I've always loved the principles and ideas behind Habitat for Humanity. If I could actually hit a nail I aimed at I'd work with them. Until now.
When I was working in a local hospital a couple of years ago there was a patient care assistant working on my floor. She was 46 years old. Single. She made more than most of the others did because she was "permanent". The others were mostly nursing students working their way through school, taking classes and working every weekend. (Probably a bit over $10.00 and hour or so).
Sorriest woman I ever met. She'd brag about her $200 braids and weaves and stayed in trouble about her three inch fake nails all the time. She refused to remove them because they cost so much to have done.
We could never find her to help a patient, she was always in a breakroom, a comatose patient's room on their phone or stirring trouble. We started noticing that family members would arrive to see their patient after work and would come to the nurses station wondering why their mother/father hadn't been bathed YET AGAIN that day. It was always when this particular one was theoretically working. I started paying close attention. She'd go into the room of a sick person and say, "You don't want a bath do you?" So I wrote her up. Her excuse? She wasn't going to "cater" to those old "white people". Because, as she put it (in a meeting with supervisors, no less), "the days of the field N***** are over".
When the patient census is low sometimes nurses and aids have to "float" to other floors to work. Not her. She'd get sick and go home. She never worked a minute over time, she never came in for another shift. Ever. We couldn't get her off the computer at the nurses station many times because she was "booking her cruise". Took three -four a year.
Guess what. I saw the local paper today with an article about Habitat for Humanity building a house for a local woman. There SHE was. Tickled pink. Grinning through her gold toof. Low down, sorry, no kids, no over time, 4 cruise a year, braided $200 hair cut and all...getting a new house so she could "decorate it like she wanted to without no landlord telling me what I can and cannot do".
Disgusting.
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