Benefits and Doubts; Lynne Duke. The Washington Post Washington, D.C.: Feb 26, 1995. pg. W.12

Most people don't know exactly what welfare is. They just know that they don't like it.

Technically, welfare is a complex of social services that includes Medicaid, food stamps, subsidized housing and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which is the largest cash program involved and the primary topic of the current welfare debate. Politically, welfare has become a symbol of what's wrong with America: To some, this would be the excesses of the welfare state; to others, the absence of compassion in a society that has forgotten its poor.

At the heart of the debate is the welfare mother. She often emerges as a potato-chip-eating, baby-making, drug-addicted teenage mother, or, conversely, an innocent victim of a system that has gone, somehow, terribly wrong.

But who is she, really?

First, she's not the most common recipient of welfare; according to the Department of Health and Human Services, two-thirds of recipients aren't women. They're children.

But she does represent the vast majority of parents who receive welfare. Eighty-nine percent of welfare parents are women.

Her median age is 28 years; only 8 percent of welfare mothers are teenagers. But teenagers who have babies are highly likely at some point to go on the dole: Current and former teenage mothers make up 42 percent of single AFDC mothers.

Most of the time she will go off welfare within two years, though many welfare mothers will cycle on, and off, and on again later.

She doesn't have as many children as you might think; most welfare families -- 73 percent -- consist of one or two children, and the size of the average welfare family has been steadily decreasing.

She can be of any race: About 39 percent of welfare parents are white, 37.2 percent are black and 17.8 percent are Latino.

She probably has some work history, though it may be sporadic or low-wage. She is probably not a substance abuser; most welfare mothers -- 85 percent -- do not have drug or alcohol problems.

She is not getting rich off the system. Welfare barely provides subsistence. The typical AFDC benefit nationally is $367 a month for a family of three, plus a couple of hundred dollars in food stamps. In no state do these benefits reach the poverty line.

She is part of a multitude: Nearly 5 million families -- with 9.5 million children -- receive AFDC.

Yet she is not the source of governmental budget deficits. Far from it. While 14 percent of Americans receive AFDC benefits, AFDC accounts for only 1 percent of federal spending and 2 percent of state spending.

And she is misunderstood. In part that's because the politics of welfare are so emotional and intense, the debate bitter and, often, racially charged.

Despite or perhaps because of this, there is broad consensus among Americans that welfare reform is needed. Polls show that the majority of people want to get tough on adults who receive welfare benefits. Polls also show that the majority of people don't want to do this if it means harming children.

Clearly, welfare reform will happen. Republicans -- now the majority party in both chambers of Congress -- are crafting legislation that would fulfill the goals in the "Contract With America" of placing time limits and work requirements on welfare recipients. The details are still fluid; there's widespread agreement that recipients should be cut off after five years (or after two years if states choose), but there's some debate over whether and how jobs should be guaranteed them. The architects of GOP reform also would refuse aid to unwed mothers under 18; deny increased benefits to welfare mothers of any age who have

additional babies; and give more control of welfare to states. States could open orphanages, for example, or deny welfare benefits to legal immigrants who have not become U.S. citizens.

President Clinton would hand over far less control to the states than Republicans would. But he shares the "two years and out" philosophy: Legislation that Clinton and other moderate Democrats introduced last year would limit welfare to two years but provide public service jobs if a recipient hasn't found work by then. The bill would require teenage mothers receiving aid to live in a parent's home, stay in school and help establish their child's paternity. The Clinton administration (which has yet to introduce a new welfare measure this year) would allow states to refuse additional benefits to welfare recipients who have more children. And it would restrict -- but not cut altogether -- benefits to legal immigrants. Clinton and his Democratic allies also oppose the Republican call for orphanages.

This is the welfare picture in broad strokes. The stories of individual welfare recipients, however, don't always fit the rigid frames designed for them by politicians.

They are stories tied up with complex issues of family failure, education, divorce and nonpayment of child support, health care, drugs and a general inability to cope. They are also simple stories of ordinary people struggling to do the right thing: care for their children, tend a sick relative, go to school.

Here are the stories of five real-life welfare mothers. Patty Lesefske They lived in a town house in Germantown, a cookie-cutter suburban family: husband, wife, two kids. David Lesefske was a Navy veteran who worked as a building engineer and, when jobs were plentiful, earned a good income. Patty Lesefske was a housewife who stayed home and cared for the boys, Brian and Chris.

But the Lesefske marriage was less than ideal, court records show. David's income rose and fell. Patty worked just once, for three months during a Christmas season, at minimum wage. David wanted her to work more. Patty wanted to stay home with the kids. They argued. He drank. They fell behind on the mortgage payments. The house went into foreclosure.

And one August night, six days shy of Chris's fifth birthday, David Lesefske took their youngest son and left. Patty Lesefske woke up to find $10 in the joint bank account. "I was ready to commit murder," she says.

Patty, now 43, was also embarrassed. At first, she didn't tell anyone that her husband had left her. But $10 didn't take you far, even in 1984, and when food ran low Patty told her mother, who had been left by Patty's own father when Patty was a child.

"She brought me groceries. It was just terrible . . . And it dawned on me one day: I've gotta do something. I can't keep relying on my mother." Patty applied for welfare and food stamps. "And we got them right away because we really were in a terrible mess." She also filed for divorce from David, who was shuttling Chris between Virginia, where his sister lived, and New York, where his parents lived, Montgomery County court records show. Meanwhile, Patty and 9-year-old Brian stayed in the Germantown house until foreclosure proceedings forced them to move in with her mother in Fort Washington. A month later, they moved into a subsidized two-bedroom apartment off Sligo Creek Parkway in Silver Spring. It cost Patty only $80 a month. She paid the rent out of her $400 monthly AFDC check. Food stamps were about $100, she recalls.

That same month, April 1985, a Montgomery County Circuit Court judge granted Patty's divorce request and awarded her custody of both boys. The judge ordered David -- whose annual income at the time was about $30,000 -- to pay $500 per month in alimony and $600 in child support. Patty initiated a criminal case accusing her ex-husband of child abduction and had Chris listed as a missing child. One day, police stopped David in Dunkirk, N.Y., because Chris, then almost 6, was standing on the seat of his father's Pontiac Trans Am, head poking through the sunroof. When police ran a check and discovered that Chris was listed as missing, they placed him in a foster home till his mother could get there to recover him.

Patty, a native Washingtonian, struggled to raise her boys on AFDC. They were crowded in the apartment, where they still live

today; the boys had behavior problems in school. And the stigma of welfare made life extra hard.

People view you as "the scum of the earth," she says. She still remembers one sweltering day when she dragged the boys to the Giant so they could help her carry the groceries home. (She had no car, and still doesn't.) She was tired and sweaty and the boys were "really on my last nerve"; at the checkout, the woman behind her started muttering when Patty pulled out a wad of food stamps. "I almost hit her with a gallon of milk," Patty recalls.

Patty Lesefske -- abandoned housewife, high school graduate -- viewed her situation as different from that of many other women on welfare. "I was someone that was forced on to welfare due to my circumstances. I would have never ever in my lifetime imagined myself even being on welfare," she says.

"I never considered myself a welfare person. And please don't think I mean this as prejudiced, but there are some people that you can look at and know that they -- how can I say this without sounding prejudiced? -- that they're a lower class of person. I've never considered myself to be that. I may be low-income, but I'm not of the welfare mentality."

Her feelings about welfare itself are mixed. Some people, she believes, "see nothing wrong with being on welfare." But others "are just someone who's had a bad break in their life. And how many thousands of people are one paycheck away from welfare? Really!"

Patty stayed on welfare for 2 1/2 years. She was able to get off with the help of the Family Independence Program, a voluntary state service available to Maryland welfare recipients. Program staffers counseled her in juggling work, home and school. They trained her in data processing, cared for her kids while she was taking classes, helped her set goals and placed her in a job.

As a result, Patty went off welfare -- and stayed off. For nearly seven years now, Patty has worked in data processing at the National 4-H Club in Bethesda. Her salary is about $18,000, with family medical benefits. Chris, now 15, is a freshman at Montgomery Blair High School. Brian, 19, has been attending

Montgomery College, but money problems may curtail his education. As of last November, David Lesefske's child support and alimony arrearage came to $122,747, court records show. Records show that $1,572.50 was collected from him in 1992, but it is not clear whether he paid that voluntarily or through a garnished payroll or government check. The case has been transferred to Erie County, N.Y., where he once worked and not far from his parents' home. Erie County sheriff's officials have a warrant for his arrest. A woman who answered the phone at his parents' house said the family had no idea where he is.

If the child-support payments had been coming in all these years, tuition troubles "would be a non-issue," says Patty. If the child support had come, "we wouldn't be living in subsidized housing. My children wouldn't be getting free lunches."

Patty is now an advocate of child-support enforcement. She has testified on Capitol Hill. She has coordinated the Montgomery County chapter of the Association for Children for Enforcement of Support Inc., a Toledo-based advocacy group.

"There are two people that bring children into the world and there are two people that are meant to support that child," she says. "But I cannot understand for the life of me how a parent, men and women, can just walk out the door and never look back." Monica Barnes Ask Monica Barnes to describe a good memory from one of the foster homes she grew up in, and she is amazed. "Why would you want a good memory of a group home?"

Perhaps she met a friend there, someone she liked? "You don't have friends in group homes," she corrects. Group homes are places with lots of stealing. "You have to fight. The staff just talks to you any kind of way. I just wouldn't recommend no child going in there."

But Monica didn't have a choice. Her mother, a drug addict, abandoned her when she was 11. The aunt with whom she was left could not take care of her. The Family Division of D.C. Superior Court became her parent; "home," for her, was a series of unhomey places like the District's Receiving Home for Children, therapeutic schools, and foster homes in D.C., Maryland and

Georgia. Monica hated them so much that, when she was 13, she ran away from a group home and broke into a church to sleep.

Back then, Monica sometimes thought of what it would be like to have a baby. It would be a girl, she'd imagine. And this: "If I would have one, she wouldn't go through what I went through."

Monica is 21 now. She has a little girl, named Jaquasha. Jaquasha is 7 months old. Both are new additions to the welfare rolls.

Monica says that's only temporary. She talks of school and training and work. But her actions suggest she isn't sure what she wants to do.

She does read the want ads every Sunday, she says. "But most of the good jobs are in Maryland and Virginia. And I don't have that kind of transportation money. Or they need experience. Like, I look at the receptionists -- you need experience. You gotta know how to type and stuff like that, and I don't know how to type. I had a chance to learn when I was in the receiving home. I had a chance, but I was so angry at the world I didn't want to learn how to do nothing. But I could learn. I have a good memory. If I would have learned, I probably would still know how to type. But I didn't want to learn. I was too angry at the world to learn anything."

Monica, in talking about her life, is sometimes so shy or embarrassed she is barely audible. At other times she exhibits a powerful, articulate sarcasm. She does not discuss her mother easily, or her early life on Ely Place SE.

She will produce a memory of the place in Laurel, where, at 17, she received therapeutic foster care. Of all the public-run homes she's known, "that's the only good one. I liked it . . . Just how they helped you out with problems. Like every week you had to go to therapy. You had to go, like once a month you have to go to some lady, I forgot her name, that played with your mind. She's supposed to see if you have problems. She make you think you have problems. She tries to. It didn't work on me, though . . . She tried to make me think I was crazy . . . asking you questions over and over again."

"I used to make them buy me McDonald's food. That's the only way I'd talk to them . . . They was so pressed for me to talk to them, they would buy the McDonald's food. And I still barely talked to them."

Monica, who attended Weatherless Elementary and Lincoln Junior High schools in the District, received her high school diploma through For Love of Children Inc., a wide-ranging private program for children in the foster care system or with behavioral problems. After that, she spent a year in the District-run Jones & Associates Independent Living Project, receiving stipends and other assistance to make the transition to adult life. She enrolled at Virginia State University in Petersburg in the fall of 1992 but withdrew from all five of her classes. "I didn't like it," she says. She tried the University of the District of Columbia. That didn't hold her interest either, and by then she had become too old for special assistance under court-mandated programs.

Two years ago, when Monica was 19, the court system let her go.

For a while she lived with her father, about whom she will say little except that she did not like living with him. She also lived with a half-sister, but wanted out of there too. "I just wanted to go out on my own. Since I was little, I always wanted to go out on my own."

Ultimately, she was admitted into public housing, was evicted for late rent, moved in with friends and relatives, and moved again.

For several months she stocked shelves at the Kmart in Suitland for $5.25 an hour. Then she worked at a McDonald's in the District for $5.75 an hour. Then she became pregnant. She didn't plan it exactly, but she didn't prevent it either. She and her boyfriend had discussed having a child at some point, and they weren't using birth control.

Monica did not want to go on public assistance, but her boyfriend's income from part-time moving jobs wasn't enough, she says, to sustain them and a baby too. Some older female relatives told her that, given the fact of her pregnancy, welfare seemed her only option. "Get all you can from the government," Monica recalls the women telling her.

She signed up last summer and receives $538, together, in AFDC and food stamps. Monica claims she will be off welfare in a few months. "I'm not gonna be stuck on public assistance. I just keep telling myself that."

Attorney Brenda Smith has taken an interest in Monica since her group home days. Recently, Smith arranged for her to be interviewed for a spot in a two-year transitional program called Conserve. The private, nonprofit program would provide her with educational and job training (including on a computer) and an apartment that would cost 30 percent of her income. An appointment was made for case manager Joi Buford to interview Monica last month.

Monica did not show up; later, she explained that she fell out with her roommate and had to move. The following week, her boyfriend -- who had gone AWOL from the Marine Corps last April to stay with Monica and Jaquasha and avoid a transfer to Japan -- was arrested on a federal desertion warrant. He could face a court-martial.

The next week Monica asked for another chance at Conserve. An interview date was set; she didn't show. She had moved again.

Early this month, Monica made a third appointment with Buford. This time, she kept it. Ana Marie Malong Ana Marie Malong is sobbing. She has had a falling-out with her boyfriend. The goal of finding "the right person" seems, today, remote. She has tried over and over. Has had a number of children as a result. Had birth control but didn't use it consistently. The prospect of pregnancy did not bother her, because "I thought that I could find the right person for me."

Ana, 29, a Filipino immigrant, lives with two of her children in a subsidized house in Rockville. The family receives $373 in AFDC and $270 in food stamps. Ana has been on and off welfare since 1988, the year after she arrived here from Manila. She came to the United States at the request of her mother, to join other family members. In what Ana describes as a strict family headed by a retired Philippine government agronomist, there were 10 children in all. Ana is the youngest girl.

Within two weeks of her arrival in Silver Spring, Ana, then 22, obtained a Social Security number and a green card affirming her status as a permanent resident. Within five months, she was juggling jobs at Wendy's, Hardee's and a Subway Sandwich shop.

At the same time, however, she was pregnant. She is not sure who the father is. Although she had a steady boyfriend at the time, she says she also was raped. She never reported this to the police.

In each of the four years after her son Joshua was born, she became pregnant again. Two pregnancies were aborted. In 1991, she had her daughter, Ana Marie. In 1992, she gave birth again but put the child up for adoption. Relations between Ana and her family grew progressively strained during this time, she says, because of her behavior.

Ana had a tubal ligation after the last child was born. She believes now that her progress has been hampered by her choices in men. She receives no help from Ana Marie's father, although a child support order is in effect.

During this time, Ana cycled between welfare and work, sometimes combining them. After the birth of her daughter, she went back to work part time, receiving reduced AFDC benefits, as the law permits. "I did my best to survive with my kids and myself and be more strong," she says.

But by late 1992, it was all too much for her: In addition to raising her kids and working, Ana (who graduated from high school in the Philippines) was taking daytime classes to prepare for the general equivalency diploma (GED) test. "After school I have to hurry up to go to my job and they're gonna tell me I'm late again . . . My mind is too much -- what do you call it?"

Overwhelmed?

"Yeah. A case worker of mine mentioned to me, `You put too many things in your mind. Don't get overwhelmed.' "

Ana fell behind on her $520 rent and was nearly evicted from her one-bedroom Takoma Park apartment. Her social worker, Janice Jordan Martinez, negotiated terms that would allow her to remain there.

In March 1993, Ana moved to an efficiency apartment. Her rent was sponsored by a church, through a Montgomery County-funded program called Home Start. She had stopped working by then, and hooked up with a state-run training program, Project Independence, to help her study for the GED test. And in February 1994, a team of social workers selected her for the county's Family Self-Sufficiency Program, an array of supports for families showing the potential to make it on their own. Ana studied for the GED test that winter and spring, took it in June 1994 -- and failed.

But that month, she did move into the subsidized house in Rockville. It is a small house with a small yard. Inside, couches are strewn with clothing, papers and toys. Entangled in the carpet are pens, hair ornaments, toy parts, strings, crumbs.

On one recent evening, Ana was watching TV while 6-year-old Joshua was playing with a box of matches, trying to light the gas stove. Ana snatched him away and took the matches; moments later he was standing atop the kitchen counter.

Ana says that investigators from Montgomery County Child Protective Services called her after Ana Marie's preschool notified them of a bruise on the girl's nose and a burn on her leg. No finding of abuse or neglect has been made, and none occurred, she says. She adds that she cooperates with CPS (which does not comment on investigations) by seeing a psychiatrist and attending parenting classes. "As far as I know, I am a good parent. But I need more supervision."

Ana has decided to take a more planned, deliberate approach to life. She could go back to the fast-food jobs and get off welfare, but she thinks it makes more sense to stay on welfare and continue taking classes.

"As far as I know, the government will help you if you make goals on yourself," she says. "If I go back to work, what about my

education? . . . I did that before . . . I don't want to go back in the same situation. I want to go in a more better job."

She is taking the GED preparation course again and will take the test in June. If she passes, she plans to get clerical training. By August 1996, she says, she will be able to kiss welfare goodbye.

Martinez, her former social worker, says that though Ana hasn't broken the welfare cycle, she has made real progress "in the way she is parenting, in her social life, in the discipline and the decisions she is now able to make for herself. These skills are foundational to ultimately getting off of welfare and getting a job."

Ana is only vaguely aware of the welfare reform debate. But she knows that women like her are targets of criticism. She does not feel hurt or insulted, she says, because "I'm not doing anything wrong." Cindy Ann McDonald The phone bill's as thick as a dime-store novel, filled with hundreds of calls -- $2,219.23 worth. That's more than five times the amount of Cindy Ann McDonald's monthly welfare check. It must be a mistake, Cindy says as she places the bill on the sofa, puffs a Newport and stares at the bill, stunned all over again. How could it be so high? She has asked the phone company to investigate. She says she couldn't have made so many calls. Her phone was cut off January 7.

Which, as it happened, was a bad day all around. That's when an ex-boyfriend showed up at Cindy's apartment in Capitol Heights, kicked a hole in the wall, hit her and was arrested for battery.

"It's just like a tornado's touched down and stuff's just flyin'," Cindy says, describing the natural disaster that sometimes is her life.

Cindy, 24, lives with her three children -- Dwayne, 5, Cynethia, 2, and Nathaniel, 18 months -- in a government-subsidized two-bedroom apartment off Central Avenue. How she got here is a long story. She grew up in La Plata, a rural community in southern Maryland, where her youth was what you might call troubled: Clashes with school officials led to numerous suspensions, so numerous that she dropped out of La Plata High and opted for a general equivalency diploma. There was trouble

at home too. Cindy says it stemmed from her family's inability to accept that she was a white girl who liked black people -- as friends, as boyfriends. At 18 she got pregnant by a boyfriend who was black, and the trouble got so bad that she had to leave her parents' house. She is not permitted to come back, her mother confirms.

So she applied for welfare. And received it. Lived in a small apartment in Charles County. Had the baby, a pretty child with doe's eyes. Clerical training through the Project Independence program helped her get off welfare and into a government job in Arlington, but the job was terminated several months later. A dispute with her landlord resulted in eviction from her apartment.

And somewhere along the way, Cindy lost control of her life. "I lived with other people. I sold drugs. I did what I had to survive." She adds: "I never resorted to prostitution."

For two years Cindy and Dwayne drifted from place to place: from the house of acquaintances in Forestville to the Shepherd's Cove homeless shelter in Capitol Heights, to Morris Road SE, Pleasant Street SE, Savannah Street SE, Stanton Road SE -- all in the District -- then out to Landover. There, one night in the fall of 1992, she was inadvertently locked out of the apartment where she rented a room from friends of friends. By then, she'd had Cynethia too and was stuck outdoors with an infant and a toddler.

"It was really cold and I called 911 and I was like, `Look, we don't have anywhere to go and the shelters are full. Can somebody please help me?' . . . So the police officer that showed up transported us to Prince George's Hospital to stay the night in the emergency room so we would at least be warm."

Within days, she had returned to Shepherd's Cove, where social workers got her connected with welfare again. Her benefits started in December 1992. The following March, she was placed in her subsidized apartment. Her life had been stabilized, to an extent.

She gave birth to Nathaniel the next year. Both boys were conceived while she was taking birth control pills, she says. She wasn't using contraception when her daughter was conceived.

And now here she is. The linoleum floor, sagging curtains and torn fake leather couch give Cindy's place a gloomy cast, though it's neatly kept, filled with furniture and kids' colorful toys. The family lives on $405 a month in AFDC benefits, plus $311 in food stamps. Neither the father of Dwayne nor the father of the two other children helps them financially.

Value packs of inexpensive meats and canned vegetables are staples of the family diet. Cindy takes a bus to the supermarket and catches a lift home with a "rider," one of the unofficial taxi drivers who hang around shopping centers where old folks or folks on welfare always need a ride. She picks up items listed on her WIC (women, infants and children) vouchers -- milk, cheese, juice, eggs, dried beans and peanut butter, as well as fresh vegetables, when she can afford them, or cake mixes as a treat for the kids.

The kids' grandmothers sometimes give them clothing. Cindy also takes advantage of sales and secondhand stores. This summer, she says, "I got them each of them two outfits from Kmart. They had them on sale. Sweat suits. They were like $5.99 on sale." Cindy herself often wears the same thing over and over.

She feels trapped where she is now, and agrees there ought to be welfare reform -- aimed at getting and keeping people out of poverty. But it's a complicated process for a single woman with no job, no car, three kids and no family to serve as a financial safety net. In so many ways her life is cheaper with welfare. "I know that if I go to work at $4.25 an hour, 40 hours a week, my rent will go up, my food stamps will go down." What she would like, she says, is a job that would pay enough to cover the increase in expenses. But for now, she says, she is "exercising my common sense."

Though she doesn't work, Cindy is too hyper to sit idle. A budding social advocate, she volunteers with the Maryland Food Committee, which fights for policies to help poor, hungry or homeless families. Mostly it's phone work -- when she has a phone. She helps women get connected to services and speaks to activists and politicians.

She argues that under a reformed system, she should receive subsidies to help pay for rent and day care. It's pointed out to her that some subsidies exist now: Women in job training or school or who are working can qualify for day care vouchers. Cindy says she has found that day care providers don't want to take three subsidized kids; if they will take the kids, she can't afford to make up the difference between the level of the subsidy and what the providers charge. She continues to call around, periodically, to see if things have changed.

For now, the essence of her argument is this: "Until I can find a job that I can afford to work, I can't afford to take the chance of going and losing everything I've got." Wanda Yates The welfare system "is set up to hinder you, and it handicaps you, because once you get involved with {public assistance} you can get comfortable sitting home," says Wanda Yates. "And if you're used to doing it -- I know I have friends that have been doing it for years -- it's a part of your life. You're content sitting home drawing a check once a month, getting free food stamps. You ain't got to worry about paying a babysitter if you don't want to. It's a handicapped system. And I feel that, to me, welfare reform is the best thing to do."

Wanda, 32, is a mother of two who lives in Congress Heights in Southeast Washington. She has worked most of her adult life; she even worked part-time jobs as a student at Ballou High School, a time when her father was away in the Air Force and her mother was home, suffering from kidney problems and undergoing dialysis periodically. After graduating high school Wanda held several clerical and secretarial positions, and she continued working after her first child, Curtis, was born in 1984. (She has not seen her former boyfriend, Curtis's father, for nine years and receives no support from him.)

But her work life was interrupted in 1985, when her mother's kidney ailment worsened. As the oldest daughter among five siblings, Wanda felt a responsibility to be the one to care for her mother, so she quit her job. For about a year, Wanda received AFDC for herself and Curtis.

Wanda's mother died in March 1986. Two months later Wanda went back to work. There was no big miracle to it. Wanda just did

what she knew how to do: "I started calling around to girlfriends: `I need a job, y'all.' "

She found one, at the National Corporation for Housing Partnership, which ran the Congress Park complex where she lives. She stayed in the property management field, later working for Phoenix Management at the Clifton Terrace apartments in Northwest.

In 1991, she had a second child, Tiyonna. The baby's father, with whom she'd had a long-term relationship, soon drifted out of the picture. She continued working -- by this time, she was making $11 an hour -- but within a year Tiyonna developed severe asthma. She had to be taken to Greater Southeast Community Hospital for respiratory therapy sometimes as often as twice a day, three times a week, Wanda says, and she also needed constant home care, which was not covered by Wanda's medical insurance or Medicaid. And, because asthma was not considered a disability, Tiyonna could not qualify for disability coverage provided by Supplemental Security Income, one of several welfare programs.

So Wanda left her job to stay home to care for Tiyonna and received unemployment. A year later, however, when she still could not return to work, Wanda again signed up for AFDC. She received $420 a month from AFDC, $167 in food stamps, and a near-total subsidy for her three-bedroom town house. Wanda said she never did get accustomed to the drop in her monthly cash flow.

"By the 15th, you're broke. You really gotta know how to pinch that $420 to make it, and I'm not used to pinching . . . I'd rather work at McDonald's than get public assistance, because first of all I can't see how no woman on God's earth can live on $420 a month, 'cause that's what you get for two kids. By the time you pay the phone, electric, the rent, and say you got cable, that's basically your check. Where does it come from when you want to dress and look decent? How do you survive on just once-a-month income?"

"Let me tell you how I made it. People in my church would go shopping for me. They would give me care gifts, outfits and stuff,

because they knew what I was going through mentally. I mean I was so depressed."

"And you wonder why people hate this system so much? Honey, it is a migraine headache."

As Tiyonna's condition improved, Wanda felt she could leave her safely with babysitters. So she began to look for work again.

"I have secretarial skills," she said last year. "At some point, somebody's gonna need a receptionist. I know society says that today you need to be skinny with long hair and a fair complexion, and in some cases I believe that, but . . . somebody's gonna hire me at some point regardless of my size, my complexion or the length of my hair. I'm gonna find a job, because I have that determination: I'm not gonna be on public assistance."

Wanda did find a job -- her old job, in fact. Since late last month she has been back at Clifton Terrace, run by what is now One Management. When she was on AFDC and food stamps, she took in $7,044; now she makes $18,000. Tiyonna's father, with whom she has recently reconciled, has gotten a job and contributes to the household.

But at the same time that her income is increasing, Wanda's expenses are going up. When she was on welfare, she paid only $20 in rent; now her rent will likely be 20 times that. And she pays a neighborhood woman about $200 a month to baby-sit Tiyonna. "But what kicks your butt here is the electric. The electric bill runs me over $200 a month!" Her three-bedroom town house has three levels, and everything, including the heat, is electric. Tiyonna and Curtis will be covered by Medicaid for six months from the time Wanda started working, but after that she must get them private medical coverage. That could cost as much as $300 a month.

Still, it is a blessing, says Wanda, to be free of welfare.

She knows of women whose self-confidence is so low or their fortitude so withered that they have given up on the idea of a more independent life. "Ain't no need in me trying to get this job because it ain't gonna do me no good," she has heard women

say. And some use the welfare check to support alcohol and drug habits.

"Drug counseling is needed real bad. A lot of these women, they'll get the check and they're gone. The food stamps, they're sold. I won't buy a person's food stamps because I feel I'm taking from a child. Go give it to the next person, don't come to me. It's sad, because people are vandalizing the system and are making it hard for a lot of us that need it or actually want to do something positive.

"So I say, sure, there should be welfare reform. But it should be set up to help and not hurt. And what they're saying now is gonna hurt . . . It should be set up where you're molded, you're trained and after training you they help you find a job that's comfortable enough where you don't have to come back, and stabilize you.

"But what they gonna do, talking two years and out? If you fail within that two-year period, what happens to you?"