Harvard has, in fact, tried numerous efforts to assist Agatha in her current situation, but through it all she has remained resolute in her determination to stay in the Square.
“It’s not the institution deliberately failing her...Harvard is not a place set up to deal with the mentally ill,” explains David P. Illingworth ’71, associate dean of the College.
“She is very strong-willed and resistant to help,” explains HUPD Sgt. Robert Kotowski, who as the department’s community policing team leader for the area has worked with several community groups to get Agatha help.
According to both Agatha and those who have offered her help, her large amount of property has been what has kept her on the streets for so long.
Few shelters have space to take her and all her possessions.
Agatha is a “hoarder,” an individual who accumulates items assiduously, eventually amassing enough to render them practically immobile, according to Len Thomas, the director of Cambridge’s Multi-Service Center.
The bags and boxes around her at the Gate, she explains, contain clothing, books, and sundry other belongings acquired over the years.
Agatha reaches into a plastic Coop bag and fishes out a sheath of photographs. With great care, she lifts each individual picture from the stack and places them, one by one, on top of a heap of clothing.
She pauses at one picture: a statuesque woman in a business suit, looking intently at the camera with mouth slightly upturned in a wry smile.
“That’s me,” she says, smiling proudly. “That’s my nice business clothing. I have so much of that. My pinstripes, my charcoal gray...”
Her voice trails off.
Apart from the soulful brown eyes, there is scarcely any resemblance between the vibrant young woman in the pictures and the woman who now stands outside the Holyoke Gate, shrunken, in her woolen coat.
To all those who have seen her in recent months, it is obvious her health is deteriorating. She has lost weight and moves less smoothly than she once did. The whites of her eyes have grown yellow, her face gaunt.
Worries about her health and the coming cold weather has precipitated revived action by the University.
“In cases like hers, when we begin to truly get worried given the weather and everything else, there is a step up in terms of response,” Thomas says.
HUPD, working with Thomas and other agencies, has arranged a place where she can store her property securely and a new shelter where, people hope, she will be able to live and seek help over the coming months—protected from the cold nights and rainy days that characterize Cambridge winters.
Even as Agatha begins another life transition—one that will bring her back under a roof for the first time in at least a year—she projects the same spirit so evident in the class reports of the last 20 years. While she packs her bags in anticipation for today’s big move, she says, “I’m an independent woman in every sense of the word.”
She says she wants to spend the winter working on her resume, possibly returning to Ghana for Christmas to see her daughter.