Homeless, 9, and coping with a hard life

updated 12:02 p.m. ET May 9, 2009

PORTLAND, Ore. - At first, 9-year-old Brehanna didn't seem to understand.

Her family was being evicted from their home in Tualatin, a Portland suburb. Her father, Joe Ledesma, a homebuilder for 20 years, was without a job and couldn't find another. He couldn't pay the $800 rent on the three-bedroom house where he, his wife Heidi and daughter lived.

And he couldn't get through to Brehanna as they packed the family's navy blue 1986 Pontiac Firebird that she would not be able to bring her bed. She would not be able to bring every toy or trinket, or that checkered desk she had spent hours painting and sanding, either.

She wanted to bring it all to the next place, she told her dad as she stood in her bedroom filled with packed bags. But the Ledesmas had no new place to go this time.

"I was trying to explain to her there were some things we could take," Joe said, "and some things we were going to have to leave behind."

That was in December, when Brehanna joined the unhappy ranks of American children who experience homelessness — a group that includes one child out of every 50 in America, according to the National Center on Family Homelessness.

In the months that followed, the Ledesmas stayed with relatives and lived in shelters and churches as they tried to regain their financial footing — or at least to stay afloat.

Joe spends most days searching for jobs. Heidi, who at 42 is disabled because of severe arthritis in her ankles, shuffles her feet and limps as she tends to domestic duties. She cooks for her family — not in a home, but in the crowded kitchen of an east Portland homeless center.

"I never thought this would happen to us," she says. "Not in a million years."

Brehanna — affectionate and playful — has transferred to a new school, one that caters to students who are homeless or in transition.

She remains in many ways a fourth-grader like any other. She sports Hannah Montana sneakers, swings on monkey bars and ties her long, brown hair in ponytails. She boasts she can read as well as an average sixth-grader.

But she has lost some of her innocence. She understands her circumstances, and she can speak frankly in her soft voice about how her family gets by.

"We are having a hard time paying rent," she tells her reading teacher Mary Weller. She yawned and coughed, battling the second cold she has caught in less than a month at the shelter.

"But if you want to pay rent and you need to get money you can donate blood," she says. "My dad does that."

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