Teens living in hotel, working at COVID-19 testing center, move into new home
After two years of living in a single hotel room, a family of seven, including two teens working at a Wake County COVID-19 testing center, moved into a new home Tuesday.
“So immediately is decompression,” said the teens’ mother Amber Adams about moving into the house. “At least (we can) just breathe and feel how it feels to not be worried about where we’re gonna live.”
Lovonte Adams, 17, and Jordan Adams, 15, are students at Broughton Magnet High School. They have been working at Wake County’s free COVID-19 testing sites run by Vero Diagnostics. The founders of Vero Diagnostics Ritesh Shah and Dipesh Shah gifted the teens and their family a year’s worth of rent to live in the house in East Raleigh.
“We just hope even more students get involved in the sciences and help their communities and would love students to come forward who would like to learn about how laboratory testing works,” said Titesh Shah, co-owner of Vero Diagnostics in a Wake County news release. “Hopefully we can inspire them to become scientists or medical and health experts in future and solve real world problems.”
The testing sites are in Black communities where people are dying from COVID-19 at 1.7 times the rate of white people. They are part of a pilot program, STEM Student Community Outreach, Opportunities and Innovation Project (CO-OiP).
The program trains students living in the 27610 ZIP code to be COVID-19 testers. The ZIP code, which includes East Raleigh, Southeast Raleigh and Southeast Wake County, has the most COVID-19 cases in the state.
“You’re helping the community, you’re helping people, and I’m hoping people see what we’re doing and come out and take COVID more seriously,” said Jordan Adams, according to the news release.
Jordan and Lovonte Adams will be moving into the house with their parents and three younger brothers, who are 8 years old, 5 years old and 4 months old.
Amber Adams is looking forward to doing the regular things many people take for granted, like cooking, closing her bedroom door and getting dressed alone.
“I’m sure the boys want some privacy too,” she said.
One of her sons said he wants to bake cookies when they move in.
“We’ve been working, paying and we couldn’t save, of course, because it was so expensive.”
Living in the motel was difficult. “We still got some trauma, we got some issues and scars from living that way,” Adams said. “It wasn’t pretty a lot of times, as you can imagine, everybody being cooped up.”
Adams and her husband cooked to make a living, but lost their jobs during the pandemic. At the hotel, they were paying almost $2,000 a month for the single room, Amber Adams said. They did not have their own linens, cookware or furniture. To fill those needs, The Green Chair Project provided furniture for the family in their new house, the news release stated.
“This is a vision I have dreamed of for a very long time, to be able to give back to our community,” said Diane Powell, executive director of a nonprofit organization called Justice Served, which works with at-risk youth. “It means so much to really see a community come together like this.”
