Word: mandelas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Mothers at Mandela House have more than addiction in common. They're mostly poor and black. All have other children in family and foster homes. Beatings by boyfriends and husbands were regular. What brought their world crashing down was an out-of-control lust for the intense feelings of power and well- being that flow from a hit of crack. "Crack has taken away these women's pride," says Thomas. "By the time they find their way here, they'll beg, steal and trade their bodies to the dope man for more." The mothers uneasily deny that their babies were...
Thomas' rules are as unforgiving as the deadly streets of East Oakland. Drugs, violence and profanity are outlawed. Mothers cannot leave the Mandela House grounds during their first 30 days; trips to doctors' appointments or court dates must be made with Thomas or one of her small staff. Residents are randomly tested for drugs. Eventually, women can earn short leaves, phone calls and family visits. School and jobs follow when the resident and Thomas agree it's time...
...have a lifetime of experience to overcome. Rodgers' earliest childhood memory was watching her heroin-addict mother stick a needle in her arm. Until recently, Rodgers was lost in a haze of cocaine smoke and subsisted on leftovers pilfered from a fast-food restaurant. Now she sits in the Mandela House kitchen, which is rich with the smell of baking meat loaf...
Several women have been expelled or have bolted from Mandela House. One was a mother whose legs Thomas held in the hospital all night while she was giving birth. Two weeks later, the woman suddenly left with her baby. "I felt like I'd been kicked in the stomach," Thomas says. "For the first time, I cried...
...Mandela House has more than 60 women waiting to take Gray's place. The task is monumental, but Thomas perseveres even when mothers she loves desert her and return to the seductive glow of the crack pipe. "If they don't hear me now, they'll hear me later," she says. "Some will leave, start smoking rocks again and sink back to the gutter. But even when they're down there, they'll keep hearing Minnie. And they'll be back." It is a blessing that Minnie Thomas will be waiting...