Kelly Kenoyer
Louis Carreiro was one of the first local homeless individuals to shelter by the Nazarene church last March.
He’s been sticking around with his service dog Diamond, a Labrador and bull mastiff mix.
“I do the best I can to keep it as clean around here as possible and keep all the riffraff and whatnot away,” Carreiro said of the church grounds.
Carreiro, age 56, has been homeless for over 20 years. His blond hair peeks out below his trucker hat, obscuring his ears, and a grey beard and glasses grace his lined face. He’s a thin, suntanned man, worn by the struggles of life, but he holds himself with pride and excellent posture. He rides around town on a bike, towing a trailer, often with Diamond running alongside, usually trailing a leash.
“I don’t feel that I owe anybody nothing,” Carreiro said of his homelessness. “I can do what I want, when I want, where I want, how I want and to whom I want. So long as I keep it within the law and treat people with respect.”
He’s been in Sweet Home for six years, and has only been housed for a month or two at a time, when he lives with friends. Living without housing can be extremely challenging, he said, “but that’s life.” He actually prefers the freedom of not living in a house, he said.
Carreiro said he spends his days seeking work by holding up a cardboard sign. “I’ve gotten a few jobs, not as many as I would like to get.” In the past, he has worked as a cook, and he said he aspires to go back to school for culinary arts so he can continue in that career.
“I started when I was 14, so there’s not much I don’t know how to cook,” he said.
He also wants to get into housing and on disability with the help of homeless advocates so he can provide a home for Diamond.
He said the main challenge is not having anywhere to leave his dog while he’s working. Another challenge is not having an ID, because he can’t get a steady job without one. He has an advocate, Rachel Lytle from Linn County Public Health, who keeps his birth certificate and helps him navigate things like getting an ID card.
“I’m stepping up, slow but sure,” he said.
Lytle said Carreiro and other homeless people in the community need help developing life skills after spending decades, or even their entire lives, in the streets. “They don’t know how to live,” she said. “They don’t know how to talk to a receptionist on the phone.”
The church of Nazarene has been a big help for Carreiro.
“It has helped a lot to be able to stay here at night,” he said. “I have the permission to be here, so I don’t have the po-po rolling up here to tell me to move at 1 a.m. or 2 a.m.” Carreiro said he used to get chased away from where he was sleeping two or three times a week before he came to the Church of Nazarene.
“It’s very frustrating.”
Carreiro’s advocate sometimes watches his dog for him when he goes to doctor appointments and the like. Recently, though, his life changed significantly when Diamond got pregnant.
Carreiro watched for weeks as her belly swelled, excited by the prospect of being a grandfather to a litter of puppies. Nazarene Pastor Bethanie Young cleared out a shed by her house to serve as a maternity ward, and Carreiro set up a cot outside the door to keep watch.
An acquaintance of Carreiro, 80-year-old Air Force veteran Jim Elkin, said he’s been impressed by the man’s commitment to taking care of his own dog.
“He’s pretty pragmatic, but it interests me how adamant he is about wanting to pay for his dog and to take care of his dog,” he said.
Elkin got to know Carreiro after giving him his beer cans at the Safeway, preferring not to give cash directly to the homeless.
“It seemed a good way to lessen the evil of alcohol,” he chuckled.
When Elkin found out about Diamond’s pregnancy, he decided to help Carreiro with vet bills. The veterinarian told them an X-ray to get a count for the puppies would be a good idea, but it would cost $184.
“I told him that $184 is really stretching the budget I have for this,” Elkin said. “He said he can come up with the rest.”
Elkin said he was surprised by Carreiro’s confidence and determination.
“He said, ‘It’ll take me a couple days but I can do that.’ He gave me $60 to hold onto for her care.”
They scheduled the appointment for Friday, Aug. 28, but didn’t end up needing the appointment.
On Monday, Aug. 24, Diamond gave birth to 12 puppies, ranging from black and white to brindle to pure white. The father of the puppies is a border collie mix belonging to another camper who stays on the property.
“I’m damn proud,” Carreiro said on the day Diamond gave birth.
He’s determined to keep her and the puppies safe and healthy for the next six weeks before the puppies can get their first set of shots.
“No one is allowed to touch them but me,” he said. “I already told the priest (Young), ‘Nobody’s hanging out. They can come look and disappear. Nobody is playing with none of them.'”
The veterinarian told him that’s the best way to go about it until the pups get a Parvo vaccine, he said.
To Lytle, the litter is a big motivator to get Carreiro interested in a more stable lifestyle. “When I first talked to Louis, he didn’t want his own apartment; he wanted to live on the street,” she said. Now he wants to have a permanent residence so he can take better care of Diamond.
It helps the homeless to have advocates like her and relationships with members of the community, she added.
“The building of those relationships with those people are the most important thing you can do to motivate change.”
Carreiro said every single one of the puppies is beautiful.
The pure white puppy is the one he’s chosen to keep from the litter, and he’ll name her Ruby for her pink nose.
Now he’s focused on getting Diamond spayed and getting all the puppies their shots. He expects it’ll cost well over $200 to take care of all those expenses, and he hopes to make some of that money by letting prospective pet owners pay for a hold on a puppy once they’re old enough to wean.
“I just want the babies to go someplace where I’ll know they’re taken care of,” he said.
Pointing to Diamond, panting nearby in the summer heat, he said simply, “This is my daughter, so they are my grandchildren.”
Elkin said he’s still holding onto the $60 Carreiro gave him for the vet, “and I put $60 with it.”
Though he’s never given cash to someone on the streets before, Elkin thinks this is a worthy cause.
“I liked the way he was talking about how he wants to take care of himself,” he said. “Last time I saw him, a couple weeks ago, he said he’d sold all but three puppies.”
Carreiro said he wants to sell the puppies for $100 to $200 apiece, because he’s certain they’ll be whip-smart. He’d rather keep them all himself if he had a big farm for them, but he knows that’s not an option.
Lytle plans to help Carreiro get veterinary care for Diamond and her litter. “Next time I see him, we will call the Humane Society and ask them about how to go about getting her spayed and for the puppies to get shots,” she said.
“I will most likely drive him there with the dog and drive him back, if that’s what he needs.”
Elkin just wants to see a stable future for Carreiro. “I hope he finds somebody to take him on, you know. To keep care of the grounds at Wiley Creek or something, anything to put some beans on the table.”
He sees Diamond’s litter as a possible turning point for her owner.
“Maybe this will be a good, good thing, that this responsibility makes a change in behavior.”
Elkin also wondered whether a shelter could go up in Sweet Home for people like Carreiro.
“Instead of giving money to individuals, you know, pool it and build a big six-bedroom house or take over an old farmhouse,” he said. “I just wish we could take care of our people.”
For her part, Lytle thinks a life skills development facility would be one of the best things Sweet Home could do for its homeless population – a place to learn how to make phone calls, to help help filling out forms, to take a shower before heading into work for a shift.
“We have to take responsibility for this problem at some point or it’s just going to get worse,” she said. “There’s very limited resources and they have a huge homeless population for the size of the city.”