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By Priscilla Greear, Staff Writer
ATLANTA—God’s call to Sister Mary Jane Lubinski, OP, has
joyfully carried her from advocating for the disabled poor in a quiet town in
Appalachia to founding HIV/AIDS programs in Atlanta and now to Kenya where she
will serve the multiplying numbers of those with the virus.
The 52-year-old Adrian Dominican nun born in Detroit enjoys caring
for those on the edge, those most in crisis. After realizing the problems that
people with HIV/AIDS have in finding and maintaining quality, affordable
housing, Sister Lubinski founded Living Room in Atlanta in 1995, which provides
housing assistance, information and referrals to low-income persons who are
homeless or at risk of becoming homeless due to the illness.
Saying goodbye to clients and co-workers, she left Atlanta Sept.
27 to begin cross-cultural training for her work before traveling to Africa,
the worst affected continent where nearly 34 million have the AIDS virus. A
farewell party was held for her Sept. 17 at the Shrine of the Immaculate
Conception, Atlanta, her parish and one of several churches that support Living
Room.
“I’m sad to leave Atlanta ... I know that my soul is
called to the edge, to the fringe and the margins and this for me is the edge,
the fringe and the margin. I’ve just got to go. My call is to the people
that some consider the least and I just think I need to be with them,” she
said.
Her work in Atlanta began in 1988 when she became a case manager
for AID Atlanta and saw the need for more free legal services for people with
AIDS. Through the Atlanta Legal Aid Society she, with the help of many,
co-founded and served for seven years on the AIDS Legal Project.
“There was an element of risk. This is what had to be done.
This is what we were called to do so we followed the Spirit and leaped in
faith,” she said. “Whether starting something that doesn’t
exist, the Living Room, or going off to Africa, God is working with me without
my consultation.”
Through the legal project, she helped people fight employment and
insurance discrimination, write last directives and helped clients “access
the system” to gain Social Security and insurance benefits.
“In the early days there was a lot of advocacy to shake up
and to wake up people who were not aware of this simply because it didn’t
touch them. You’re not aware of the crisis until it touches your
life,” she said.
The Dominican attributes her clear reception of God’s call to
her prayer life, as for decades she’s risen from bed to an hour of prayer
and meditation. “(Prayer) is the fabric of my life. It’s the warp and
the weave.” And her spiritual weekend retreats have often taken her
camping and to the state park at St. George Island. “Absolutely what
renews my strength is to be in nature.”
Now in her 34th year as an Adrian Dominican, Sister Lubinski
recalled the first clue of her calling when a past professor who died of AIDS
appeared in 1984 on the cover of Time magazine for an article on the
unfamiliar, emerging virus.
“I think that really began my call, that story and just
hearing about it. It was the crisis of our time, and the final thing that
absolutely told me I had to respond was when I was realizing that people were
denied access to ambulances and funeral homes and hospitals. And I thought I
needed to be here and I need to do what I can to break down those
barriers.”
Meanwhile she gained advocacy experience for the poor in the
mid-1980s working in the mountains of southwestern Virginia, where she
represented disabled and elderly clients before administrative judges to obtain
public benefits such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. With a
master’s degree in religious education, she worked before that as a
director of religious education for five years at an Arizona parish and as a
teacher for seven. “I’ve loved everything I’ve done. It’s
always listening to a call and responding to a call.”
Practicing the Gospel she once taught, Sister Lubinski founded and
became the first executive director of Living Room as a way to begin filling in
cracks she saw in housing services through the legal project by opening up
already available resources. After landing an initial grant from United Way
AIDS Response Fund/Metropolitan Community Foundation, it opened as part of
Trinity Community Ministries. Living Room grew to become a separate nonprofit
organization in 1999, having moved from a “closet office” to a suite
on the fourth floor of Grady Hospital’s infectious disease program on
Ponce de Leon Avenue.
Now led by executive director Nick Danna and largely serving
Fulton County, it has helped about 3,800 clients, with a 26 percent increase
from 1998-99 with increasing numbers of women, the poor and minorities being
infected.
Sister Lubinski is particularly proud of Living Room, the only
AIDS housing assistance organization in Atlanta. She believes it has helped
raise the awareness of housing as a health issue for those with HIV among both
housing and AIDS service organizations, she said, sitting by a picture of the
AIDS quilt in her office. It’s a health issue, she explained, because
people with AIDS may struggle to keep jobs, which they need in order to pay for
housing, because of things like episodic sicknesses and having to miss work for
doctors appointments.
“Because we opened our doors, people realized there was a
crisis, a housing crisis for people with HIV and AIDS. Even the AIDS community
wasn’t focused on it. They were always focused on medical and advocacy,
but Living Room helped raise the awareness of housing.”
She’s confident Living Room lamps will keep shining brightly.
“The service is strong, great staff, wonderful staff.
They’ll take over and they’ll improve it, they’ll make it bigger
and better ... They will continue to improve the quality of services to the
community, to our clients,” she said. “The clients have been a gift,
all the donors, the people who support us, all the volunteers, every single
person who comes here makes a contribution, first and foremost, the clients ...
It’s a privilege and honor. They represent to me the body of Christ. It is
sacred, it is holy ... This place has been plenty and grace for me personally
and for the community.”
And as “my passion is the people,” she’s been
rewarded by the gratitude of clients who she’s helped after coming in
burdened by the weight of poverty and life-threatening illness. She easily
recalled one married man with AIDS and seven children who, after losing his
job, was able to stay with his family in quality housing the last year of his
life through the rental assistance program. One woman, caring for her children
plus her nieces after their parents died from AIDS, moved to Atlanta upon
losing her job in Florida. She sought help from Living Room and found the
start-up costs for a home.
Another client “was hugging and thanking us. He was so
grateful, got his own apartment and so it’s wonderful.”
“One of the things I really strive to do is help people to
dream and make their dreams a reality—(to think) ‘I want a place of
my own. I want a place for my children’—and to recognize it takes
time and patience,” she said, having to pause at one point to control
tears.
Yet others have been harder to help, like the increasing numbers
of single parent families as well as homeless people with mental health and
substance abuse problems, who are “extremely difficult” to serve
because there aren’t enough support and case management services for them.
Sister Lubinski said that sometimes getting needed help for
clients means being bold enough to ask for special privileges from social
service agencies.
“One of the major things we’ve seen happen is affordable
housing being torn down and condominiums constructed at great cost. Affordable
housing is being depleted,” she said. Housing “is always important,
even if they’re homeless. It’s important where people live. I
don’t believe people choose to be homeless. I look on housing as a
right.”
This straightforward sister sees all her work as a mission of
mercy. She strives to show “the compassion of Christ, recognizing the
dignity of each and every person, no matter what their educational background,
socioeconomic background, religious perspective or sexual orientation.”
“This is the body of Christ, no matter their mental
disability or physical disability,” she said. With fellow Dominicans,
“it’s about co-creating justice and peace for some who are most in
need in our city, for some who are most oppressed, most isolated and most
ignored.”
As he carries on Sister Lubinski’s work serving guests at
Living Room, Danna, a licensed clinical social worker, is inspired by that
spirit.
“I like her energy. She energizes you and she challenges the
staff to give their best and she can meet someone who feels hopeless and when
they leave they’ve got something to hold onto. It might be someone who
just found out they have HIV or somebody who got sick and lost their apartment.
She’ll give them hope. When they come in, they know they’ve got a
plan and they’re on the way to a home.”
And being well known in Atlanta’s HIV/AIDS and housing
communities, she always gets the job done. “When you need a miracle, you
call Mary Jane ... She’s very good with asking people to be generous and
people respond readily to her and she will be greatly missed,” Danna said.
“She’s really great at seeing a need and then figuring out a way of
implementing it or addressing it.”
Sister Lubinski said she got the idea to go to Africa after her
mother died in February. She had been so close to her, she never would have
moved abroad before. But she believes the idea had been subconsciously brewing
for over two years.
She plans to stay in Kenya for the next decade and, while plans
are still sketchy, may work with a Jesuit or Maryknoll priest at either an
orphanage or hospital while living with African Assumption sisters, who invited
her order to Kenya.
Sister Lubinski has new hope and determination through the
increasing life span of people with AIDS since she moved to Atlanta; it’s
now more about quality of life issues rather than issues of dying. She’s
interested in advocating in Kenya for pregnant women to have access to the drug
AZT which reduces transmission of AIDS from them to their babies. The drug has
significantly reduced mortality rates in the developed world but is out of
reach to the majority of sufferers in the Third World.
One thing she is sure of is the clarity of her call. “I see
it’s such a cutting edge to go to Africa right now because of this crisis;
it is a pandemic. For me it’s a passion. It’s a call. I can’t
not respond.”
And she’ll be sure to pack along gifts received from clients
in Atlanta. “It has been such a gift to be with people (with AIDS). I
mean, sometimes their faith has taught me so much. Their belief that no matter
what God is with them, that God is caring for them, their acceptance,” she
said. “Particularly the women ... they struggle to provide for their
families in the midst of illness and sadness and poverty and lack of finances.
They struggle and they survive and they have deep, deep faith.” |
