EPISODE 50
"JUST
WORDS"

Welcome to JUST WORDS.  The stories of working people in our community.

I'm Marc Steiner

November 22, 2007

It’s a hassle. I learn how to manage my money though, it’s not easy. I got two kids, I got to pay my rent, we gotta eat, they need this, and they need that. I kind of like…I don’t even know, but I have been doing it. I can’t even really tell you how; I can’t, because I have been doing it. I have been maintaining. It’s hard though, you always have to give up something and go without. Basically it always be me that lose out on something. I am always the one who comes up short, so I learn how to deal with that.

That’s Corrine, a 25 year old single mother of two, talking about how she raises her family on around 300 dollars a week. She works in the kitchen at a nursing home company called Manor Care. Her daily routine can be exhausting.

My daughter has to be at school at 7:45 so I am up at 7 trying to get her up. My son goes to daycare when my daughter goes to school so they leave at the same time. I’m scheduled 11:30-7:30, so I prepare the meals for dinner time. half the time when I get to work somebody not there, so we have to help the people who are serving lunch. So we do lunch. After that, I have to do dinner. We serve dinner at four thirty. Take about an hour. We not allowed to feed the patients so we have to wait for the nursing assistants to feed them and bring the trays back for us to clean. And a lot of times, here lately I have to help them, because there are not enough people there. So we pretty much have to help each other out the best we can, because we get off before the nurses get off. The kitchen closes at 7:30, they there until 11. so if we want to get out at 7:30 we have to help them with what they got to do as far as feeding patients and getting the trays out. And then, that is pretty much. I’m ready to go to bed before I even get off. I am ready to go to bed.

But Corrine can’t go to bed yet. She wants to spend time with her seven year old girl and one year old boy first. She regrets that they spent most of the day in day care.

Actually I would rather be home raising my kids. If I could do that and still have money, I would do it. I would really raise my own kids, because she kind of has them more than I do, if you think about it. Because I work every other weekend—every other weekend, I am at work.

But not working is not an option for Corrine. Neither is working less hours. She needs every bit of her hourly wage of $9.85. And she doesn’t know how secure her job is in the future. The company she works for is being sold to another company and Corrine is worried this could mean cuts in staff and supplies. All this uncertainty has her thinking hard about the future.

I am going to have my GED by the end of next year. I will be finished that and working on something else. Working, taking care of my kids, providing. Get a better paying job, you don’t have to work so much, make a little bit more money, ill be able to spend more time with them then. That would be good.

Just words is a production of the Center for Emerging Media, produced by Jessica Phillips, through a grant from OSI-Baltimore: investing in solutions to Baltimore’s toughest problems, with audacious thinking for lasting change, on the web at OSI-Baltimore.org.
Visit JUST WORDS on the web at centerforemergingmedia.org, or
email us, at justwords@wypr.org

Music: Pinback, Loro