By Regina Holmes

A pregnant woman wakes up on the floor of a dark, boarded-up house, lying on a thin blanket with a coat covering her swollen belly. She gets up and steps around feces and condoms, and tries to figure out how to start her day. She walks a mile in the cold to an office where she is greeted — perhaps with a hug — then given food and a hot drink. She stays there all day, fills out lots of forms to get help: a place to live; drug treatment for her crack addiction; a job so she won’t have to keep selling her body to strangers just to eat.

But at the end of the day, despite their best efforts, the staff regretfully informs her she has nowhere to go.

“We called around everywhere…the governor’s office, the mayor’s office…no one could find a place for her,” said Jacqueline Robarge, executive director of Power Inside, an advocacy group for women in Baltimore. The organization helps women who have recently been released from jail and works to prevent them from returning. Despite explaining the woman’s precarious predicament to numerous people, “No one could find a place for her,” Robarge said.

The woman leaves and comes back the next day, and the next day after that. Finally, a month later, Power Inside found help for the pregnant woman, whom Robarge praised for her persistence and determination to change her situation. The woman eventually secured a place to live and went on to have a healthy baby. She was lucky, Robarge said, pointing out that another one of her clients wasn’t as fortunate: she was recently killed.