Francine Black, Staff Reporter

Broke, unemployed and given the added task of caring for her schizophrenic, HIV-positive, diabetic mother, Sandy Green* is facing yet another obstacle, that of being evicted.

Green and her mother are now staying in a room belonging to an elderly woman in a central parish, but say they are being evicted and they have no where to go.

Green says she has no more savings and had to quit her job as a live-in helper to go back home to live and care for her mother. She has also used up all of her savings to care for her mom.

She is pleading for help and is worried that her mother will be forced to live on the streets as she used to do. "She is a mental patient. She was sick for years and we couldn't find her because when we were teenagers, we use to live at a church and my sister and I had to go live in a girls home and my little brother live in a boys home," she said.

Constant medication

Her mother who has several illnesses now requires constant medication and a proper diet. But providing these things have been difficult as Green says she cannot afford the cost of buying healthy foods and also of taking her to the various clinics as she should. She noted however that she does make an effort to buy the medication.

Keeping quiet

Even worse is the fact that fear of being discriminated against even more has lead her to keep quiet about the true nature of her mother's illness. "Sometimes she bleed from the anus and the doctor said it was colon cancer, but then when we went to find out if that was so, they say she HIV- positive. If people know that they wouldn't want us around," she said.

She also says that Food for the Poor say they cannot give her a house without some land to put it on, and they have none. Although her mother is married, her husband has pretty much abandoned her since she fell ill, only visiting her once.

Her daughter say they suspect she is 57-year-old and cannot determine her real age as they have no birth certificate.

While a home is the most pressing of their needs, she says she welcomes any form of assistance that can be granted to them. "We don't have a bed, we have some little pans to cook in but that's it, not even sheet we don't' have," she said.

*name changed to protect the identity