only option. Dave, 50, and Sergine, 39, ticked all the boxes.
“The most raggedy, hooker and drug-infested motel costs more than $1,000 a month,” Sergine said. For years, they were stuck. Phoenix took her first steps in the Home Suite Home motel. Jayden and Sergine kept a tally of the best and worst places they had stayed.
“Where was our first room at the Red Carpet Inn?” Sergine asked.
“Room 207,” Jayden replied. “It looked like someone got murdered in there.”
“Literally three walls had blood on them,” Sergine added.
Last year, Dave and Sergine finally scraped together enough money to buy a $4,500 RV and rent a slab in a mobile home park with shuffleboard courts and a heated pool. Dave, who had spent two years as a prep cook at the Regal Oaks resort, was earning $14 an hour. He took a second job as a dishwasher at the local outpost of Joe’s Crab Shack, a big chain restaurant.
Jayden and Phoenix finally had their own beds, a place to keep toys, and a steady group of playmates. Dave and Sergine promised the kids that they would never go back to the motels.
Money was still tight and sometimes they fought. In February, Dave was arrested on a misdemeanor domestic battery charge after Sergine called the police. She said she pushed him and that he responded by hitting her with a backpack. The charge was dropped. Then in late March the pandemic hit, tourism stopped cold and Dave lost both his jobs. Their RV was towed to an impound lot. They were back in the motels.
Three weeks later, Disney furloughed almost 43,000 park workers, adding a flood of new unemployed people to an economy that was already starved of tourists. Food lines stretched for hours.
Dave and Sergine pawned their wedding rings, their television and their children’s Christmas presents — Jayden’s Nintendo Switch and Phoenix’s tablet — to pay for motel rooms. A couple weeks ago, Sergine sold the family’s $509 monthly food stamp allotment.
Signs of suffering were everywhere. At the Lake Cecile, just three miles from Disney World, a few dozen people were living in rooms without electricity or running water. A recently released inmate had moved into one. In another, a pair of out-of-work Applebee’s employees were trying to make it livable, with a woman scrubbing the floor while her boyfriend fetched water in a bucket from a dilapidated motel across the street.
Several of the rooms on their floor were charred black by fire. Three feet of green, mosquito-infested slime and trash stagnated in the swimming pool.
Dave and Sergine decided that their car was safer than a free room at the Lake Cecile.
DAVE HAD PLANNED TO RISE AT 4:45 A.M. so he would have time to wash up in the men’s room of a nearby Wawa before he reported for work at 6:30 a.m. But when the alarm went off, he was too tired, so he hit snooze a half-dozen times before getting up at 6 a.m.
About 30 minutes later, the family pulled into a gas station parking lot near Dave’s job site for the beginning of his shift. Sergine had never learned to drive so she and the kids would have to spend the day in the car — no air conditioning, no shade, the windows down and doors open to stave off the 90-degree heat.
Dave returned with some devastating news: He wasn’t going to receive his first paycheck until the following Friday.
Seven more days of living, eating and sleeping in the hot, cramped car; seven more days of hoping no one would notice as she and her kids cleaned themselves in gas station restrooms; seven more days of worrying about her family’s safety.
Sergine rested her forehead on the steering wheel and began to sob. She looked up a short time later to find a sheriff’s deputy peering through the car window.
“You are not in trouble,” the deputy said when she saw Sergine’s panic-stricken face. “By no means are you in any kind of trouble.”
The officer asked where they lived and whether the kids were able to do online school. Sergine gulped for air between cries as she shared the story of the last few days in frantic and confusing fragments.
“I wish I could get you out of this situation … I wish I could get you a place now,” the deputy said. “My heart hurts for you.”
“I feel like a failure,” Sergine responded.
“I think you’re doing excellent,” the deputy replied. She peeked into the back seat where Jayden and Phoenix were eating their first meal in more than 18 hours. Dave’s boss had advanced him $100 that they would have to stretch to cover their next seven days of food and gas.
“You guys be patient and take care of your mommy,” the deputy said, and was gone.
To Sergine, it felt as if every institution that might provide her help was either overwhelmed or inaccessible. She had waited on hold for hours with the IRS in an effort to claim their stimulus check, before giving up. “It’s out there somewhere in the cloud,” she said.
The status of Dave’s unemployment claim had for weeks read “still pending.” The governor blamed the backlog on the state’s buggy computer system and Floridians’ failure to fill out the forms properly. Dave and Sergine had all but given up hope of ever seeing their money.
Sergine’s best chance was a local charity group. She dialed the number for the St. Vincent De Paul Society’s financial help line, which had given her some money last year when they were moving into the mobile home park.
“Our small volunteer group is overwhelmed with those requesting assistance,” a recorded message played.
“Please, please, please,” Sergine prayed.
“Speak your name slowly and clearly … ”
Sergine held her breath and waited for the beep.
“Sorry, that mailbox is full,” said a computerized voice. “Goodbye.”
She dropped the phone in her lap. Tears ran down her face and neck. “I want to hit something. I want to scream,” Sergine cried. “I feel like I’m drowning.”
In the back seat, Phoenix squeezed her pink slime. Jayden was playing “Brawl Stars” on his phone. Around them cars were filling up with gasoline and families were going about their day.
Sergine brushed away her tears and called the resource counselor at her children’s elementary school.
“I’m so glad to hear your voice,” the woman said.
“I’m falling apart. I am done,” Sergine pleaded. “We’ve been in the streets for three days now. Dave doesn’t get paid until next Friday. My babies don’t have food to eat.”
Sergine could hear the clack of computer keys on the other end of the line. “Let me think, think, think,” said the counselor, who promised to phone back in 15 minutes with some options.
“What’s happening?” asked Jayden.
“I don’t know,” Sergine cried softly.
Instead of a callback, Sergine received a text with a phone number for a relief agency that she had already tried. “Ms. Lucien, this is temporary,” the counselor wrote. “This situation is temporary.”
To Sergine, though, the prospect of another week of public humiliations, of her back throbbing and her children going hungry seemed endless.
“Help me, Jayden,” she said. “Help me think.”
Dave arrived around 3:30 p.m., drenched in sweat from digging trenches in the 90-degree heat. He tossed Phoenix a rubber ball that he had found on the job site. “A basketball!” she said, smiling.
They drove back to Kissimmee, past shuttered chain restaurants, empty outlet malls and a parade of hookers still working a stretch of sidewalk along Orange Blossom Trail. First stop was EconoLodge, where Dave and Jayden went to grab some free ice.
Dave had come to the United States from Grenada and settled in New York City when he was 17, and he knew what it was like to be hungry. “How can I heal this problem?” he sometimes thought when he looked at Jayden and Phoenix.
Jayden’s legs were stiff from the long day in the car. His head was down. “This is how life goes sometimes,” Dave told him as they filled a thermos and two big plastic cups with ice. “We’re almost there son. Your dad is working on it. Once we make it we are not going to have to stay outside again.”
Jayden still hadn’t lost faith in his father. “He’s very hard-working,” he had said one night in the McDonald’s parking lot. “I could call him a workaholic.”
Now, though, Jayden didn’t speak. He just nodded.
THEIR LAST HOPE FOR A ROOM WAS BARBIE AUSTRIA, a woman who served free hot meals on weekend mornings at a homeless encampment outside the Osceola Christian Ministry Center.
Sergine had met Austria three years earlier in the parking lot of the roach-infested Star Motel, which shares an owner with the Lake Cecile. Austria was passing out free food and clothing. They reconnected earlier this spring when Sergine and Dave lost their RV and were forced to move back into the motels.
About two dozen people lined up for a hot meal, including a woman Sergine had worked with a few years earlier at Walmart and a man who helped with maintenance at the Gator Motel in exchange for a break on his room.
“She’s a beautiful soul,” Sergine said of Austria, who was unloading folding tables from the back of her pickup truck. Her hair was pulled back in a tight black braid. A fanny pack where she kept her pistol hung from her waist.
Austria ran Kissimmee-Poinciana Homeless Outreach, a small street ministry, with the help of a former Army cook and few volunteers from her church. One of the volunteers handed Phoenix two s’mores cookies.
“Who found marshmallows this big?” she said. “They probably make them.” She took a bite into one of the cookies and handed the other to Jayden. “Most of the people here know me, and I like it,” she said.
A few yards away, Sergine was telling Austria about their nights sleeping in the car.
“When will you be able to get back in a hotel?” Barbie asked.
“Friday,” Sergine replied.
A month earlier, when they were short of cash for a room, Austria had given her $150. This time Austria didn’t offer money. Instead she said she would try to help Sergine find a housecleaning job, though both knew the prospects were bleak. No one wanted strangers cleaning their house in the middle of a pandemic.
Dave grabbed four containers of food and some sandwiches that would have to last them the day. It was too hot to go to the McDonald’s parking lot so they parked in the shade of an oak tree adjacent to an RV park full of snowbird retirees. Behind them was a shopping center that Dave said he had painted four years earlier.
“You built it?” Phoenix asked.
“Nah, just painted it,” he said. “Me and two other guys.”
Dave leaned against a barbed wire and chain link fence that separated the lot from the RV park. He gazed out at the campers.
“My RV dream,” he said.
A thunderstorm was approaching. Sergine was reading a story on her phone about a new proposal from the state to extend eviction and foreclosure protections for a few more months. Neither proposal would help her.
“It’s going to be a sh---y day,” she said.
When the sun had set and the temperatures cooled, Jayden and Phoenix chased each other through the parking lot of a nearby strip mall and tossed Phoenix’s new ball until they lost it in the dark.
Then they looked through old photos on Sergine’s phone. Here was a picture of Dave one year earlier, standing in front of their RV in his black chef’s uniform smiling. He looked at least 30 pounds heavier. Sergine showed Phoenix a shot of her second birthday party.
“If I had a cake, why did I also have cupcakes?” Phoenix asked.
“We had money, and it was only $100,” Sergine replied.
Around 10 p.m., Sergine sprayed the kids with mosquito repellent. In the back of the family’s hatchback, Jayden and Phoenix drifted off to sleep. In the front, Sergine worried that the long hours in the car were making Jayden more withdrawn, less confident and sociable. She wondered if sleeping curled up next to his sister would stunt his growth; if going without glasses would permanently damage his eyesight. Phoenix carried on as normal, which worried her, too, because nothing about the last two months had been normal.
IN THE MORNING THEY WERE BACK AT THE HOMELESS ENCAMPMENT where Austria was once again passing out food. “I feel like I’ve failed my kids,” Sergine told her. “I feel like I’d be better off dead.”
“I wish I had answers,” Austria told her.
“We never get answers,” Sergine said.
Austria was packing up the food when she called Sergine over and offered to give her the money she needed for a motel until Friday when Dave would collect his first paycheck. The total bill for the Econo Lodge came to $217.11, which Austria said they could pay back in $10 weekly installments. They made plans to get a room that afternoon, but because of a glitch with Austria’s credit card, they had to spend one more night in the car.
On a Monday afternoon, after five nights in the car, they moved into the Econo Lodge, more exhausted than elated. Jayden flipped on a cartoon channel and collapsed on the bed. Sergine and Phoenix headed immediately for the shower.
“Do we have money to put towards dinner?” Jayden asked his father.
“Eat what’s in the room,” Dave said tersely.
The car’s gas gauge read empty. The family was down to its last 48 cents. Stacked on top of the mini-fridge were a dozen single-serving boxes of Cheerios, a crushed peanut butter and jelly sandwich and six single-serving packages of crackers. Jayden bit into the sandwich, while Sergine searched on the phone for food giveaways that they could walk to from the EconoLodge the next day. Almost all of them took place in the middle of the day when Dave would be at work.
As the evening wore on, the family relaxed and tempers cooled. Dave climbed into bed next to his son and picked up one of Jayden’s spiral notebooks, pausing over a creation that was half-man, half-battery.
“You used to draw stickman,” he said. “From stickman to this … wow.”
“This is my final concept of what I want that character to look like,” Jayden said.
“It’s nice. It’s good,” Dave told him. “I wish I could draw like that.”
Now that they were someplace cool and safe, Sergine took a moment to think about the mistakes they had made since coming to Florida. “We get a little money and rush out,” she said. “That’s what we did with the RV. We rush into things without planning because we want out so bad.”
Dave fell asleep next to Jayden, who was watching cartoons and drawing. Sergine curled up in the bed next to Phoenix. By 10 p.m. the lights in their room were out. The air conditioner was humming. The faint smell of mildew hung in the air. They had made it back to the place where they had started seven years ago.
Julie Tate contributed to this story.
A Walt Disney World waitress struggles to hold on to her middle-class life amid a pandemic and catastrophic layoff.
ORLANDO — “Dear Cast Member,” the late October layoff notice began.
Flaviana Decker, 44, retreated to her living room couch and tried to stop her tears before her eldest daughter, due home from school any second, burst through the door. Her 14-year career as a Walt Disney World waitress was over.
“I’m crying,” Flaviana texted her fellow servers. “Is anyone else?”
“I’m angry, so I haven’t gotten to the crying phase,” responded one friend who felt hurt by Disney’s decision to restore temporary cuts to its top executives’ salaries just weeks before axing more than 28,000 of its lowest-wage workers. Others were stung that their years, and in some cases decades, of service to a company that they loved had ended with an impersonal email.
“They could have at least used our name,” one server wrote.
“That’s all we are, just a number,” another added.
Flaviana wasn’t angry at Disney. She was too scared for her girls and herself to be anything other than worried. “I wish I could be at work,” she typed.
Her job waiting tables at Disney’s Polynesian Village Resort had sustained her through the painful end of her marriage and the struggles of being a single parent to two teenage girls, one of whom is autistic and struggles with basic motor skills and speaking. Throughout the summer and fall as lawmakers were fighting over an economic relief bill and the number of coronavirus cases was climbing, Flaviana was scouring the Disney fan blogs for glimmers of hope that the tourists might be returning. But the once famously long lines at Disney World remained short even as Orlando’s free food lines, packed with laid-off hotel and theme park workers, grew longer. All the while Flaviana’s unemployment checks shrank from more than $800 a week in July to $247 a week in October, which didn’t even cover her rent.
The hardest parts for Flaviana were accepting the reality that her Disney job was gone; that the modest middle-class life that she had built was no longer sustainable; that she wouldn’t be able to provide Victoria, a bright and imaginative teenager whose autism made everyday tasks difficult, with the classes and therapists that enabled her to learn and share her thoughts and feelings.
She felt “robbed and sad.” She cried in the shower so that her daughters wouldn’t see. She asked her mom in Pedro Leopoldo, Brazil, to pray for her but didn’t tell her that she had been laid off. “She’s on the other side of the world. I don’t want her to worry,” Flaviana said. “What can she do? She’s not going to change the outcome.”
The stress left her with a pain in her stomach that never seemed to go away.
The only people in whom she confided were her fellow servers from Ohana, her restaurant at Disney’s Polynesian resort, who had kept in touch through a group text chain that they named the “corona crew.”
Late at night when her mind was racing and her daughters were asleep in their room across the hall, Flaviana would text the group asking if anyone was up.
“Go back to bed,” urged one friend a few days after their separations were finalized.
“I’m worried about you,” another friend wrote.
“I’m worried about myself,” Flaviana typed.
“The most magical place on Earth,” as Disney World bills itself, had by late fall become a place overwhelmed by an unprecedented number of individual crises. In late September, Disney announced that it was terminating 28,000 cast members, most of them at its theme parks in Orlando and Anaheim, Calif. Then, the day before Thanksgiving, with business still lagging, Disney added another 4,000 workers to the tally, boosting the total losses to 32,000. The cuts fell heaviest on part-time employees, many of whom held multiple jobs or, like Flaviana, regularly picked up extra shifts and worked full-time hours.
Their pain was evident in Facebook groups, such as “Cast Members Supporting Cast Members” and “Ear for Each Other,” where laid-off Disney workers sold homemade trinkets, advertised side hustles, and struggled with the hard facts of what their lives and their country had become.
“I’ve paid rent for November, [but] I’m completely out of money,” wrote one Disney worker. “Can’t pay my phone bill, electric bill or car insurance this month.”
“Prayers for a miracle,” added another Disney employee. “My car goes out for repossession 11/12.”
“Covid, you have RUINED EVERYTHING!!!” wrote a third.
For Orlando, the pandemic has been devastating. Theme parks are operating at one-third of their normal capacity. Thousands of convention workers and banquet hall servers have gone months without paying mortgages, car payments or rent. Budget motels that once served tourists from all over the world now struggle to get by as a shelter of last resort for homeless families.
Some of the desperation has played out behind closed doors in quiet, tree-lined neighborhoods. “We once lived really comfortably,” said the wife of a Disney bus driver who on a recent Saturday was selling off her Christmas decorations, her grandchildren’s toys and her furniture to pay for food, power and rent. “Now we scrape and we borrow and we plead.” She disinfected the day’s haul — three $20 bills — with Lysol and stuck them in her pocket.
Food lines offered the most public view of the need. They also laid bare the city’s class and racial divisions. There was a discreet, appointment-only food pantry in an upscale neighborhood that served mostly Disney executives and engineers. Disney’s laid-off musicians, dancers and actors flocked to a line at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church, where the free food was accompanied by live performances.
Longtime veterans of recently canceled shows, such as “Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular!” and “Hoop-Dee-Doo Musical Revue,” gathered under an oak tree in the parking lot.
A few laid-off Disney performers ambled past in witch’s garb on their way to entertain the growing line of cars. “We’re the Oven Coven!” they said. They joined a middle-aged man sweating through a rainbow unicorn outfit and a clown teetering on stilts. A musician belted “Lean on Me.”
“It’s a slaughterhouse,” said Andrea Canny, who came to Orlando in 1991 to play Belle in a “Beauty and the Beast” stage show before transitioning to playing gargoyles and other character actor roles over the course of a three-decade career. “People are going to have to move back to their hometowns. There just aren’t enough jobs at Trader Joe’s and Target.”
The largest food line of all was one that the Society of St. Andrew and Unite Here 737 hospitality workers union ran at a temporarily shuttered motel not far from Disney’s main gate. On a recent Saturday, the first cars arrived around 3 a.m. — a laid-off housekeeper who had come to grab a box for herself and a friend who had lost her car, a former Magic Kingdom cashier who couldn’t sleep, a banquet server who had emigrated from Haiti in the early 1990s and was draining her 401(k) to pay her mortgage and care for her 12-year-old daughter. She’d applied for help from Florida’s child welfare agency but was told she earned too much money.
“What kind of country is this?” the woman asked, gazing out at growing line.
By 5:30 a.m., there were more than 250 cars in the parking lot. Old friends, who had not seen each other since March, caught up under the motel’s lights.
“My mom passed away a month ago,” Jesus Paz, a janitor, told his friend Carmen Alta, a cashier.
“Why didn’t you call me?” asked Alta, who had spent much of April intubated in the hospital with covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
By 8 a.m., the line spilled more than a mile down Highway 192, past a pawnshop promising “Cash for Guns,” a Disney clearance outlet and the Congo River miniature golf course.
Flaviana’s friends, several of whom relied on the union food line, urged her to use it as well. But Flaviana worried that the food wouldn’t work with Victoria’s diet and told her friends she didn’t want to “waste” it. Her friends concluded that she was too proud, unwilling to admit that her life in America had reached the point where she needed to wait hours in line for food.
Flaviana had dreamed of living in the United States since she was a girl growing up in Brazil. “Maybe it was the movies,” she said. “Europe seemed old. America was new.” At 17, a high school exchange program placed her with a family in Rhode Island. She returned a few years later on a five-month Disney World internship and in 2000 moved to the United States permanently. She found work at an Olive Garden and then an upscale Italian restaurant before landing her Disney job in 2006 when her girls, Victoria, 14, and Gabriela, 15, were still in diapers.
As an exchange student, Flaviana had marveled that her biology teacher had been able to take his family to Disney, a place that seemed so out of reach in Rhode Island. Now her job came with a free year-round family pass to the park.
Four years later, when her marriage collapsed, the job gave her the time and money she needed to fight for Victoria. Since 2014, Flaviana and Victoria had spent a week each year in Austin, where they studied the “Rapid Prompting Method,” a technique that had enabled Victoria at 7 to share her first full thoughts with her mother. Her first words had been a revelation.
Victoria, who couldn’t speak, pointed at letters on a board, spelling out a story she had made up about a boy named Gus who blew bubbles as big as a house and traveled inside one of them to the White House at the invitation of President Barack Obama. Up until then, Flaviana hadn’t realized that Victoria could read; that she wasn’t locked away in her own world, but rather was bursting to communicate.
The annual trip and classes cost about $2,500 to $3,000 a year. Flaviana knew that if she was short money, she could always pick up a few extra shifts at Ohana. She worked most of the big holidays, which paid overtime, including the last 14 Thanksgivings in a row. Each year Walt Disney World raised the prices, and each year the guests kept coming. Flaviana’s tips grew more and more generous — 2019 was her best year ever.
“What could make this stop being so good?” she would sometimes think as she headed off around 5 a.m. to work her regular breakfast shift. A hurricane could shut Disney down for a week, but the company would quickly rebuild. A terrorist attack would be a big setback, but Disney and her job would survive, she reasoned.
The crowds would always return. Her restaurant would always be packed. Her job would always be safe.
Flaviana knew that her friends at work were worried about her. They overwhelmed her with well-meaning, unsolicited advice: She should get more sleep, consider anti-anxiety medication, meet them for a cocktail, take up baking, start looking for a job. Flaviana listened politely and mostly ignored them.
In early November, Flaviana and her girls met up with Desiree Jacobsen, who had also been laid off from Ohana, and Desiree’s husband and children at a Hawaiian shave ice shop in an upscale outdoor mall. On the way from the parking lot, Flaviana eyed an empty sushi place, a cavernous and deserted Gloria Estefan-themed restaurant and a gift shop that was advertising 50 percent off all merchandise. Palm trees swayed in a gentle warm breeze.
The United States had just set a single-day record for new coronavirus infections, surpassing 100,000 for the first time ever. By early December the daily toll would exceed 200,000. In Washington, President Trump was still insisting that he had defeated President-elect Joe Biden. “If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” he insisted at a White House news conference before storming off.
Flaviana’s mind was on more personal matters.
“We need some freaking tourists,” she half-jokingly complained.
“Yeah, but we don’t need their cooties,” Desiree replied.
Disney had promised that if the virus abated and the tourists returned, it would rehire workers in order of seniority through 2022 when the union contract expired. The list of just the laid-off servers ran 24 pages, 84 names per page, 1,944 unemployed waiters in all.
Desiree, 45, had been working at Disney’s Polynesian resort since she was 16. Her three decades of service landed her near the middle of Page 1. Flaviana’s name was on the bottom of Page 6.
Desiree’s mother had worked at the Polynesian, and Desiree had met her husband, who was also a Disney server, at the resort. At first, the layoff hurt her pride. “It makes you feel like you don’t matter,” she said.
As the weeks passed, her worry shifted to her bills. Her husband had been called back to work but was only earning about half of what he made during normal times. A good Disney server at a popular restaurant could earn $50,000 to $75,000 a year. Desiree had landed a seasonal job at Bath & Body Works, but it only paid $11 an hour. She picked up a bit more money gardening. But it wasn’t covering her expenses.
Days earlier, she and her husband had drained their savings account to pay the mortgage on the home they had purchased in 2018. Banks were letting customers skip payments, but Desiree was still anxious about falling behind and losing the house.
“What are we doing next?” she had texted her husband who was at work.
“Bankruptcy?” he replied.
Desiree called Flaviana in tears, but Flaviana had trouble mustering sympathy. “At least your husband is still working [at Disney],” Flaviana said.
The next morning, Desiree sent her a text: “I am sorry I was freaking out last night. I always get lost in my fears when I am doing my own bills.”
Now the two women were sitting in a booth across from each other reminiscing about the pre-pandemic days at Ohana: how packed the restaurant used to be, how Flaviana once accidentally set a guest’s “Sweet 16” birthday cupcake on fire; how good Flaviana was with disabled children who visited their restaurant; how easily they both could make their guests laugh.
“Are we ever going to do that again?” Flaviana asked.
“You’ve got to have faith,” Desiree replied.
Their children were smiling and joking in the neighboring booth. Desiree tried to gently nudge Flaviana to consider looking for a new job. “It’s a lot of fun at Bath & Body Works,” she said. A day earlier she had helped a customer find a scent that she had liked. “It felt a lot like Disney.”
“You’re great at customer service,” Flaviana said.
Earlier in the week, the check-engine light on Flaviana’s car — a 2009 Kia with 260,000 miles on it — had come back on. The state had discovered a mistake with her food stamps and was cutting her monthly allocation by $12 to $192 a month. Desiree, who volunteered at the union food line and took home a box for her family each week, urged Flaviana to reconsider using it. “We had chicken thighs last week,” she said. “I know you eat that.” But Flaviana was noncommittal.
Flaviana’s Ohana co-workers had become her surrogate family. They vacationed together in the summer and started their own traditions, coordinating and sewing homemade, Disney-themed costumes for “Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party.”
Shortly after the layoffs, Flaviana, Desiree and a dozen other Ohana servers met to turn in their uniforms and spend a last day in the park together, riding roller coasters, drinking and taking in a character parade.
“Ready, 1-2-3 … We love you!” they yelled through their cloth masks as Mickey and Minnie rolled down an empty Epcot street in an antique car. Flaviana and a laid-off Ohana friend, whose husband had also lost his hospitality job, held hands in one of the Epcot gift shops and cried together.
“It’s different for us,” the friend told her. “You and I are losing everything.”
One of the most demoralizing parts of the layoff for Flaviana was how isolated it made her feel. Unlike her co-workers, Flaviana didn’t have a husband with whom she could share the emotional and financial burden. She didn’t have family in the United States who could help her with the bills. None of her fellow laid-off servers at Ohana had a special-needs child — a term that Flaviana hated.
“Victoria has specific needs,” Flaviana often said. And meeting those needs took time, persistence and money.
“My victories have just started,” Victoria had said four years ago on her 10th birthday, pointing to the letters on her board. Flaviana asked her if she had anything else to say. “Try to respect young thinkers,” Victoria added. “Some have surreal minds and strong messages to share with the world … victories over silence.”
Flaviana’s mission was to make sure those victories continued. Victoria’s severe motor difficulties make it hard for her to perform tasks like cutting her food or tying her shoes. Flaviana was determined not to let those limitations prevent Victoria from having a meaningful life. She also wanted her eldest daughter, Gabriela, a diligent high school sophomore, to attend college.
“They don’t see the sacrifices I have to make,” Flaviana said of her Ohana friends. “They don’t see the mountains I have to jump.”
Flaviana tried not to think too hard about what it would take for Disney World’s pre-pandemic guests to return. People would have to be able to afford to take a vacation. They would have to be willing to fly. They would need to get on crowded buses and check into hotel rooms. They would have to feel comfortable enough to sit surrounded by strangers in packed restaurants. And they would have to come by the tens of thousands.
For Flaviana, it was too much to consider. Instead, she gravitated toward a simpler solution, borne of personal desperation. She was convinced that if Trump won the election, he would ignore the virus, force open the economy and return her life to some semblance of what it had been before the pandemic.
In that life, Flaviana had cried four years earlier when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. Back then, she had worried that Trump was anti-immigrant, anti-woman and interested only in helping the rich get even richer. She was especially upset that he had mocked a disabled reporter. “How can a person like that represent the most powerful country in the world?” Flaviana recalled thinking.
In 2020, Flaviana didn’t love either of the candidates. Her only concern was getting her Disney job back and providing for her daughters. “I can’t believe I am saying this,” Flaviana said, “but Trump has guts and he wants to get things open. That’s the best option for my family right now.”
As Trump’s prospects dimmed in the days after Election Day, Flaviana held on to the faint chance that he might somehow prevail. Her hopes were dashed on Nov. 7 when she glanced at her phone and saw the election was being called for Biden. She took a deep breath and then swallowed hard. A tear streaked her cheek.
“This sucks,” she said. “If Trump would’ve won, maybe this would’ve gone away.”
Before the pandemic, Flaviana would occasionally wait on tables of Brazilians who had just arrived in the United States but were already buying homes and starting businesses. In some cases, she recalled, they barely spoke English. Flaviana had been in Orlando for 20 years. She was still renting a two-bedroom apartment. Her 11-year-old Kia was always breaking down when she could least afford to fix it.
She wasn’t jealous, she said. She had obligations, especially to Victoria, that were beyond her control and bigger than any career.
“Is Disney a dream job? For me it was. I was around for my daughters,” she said. Still, she carried a nagging feeling that she had somehow failed. “I’ve been here for 20 years,” she said, “but I didn’t make it.”
Flaviana asked for advice writing a résumé on the “Ear For Each Other” Facebook page, and an insurance agent from Pennsylvania, who was monitoring the page, helped her with a first draft. A former Ohana manager agreed to write a letter of recommendation. “You are one of the most amazing people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with,” the manager wrote to her.
Flaviana had always seen herself as a person who seized opportunities. She came to the United States for the first time when she was just a teen. She had “fought like a lion” for Victoria, she said, proving wrong neurologists who told her that her daughter was permanently locked away in her own world and unable to communicate.
“Right now, I’m in an unfamiliar space and feel very defeated and frozen,” she said.
The day after the election was called for Biden, Flaviana met a laid-off Ohana friend for coffee at a sandwich shop near her apartment. Disney had announced that it would pay its laid-off employees their full salaries for November and December as required by a federal law called the Warn Act. Flaviana planned to use the money to catch up on her Internet, phone and electric bills. If she cut her spending to a bare minimum, if Congress passed another relief package in January, she could probably survive until late spring or early summer. By then, there probably would be a vaccine and maybe her restaurant would be open? Maybe Disney would hire her back?
There were so many ifs and one certainty that she confronted every time she considered looking for a new job. “I can’t make ends meet on $12 an hour,” she said.
“Have you looked into trade school?” asked Denni Myton, Flaviana’s Ohana friend. Myton was laid off too and was thinking of studying to be a phlebotomy technician or perhaps a dog groomer. Flaviana doubted that she had the time or money to go back to school.
“I have no skills,” she said.
“You’re stronger and better than you give yourself credit for being,” Myton replied.
“Not this time,” Flaviana responded.
Flaviana and her friends often said that they would do anything to get back to Disney and their old jobs at Ohana. If necessary, they would take temporary positions scooping ice cream, handing out popcorn on Main Street USA, sweeping the park. To Flaviana, Disney World embodied the best of the United States. Now she was struggling to accept that both the company and her adopted country — her American Dream — were something less than they had seemed.
“I just hate, hate not being connected to it,” Flaviana said of Disney.
“It’s who you become,” her friend agreed.
“It’s where I belong,” Flaviana replied.
Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
Biography
Greg Jaffe currently covers national security and foreign policy for The Washington Post and is the author, with David Cloud, of the book “The Fourth Star,” about the lives of four Army generals (Abizaid, Petraeus, Casey and Chiarelli) who played key roles in the Iraq war. Since joining The Post in 2009, Jaffe has covered the White House, the military and has worked as part of the paper’s National Enterprise team. He began covering the White House in December 2014.
Before the Post he was a reporter with The Wall Street Journal, where he shared a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for a series on defense spending. Jaffe is a graduate of Williams College in Williamstown, Mass.
His first job in journalism was with the Montgomery Advertiser in Montgomery, Ala. There he co-authored a series on the questionable fundraising tactics of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the nation's wealthiest civil rights charity; the series was a finalist for the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Journalism.
Jaffe grew up in Northern Virginia and lives in Arlington, Va., with his wife and two children.