Helping hands Matthew (left) and Jazmine carry armfuls of donated food home from their school’s ‘Totes of Hope Day.’ (Jeb Harris / Orange County Register)
Every morning, Peggy Monroe scours the skin of her six children for bedbugs. When she finds one, she pinches it until it bursts. The King’s Inn–a cheap motel off East Colfax Avenue in Aurora, CO, where the family has lived for about a year–is infested with the bloodsucking insects. At night, the four oldest children sleep on the floor on thin mats that interlock like puzzle pieces; the two youngest sleep in the queen-size bed with Peggy and their father, Jonathan Jacko. The cat, Barack, sleeps wherever he can find room.
The Monroes are one of two families profiled by The Denver Post for a project on homeless schoolchildren called “Trying to Live, Trying to Learn.” Over the last decade, the number of homeless students in the state more than tripled, from 7,000 to some 23,000. For two and a half months, photographer Joe Amon and reporter Jennifer Brown visited the Monroes every day, observing the kids as they walked a mile along East Colfax to school in the mornings and sitting with the family as they ate dinners of canned spaghetti and soup.
It took a few years to find families that were willing to let Amon and Brown chronicle their lives so intensively. “They have to trust you,” says Amon. To gain that trust, he spends as much time as he can with the families, even when not taking pictures.
Amon grew up poor himself, in western Pennsylvania. He quit high school at 17 to join the Marines, and later worked in a steel mill until it shut down. It wasn’t until he was 28 and saw an ad on TV for the Art Institute of Pittsburgh that he decided to pursue photography. Now, at 55, he holds a coveted position: a job at a daily newspaper that lets him spend months on a single assignment.
Once a project is over, Amon finds it hard to separate himself from the people he’s followed. “It’s a challenge for me, not seeing them anymore,” he says. “It would be pretty cold-hearted to just cut it off.”
Not much has changed for the Monroes since the story came out. They’re still at the King’s Inn. The kids’ school had offered to help the family move to a subsidized apartment, but it was a temporary arrangement, and Peggy declined. She’s holding out for a house.
Christie Chisholm is a CJR senior editor. Follow her on Twitter at @c_chisholm.