Word: mahone
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...families earn less than $12,800 a year, and 19% are on welfare. More than one-third of the Northside's 13,500 residents are women able to bear children, but until last year, no one had mounted a committed effort to prevent unnecessary infant deaths. Then Joan Mahon appeared...
...first, the people surveyed the community-health nurse with suspicion. But soon Mahon, blessed with a quick smile and caring eyes, gained converts to a program called De Madres a Madres -- from mothers to mothers. Her grass-roots scheme, hatched with a colleague from Texas Woman's University and underwritten by the March of Dimes, calls for training mothers from the barrio to reach out to the ghetto's endangered women. Texas mothers, particularly Hispanics, are among the least likely in the U.S. to receive early prenatal care. So Mahon has been arming volunteer moms with information to help them...
Like a cop on a beat, Mahon patrols the Northside, stopping to chat with anyone who will return her smile. At the Fiesta Mart, the noisy, pinata- bedecked hub of the neighborhood, Mahon stops to urge a security guard to bring his wife to a Madres meeting. Then she walks over to Edith Espinoza, who is wrapping food under a blinking red neon light trumpeting FRESH TORTILLAS. Espinoza, about eight months pregnant, knows Mahon but doesn't know English. So, with some help from the store manager, she informs Mahon that she is going to the hospital the next...
Almost every Monday, Mahon and several mothers stake out a small brick bungalow across the street from Holy Name Catholic Church, where about 180 families wait in line for bags of food. Babies chugging from bottles lounge in shopping carts, while toddlers diligently pile pebbles in the driveway. Mothers and a few fathers stand stoically in the warm sun, their blank stares reflecting hunger, poverty and fatigue. Yet their ennui dissolves in the face of the Madres' perky compassion...