In my work as producer for the Just Words series, I’ve come to believe that inner city mothers are the new stoics. I can’t tell you how many times I have asked a mother “How do you deal with all this?” and they just look at me like I am crazy to even imagine that they would take the luxury of considering NOT dealing with it all. I do not know how they do it. Being a mother is hard enough, I imagine. But to be a mother trying to raise a child with drug dealers on the corner,without much money, with the schools in terrible shape and murders on the rise?
That’s what we are going to hear about today. We’re invited three women who have been featured on the Just Words series. Lorraine Mackey lost her son, Aaron Mackey, to gang violence over a year ago. She’s doing everything she can to keep her other son safe, and is trying to pick up the pieces and figure out, what went wrong? Sheilah Cannon’s daughter was caught in gang crossfire while going to pick her little brother up from school, and had to spend months in shock trauma. Now Sheila is doing everything she can to find a place she can afford to move her children to. Nargas Hyman began to worry about her eldest son years ago when she saw him and his friends hanging out after school, with nothing to do. She created an afterschool youth program that she is still running, over a decade later, out of her mother’s basement.
What do these women go through as they struggle to keep their children safe? We’ll find out today. Join us.
To hear Nargas, Sheila, and Lorraine on JUST WORDS, go here.
-Jessica
