SARASOTA, Fla. - College graduation is a routine rite of passage for many students. For Shawna Machado, it's the next step in a long, challenging road.
“I struggled from retail job to retail job,” Machado, 40, says, before landing what she hoped was more stable work in a medical office. Four years ago, she got her GED and began college. She planned to go part-time as she continued to work.
The plan changed when she lost a job she had had for seven years in May 2010. Four months later, severance exhausted and still jobless, she could no longer afford her apartment, “at which point I got rid of everything, gave it away,” she says.
Now her little gray Hyundai holds everything she owns. At night, she parks at Walmarts – because they're open 24 hours – but skips around to different ones to avoid notice. During days, she catches naps on the beach. “I don't look the stereotypical homeless person,” she says. “So I'm never questioned.”
Though Shawna had lost her home, she still had her student loans. So she stayed in school, even while living out of her car. “I just continued because I wasn't getting a job,” she says.
Some of her professors knew that Shawna was homeless, but she did not go out of her way to tell them, because she did not want to be treated differently from her classmates. She completed college with a degree in psychology, and the school named her its outstanding graduate for 2012. She wants her story to inspire others, but some days still must inspire herself.
“I have days where I say, 'I am done. I can't do it any more. I quit. Mercy,'” she says. “I have those days.” But she believes better days will come. A job doing social work. A day at the beach that really is a day at the beach. And what should be a routine rite of passage for college graduates – living in a home of her own.
Shawna does fear that being homeless could count against her as she looks for work, but says that sharing her story could set an example for someone else to succeed.
“It's worth it in the end,” she says.
Homeless woman graduates from USF - WWSB ABC 7 MySuncoast Florida
