WAILUA — Five weeks ago, when Geoffrey Otey disappeared from Wailua Beach Park — where he had lived homeless for seven years — residents accustomed to seeing him in his usual spot became concerned. People placed calls to the Mayor’s
WAILUA — Five weeks ago, when Geoffrey Otey disappeared from Wailua Beach Park — where he had lived homeless for seven years — residents accustomed to seeing him in his usual spot became concerned.
People placed calls to the Mayor’s Office and The Garden Island to find out what had happened to him.
Since then, when folks see him shopping at the supermarket, they often stop and ask him why he isn’t at the beach anymore.
“Every other time someone is asking me what happened. But they don’t know I have a house now,” says Otey.
Otey was able to get HUD Section 8 assistance and, thanks to the efforts of his advocate, Trink Martin of Kaua’i Economic Opportunity, he was also able find a rental not far from where he lived before at the beach park.
Otey says he could have gotten housing elsewhere earlier but because he wanted to stay specifically in the Wailua area, it took longer to find a place to live.
He was placed on HUD’s waiting list two years ago.
Before getting help from Martin, Otey wasn’t even familiar with HUD Section 8 and the possibility of getting housing assistance, he says.
Otey says that he has been so busy cleaning and working on his new home that he only has been back to the beach a couple times since his move five weeks ago.
“With more time that goes by, I’ll have more free time, and I will go to the beach,” he says.
When asked if he misses the beach, he replies, “I do miss the beach. I miss the openness to the East, with the ocean — there’s no buildings or nothing like that, it’s all open.” He adds, that having shelter against the rain and cold makes up for all the openness.
“Of course, just because I have shelter now my struggle is not over needless to say,” he says.
But he adds quickly that his outlook at this point is to stop and count his blessings.
“I’ve got a house now. On TV news or radio news every day you hear about somebody having to go to jail or somebody who’s sick enough where they can’t stay at home any more and have to go to the hospital,” Otey says, adding that he doesn’t see himself going to jail or the hospital in the future.
Otey says that he would like to thank KEO for the TV and the kitchen table and chairs they donated to him.
He also thanks Kapa’a Rotary for the stove and refrigerator they gave him for his new home. KEO paid for the deposit on the house, while other individuals gave him other pieces of furniture.
“Frankly, I have never been given so much in my life. I’m 40 something years old and no one has ever given me this much stuff,” he says.
During an interview, Otey is a bit hesitant about sharing too much information.
“I’m not going to volunteer everything because I’m anxious to start living a private life,” he says.
This is opposed to his life on the beach, where he was constantly in public view, he says.
Otey says that getting a home came just in time for him.
“(That’s) because I was running out of time at the beach where I was seen by people 24 hours a day and night.
It was necessary for me to get shelter.” He says that noise from traffic going by the beach park and bad weather kept him up night after night. When it rained he would have to wake up to hold his umbrella.
Lacking enough blankets, Otey was often too cold to sleep during the winter months.
Otey says that while being homeless he didn’t get nearly as much sleep as he does now in his new home.
“Here I’m getting maybe seven hours of sleep a night, which is an incredibly high amount for me. I was sleeping at the beach three or four hours a night and this was for seven years maybe.” He adds that pedestrian traffic was one of the things that really took its toll on his nerves.
Otey says that before coming to Kaua’i and spending seven years on the beach he was homeless in California for a year.
“And it took just about all of those eight years to develop the sensitivity that I have today … to relate to anyone young and old, employed or unemployed and so on.” But he says there were some amazing things that happened while homeless, like the fact he rarely got sick.
“I am amazed at life. Before I was never sick much in my life, and then, eight years homeless pitched a lot at me, pitched a lot of rain at me, pitched a lot of cold weather at me, pitched a lot of people at me any time of the day and night and all that, but I never got hardly sick at all.” He attributes his good health during that time to keeping his thoughts on what he is supposed to do in life.
“Each day you try to live towards what your long range objectives are and some day I hope to be either a doctor or banker,” he says.
Otey says that during those years at the beach, he would think about being in one or the other of those professions.
“I’m not saying the specifics of what it means to take someone’s temperature. I don’t mean specifics like that. I mean what does it mean ethically. I thought of things at the beach like ethics in terms of me as a doctor … how should I properly act.
“And likewise if some day if I became a banker and worked in a bank and a customer of the bank came to my desk for something, what would be my proper behavior.” Things like that stimulated his mind, he says, and helped him stay healthy during his hardships being homeless.
Otey says that over the years of being homeless at the beach he has encountered a lot of opposition from businesses, people in vehicles driving past and from some police officers.
“On the other hand I had a lot of people who supported me,” he says.
Much of that support seems to have come in the form of food.
This was especially true during the holiday season, when, he says, he would be inundated with plates of holiday meals.
“I always responded, ‘Well, whatever items I can use, I will.'” Otey says now that he has a refrigerator, he eats much better. On the beach he says he couldn’t keep food overnight because of rodents.
Otey says people would try to get him to accept food even though he was already full. He says that one Christmas, people stopped by and offered a record 24 plates of food.
“Most of the time I could sense their heart was with the food — they just wanted me to have it,” he says.
Otey says he doesn’t have big plans for this Thanksgiving.
“The time you reach my age, I’m 40 something years old, you sometimes on a big holiday like Thanksgiving and you don’t do one thing special and so that’s why I’m not sure there’ll be anything for me this coming Thursday because I’m still struggling after only five weeks at the house.” It’s likely, however, that Otey won’t have to spend Thanksgiving alone.
Being a veteran of the U.S. Navy, he says that the veteran’s group were planning to do something for him. Martin also invited him to dinner with her family.
But he does add that he may go back to Wailua Beach Park on Thanksgiving day.
“That would be a lovely time to be at the beach,” he says.
