By Rita McInerney

Adrian Dominican Sister Mary Jane Lubinski came to Atlanta in January, 1988, with skills “finely tuned to advocacy” and a need to help people with AIDS.

Today she is a paralegal with the AIDS Legal Project of the Atlanta Legal Aid Society. Here she helps people who have tested HIV positive find access to income and health care. Her clients run the gamut, she says, from those who made $30,000 to $40,000 annually to drug users who have never worked.

She’s worked with middle-class white suburbanites. With one family she’s seen the mother buried, the father growing sicker, but caring for their HIV-infected baby. “We’ve gotten them help along the way.”

A note from one client travels in her briefcase. Before showing it to a visitor she folds the ruled paper carefully to conceal his name. Semiliterate, he had worked as a school janitor for 17 years. He came to the AIDS Legal Project after being fired and she helped him obtain Social Security. The note speaks his gratitude in few words. It speaks volumes to Sister Mary Jane.

Sometimes her clients are gifts. There was the man blinded by AIDS whose total trust she felt as she took his arm to guide him. When he thanked her for arranging guardianship she told him, “You have ministered to me today.”

Working with PWAs has “taught me how sacred life is,” the Dominican sister says. “You have to treasure every moment, live for today. I’m totally present because this is all we have, this time now.”

Her work with the dying makes her sharply aware. “If you love someone, you tell them. If you have a disagreement, you settle it. This is the broken body of Christ.”

She sees people wherever they need to be seen, in the office, in their homes. She spends every Friday at Grady Hospital where she “hangs out her shingle” in the infectious disease clinic. “They come to me. They have to sit there and wait a couple of hours. It’s easier for them to see me there than to come to the office.”

One Grady social worker asked her to help a man who “lives in the woods.” She gave him her card and tried to impress on him that she had to know “what tree I can find you under.” Twice the 53-year-old man has wandered away from the personal care home the Grady people placed him in. The second time this happened he was to go to court with her. She had to go alone and request a postponement on his scheduled hearing for benefits. She persists in maintaining contact with this PWA who shuns society.

Father Alan Dillmann, who visits Grady three times a week as chaplain to AIDS patients, refers quite a few to Sister Mary Jane. “She does an outstanding job dealing with the intricacies of bureaucracy. She’s very persistent. If she’s turned down on the first round, she’ll set up an appeal. I know that for a fact.”

Tom Beltramba knew her from Tuesday Night at the Shrine. He’s volunteered at the dinner for PWAs for three years. She regularly serves and does dishes.

She began to help him after he lost his job as an operating room nurse at a mid-city hospital. This was after hospitalization and tests showing him HIV positive. He was one week away from finishing his probationary period and becoming eligible for health insurance. The firing came in a telephone call. “Some of the nurses and doctors went together and tried to get my job back,” he says. They failed.

When disaster hit, he went from enjoying a midlevel income to no income. Sister Mary Jane was able to speed SSI payments because he was classified as having a terminal illness. Approval took three months instead of the usual six months or more.

“She’s always available. Her office has been a God sent” Beltramba says. On the personal side, “She helps you calm down, get over your fears and anxieties.”

Why does she choose to work with PWAs? She refers to Matthew’s Gospel, where “Christ calls us to minister, to work with those on the margins and fringes. In his ministry that’s where he spent his time.”

She is nourished for the daily heartbreak of her advocacy work by love of the Gospel and her prayer life. She recalls the pastoral letter issued in March, 1990, by Archbishop Eugene Marino, which called Catholics of the Atlanta archdiocese to respond to the tragedy of AIDS.

There can be “no questions or judgements. These are our brothers and sister,” she insisted.

They are the people “who fall through the cracks” and are too sick to work. Her job is to help them get Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, food stamps. She helps mothers with AIDS retain control of their children or select a guardian for the time they grow too sick to continue.

She battles the military and the government for veterans infected by AIDS. She’s an advocate at present for a Navy veteran who served eight years. He needs more to live on than the $80 a month the government has ruled he’s entitled to.

“You’ve got people who have worked hard. Now they’re sick and the government turns them down.” They come away, she knows, with an added hurt, believing that the authorities “think I’m lying.”

“Fortunately the government is beginning to realize it’s dealing with people who won’t live much longer. They’re looking at these cases as terminal. In some cases the people die before they get a penny. It could take up to a year and a half,” to get their benefits.

She’s beginning to have a higher success rate with the Social Security Administration’s office of hearing and appeals.

“Fewer and fewer (cases) go to hearings because everybody is getting smarter.” She notices when people know someone who’s been infected, or work in an office where a co-worker has died of AIDS, they become more compassionate.

Sister Mary Jane came to Atlanta from Lebanon, Va., where she was a paralegal in a seven-county area of Appalachia. She knew if she wanted to help people with AIDS she had to go where the population was.

At first she worked with AID Atlanta. Then, she and attorney Chip Rowan convinced Atlanta Legal Aid of the need for the AIDS Legal Project. Funding came from the Metropolitan Community Foundation and the city of Atlanta. The staff also includes a full-time attorney, two part-time attorneys and a program administrator. Volunteer attorneys and paralegals help when needed.