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Poor women hear from one who knows With help, speaker turned life around By DAVID PRESZLER It was just one of countless difficult trips to the power company Donna Beegle had already made by age 25. Beegle She was trying to get the power switched back on after another stretch of utility bills the single mother of two couldn't pay. And when a woman working there told her about a program designed to help people like her, Beegle thought she got the message: One more person who didn't know a thing about being poor offering hollow advice. She called anyway. And when a program worker mentioned that the three-week class would make her eligible for low-income housing assistance, Beegle decided to go. She didn't buy into the program's pitch of "changing her life," but after a life of evictions, a chance to keep a roof over her children's heads was just too good to pass up. "But I found something that I didn't expect -- people who honestly cared," she said. More than a decade later, Beegle wants to be one of those people and help struggling women find the help they need to turn their lives around. She certainly has, going from a teen mother who dropped out of high school to the holder of a master's degree in communications who is now finishing the final two chapters of her doctoral dissertation. Beegle, 38, spoke to a group of about 50 women Monday at a conference for women in poverty at the Smullin Center. Her presentation was followed by workshops on resources that are out there to help them. "It never ceases to amaze me how impressive you all are," she told the group of women, many of whom were young mothers. "And that's the thing we need to realize, how impressive we are. "You are great and amazing. It's amazing how you are able to cope each day with all the things in your life." Beegle knows a few things about coping. All five of her brothers have served time in jail, as have all her uncles. And when she was a child, if the police weren't arresting her relatives, they were evicting her family from another home. With no money for garbage service, she remembers the rats in the walls and the night one raced across her chest. "Food stamp day would come and it would be like Christmas," she said, recalling the joy of actually filling a shopping cart, even if she and her siblings scattered when their mother reached the register so no one would see them paying with food stamps. She dropped out of Portland's Marshall High School at 15 to get married and have children -- following the only path she'd seen women take. Her first child, a daughter she named Joyce Marie, was born early -- weighing 1 pound, 9 ounces -- and died nine hours later. She eventually had two children, but her marriage ended and she couldn't escape the poverty she'd always known. That is, until she learned things didn't have to be that way and that there were people who cared enough to help her. She said she spent years feeling ashamed and convinced that people didn't really care. She told a story about traveling through a town when her father ran out of gas with a car full of six children, no money and no food. When a local church gave them groceries and a tank of gas, she assumed it was just to get them out of their town. It wasn't until she wrote about the incident in college -- and her professor pointed it out -- that she realized the church may have genuinely wanted to help. She first glimpsed that willingness to help during the three-week program she heard about at the power company. She learned that jobs didn't have to be low-paying and unfulfilling -- which was the only kind of work people she knew had ever had. Workers helped her develop a vision for her future and lay out the baby steps it would take to get there, even going so far as go with her to a community college to see her through the admission process. And they gave her a support network, even after the program ended. "It was really important to here they say, `We'll be here,"' she said. Building from that base, she worked to earn her general education degree, a two-year college degree, a four-year college degree, a master's and complete the bulk of her doctorate while raising her two children. On Monday, she encouraged the women in the audience to take the chance she took, to seek the help that's out there and the people whose support they'll need to overcome the challenges in their lives. She urged them to realize that, with help, they have the power to change their lives. "Get your needs met," she said. "That takes you believing that you deserve to be treated with respect and you deserve to get your needs met." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA