“Welfare reform is going to force me into a position where I will basically have to quit school and take on a low-paying job, keeping me locked in the cycle of poverty.”

It Feels Like Glory

Rhonda Manada was born into the culture of welfare in the inner city of Los Angeles, California. Early childhood daydreams were shrouded in boulevards of boarded-up crack houses, defunct churches and liquor stores. As a young adult she had many plans of escaping her bleak circumstances, but there were obstacles in her life keeping dreams just slightly out of reach.

     “Feeling a tiny heart beat against my chest brought my dreams back to life,” Rhonda recalls. “The birth of my son Levon compelled me to start thinking beyond just day-to-day existence.” For the young couple with a new baby, leaving behind the hazy avenues of Watts was the first major step. Her arms swing out wide to illustrate the distance of the three-hundred-mile move north to the Monterey Bay. She laments, “The pressure of supporting a family began to manifest itself in our relationship. This guy really put me down. Not hit me physically, but mentally and emotionally beat me up.” Rhonda overlooked the abuse and kept a positive attitude. “In spite of my troubles, I felt like I was still moving forward,” she said. “I had managed to elude the trappings of a vicious family cycle.”

     Her sacrificed emotions bought the relationship more time, but eventually her significant other decided to return to L.A. Rhonda winces and says, “That’s what was hard. My mom and six sisters were all down there. I made the decision to stay here. I just felt that I needed to stay. It was for me and for my son.”

     Only weeks later she was unable to pay rent. Home became the local shelter filled with men with worn leather faces, and women with tired dreamless eyes. Using her fingers like pliers, Rhonda pinches her nose recalling the stale odor of alcohol, tobacco and dirty clothes. She says, “Although the shelter was clean, I knew I just couldn’t stay there for very long. I needed some sort of money, like immediately, to get things going again. And welfare was the only thing I knew at the time.” She sighs, and says, “The old trap was sprung and I was caught up in it.

     “It wasn’t like I hadn’t tried to get work, but I was considered underskilled.” She stood in lines for hours on end and signed miles of paperwork. This produced only minimum pay dead-end jobs. “I still didn’t have any better skills. I still didn’t have any better education. So here I’d be on this $5.00 an hour job working long hours and still not making any money. I was considered to be living in poverty.”

     “It was humiliating but a real eye opener,” she says, clasping her hands together. “The shelter ended up being kind of a blessing, because I met people there who steered me back to college. That was where I discovered women’s programs and EOPS. People were very willing to help.” She reaches down and pulls out a few stapled slips of gray paper from her purse and excitedly waves them back and forth like victory banners. “I was on the honor roll three times,” she says. “I’ve gotten all A’s in my classes. School has been just wonderful for me. I keep discovering more and more about who I am. When my relationship ended, my self-esteem was really low, then I come up here and start getting A’s in all my work. It feels like glory.”

     The current welfare reform issues are jeopardizing Rhonda’s recent success. “My biggest fear,” she says, “is getting cut off and side-tracked before I can attain my goals of a higher education degree. It would steer me off course. I have come to realize that college is the only way to empower myself and take some control back over my life, especially with my son depending on me for support. No matter what,” she says, banging both hands on the pile of books in front of her, “I plan on totally going the whole nine yards with my education. A Masters degree, you know, and ultimately a Doctorate. I’ve found something here that I can feel good about, something constructive and positive. I’m not about to let that go.”

The stay at the shelter led Rhonda back to the welfare existence she had escaped in L.A., but ironically it also turned out to be the passageway to her present day success.