A Hand Up : Yes, the welfare system has its problems. But as the debate over reform measures rages, we sometimes overlook the success stories.

It started out as a symbol of goodness and compassion. But stigmas of laziness, incompetence and dishonesty have colored public and political perception of the welfare system, detracting from the underlying essence of poverty in America: that many people are in desperate need.

It is that need--not the stigmas--that should steer the course of welfare reform, say some former recipients.

“There are people who abuse the (welfare) system, but there are people who seem to be almost beyond reproach who are lining their pockets through phony contracts and fiscal mismanagement,” says Brenda Ness, 52, an associate professor of history at Santa Monica College and the mother of four. For six months in 1983, she received Aid to Families with Dependent Children.

Rather than taking money out of the pockets of the poor, Ness says, there should be more investigation and reform resulting from issues such as mismanagement of funds leading to the Orange County financial crisis and the savings and loan scandal.

Reform should also include the manner in which people are treated when they face the long lines and dizzying paperwork, says a 31-year-old Inland Empire woman who asked that her name not be published.

She received AFDC for about a year after she gave birth at age 16. She now works in the human resources department of a Fortune 500 company.

“If the people who signed me up for welfare were working for me now, they would be fired,” she says. “They made me feel like scum. They treat you with suspicion, and make you feel like you are doing something wrong. They should be helping people and telling them what options they have to get off welfare, but they didn’t.”

Options seemed limited for Mylene Rucker in 1978. The only thing she knew for sure was that she had two young children depending on her.

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A symbol of Dr. Mylene Rucker’s dream leans against a wall in her dining room. It is a painting showing her standing next to her nonprofit Biotropes Wellness Center, which she closed in December because of lack of funds.

Rucker became a doctor because she wanted to help people--the under-served and the poor. Having been a welfare recipient herself, she understood what it was like to feel degraded simply because of need, to be humiliated and stigmatized for seeking assistance.

When she became a doctor, she determined that low self-esteem, brought on by such institutionalized degradation, played an inseparable role in the health of many of her inner-city patients. Through the South Los Angeles clinic, she offered holistic health-care treatment for African American women and children.

The discussions in Washington about welfare reform evoke the same fury from her as the painting, which is all that remains of her clinic: that the poor and disadvantaged--people who need more help--might again be given less.

“I think it’s mean-spirited,” Rucker, 46, says of the House bill, which now makes its way to the Senate. “Slash and burn is not the way to address people. . . . Are we saying we just don’t care about human beings? Maybe we are. I mean look what they did to the Native Americans. Look what they did to slaves. Maybe that is the spirit, but if it is, they need to just call it out. . . . When you present this hypocrisy--that this is a fair and even playing field with compassion for all--it’s a sign that this country is in denial about who we really are.”

By 1978, Rucker and her husband, whom she met in Africa during a student exchange program, had graduated from the University of Washington and were living in the Chicago area with their two young children, ages 5 and 6.

When her husband left, she scrambled to find work. “A lot of places wouldn’t hire me because I was a college grad. I was too educated to work at McDonald’s and I couldn’t find a job in my field (zoology).”

She eventually was hired as a clerk at JCPenney, but when she began misfiling things, her eyes were checked and it was discovered that she had a detached retina, requiring surgery. She had no health insurance, and as she recovered from the operation, she had no income. It wasn’t long before she had no heat in the apartment.

“The most traumatic thing a child at that age can witness,” says her son, Kweku Middleton, now 22, “is to see your mother cry, not knowing where food or the rent money is going to come from. That’s what I remember.”

Rucker moved her family home to Los Angeles, and for a period, salt, she says, was one of two foods she had to feed her family. “Beans and salt. That’s all we had.”

She found work in a nuclear medical company but left after a disagreement about quality control. She says her standards were higher than those of her employer. After a month and a half of job searching, she applied for AFDC.

While living in low-income housing in Watts, she attended an 18-month physician’s assistant program, completing it in 1979 and finding work that enabled her to get off welfare. In 1982, she started classes at the Charles Drew University of Medicine and Science, graduating in 1986.

“If I hadn’t gotten on welfare, I’d probably still be working at JCPenney or somewhere like that,” she says. “I know I’d be working, because I had two children. If I had gone through that and didn’t have my kids I may have turned to something negative, but my kids have been the love of my life. They kept me straight and honest.”

Rucker works three part-time jobs, two of them at community college infirmaries, one at an urgent-care center. She still has hope for the clinic, which was open for only one year. It is still her dream, but maybe this isn’t the time, and maybe this isn’t the place.

Perhaps, she says, there will come a day when she will be able to serve those most in need, which is why she wanted to become a doctor in the first place. Perhaps, she says, she will find a more humane place--a place to hang the painting that leans against her apartment wall.

“I tell my kids, ‘To the extent that you deny someone’s humanity, you lose your own. You’ll lose your own humanity to the people of this country if you continue to deny humanity whether it’s someone who is Mexican, whether it’s African American, whether it’s a welfare mother.’ ”

More and more, she says, she sees humanity being denied.

More and more, she thinks about Africa.

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Maria Lopez was 18 years old in 1981 when she left a troubled marriage in Mexico and crossed into the United States with a 3-month-old baby and the clothes on her back. Shortly after arriving, she reunited with her husband in Los Angeles, agreeing to give their marriage another chance.

Lopez was pregnant in 1983 when her husband left her and returned to Mexico. She spoke no English, had nowhere to live. For three months, she stayed in a friend’s car, going door to door during the day seeking housecleaning work.

She found help at the L.A. Catholic Worker Community, which gave her a place to stay and offered guidance during her pregnancy. When she went into labor it was late at night. She didn’t want to wake anyone up, so she walked 10 blocks to the hospital.

After the baby was born, Catherine Morris of Catholic Worker helped her sign up for AFDC. A week after she got out of the hospital, she was looking for work. She walked into a flower shop and asked the owner for work. He said he had no openings, and Lopez said that was OK. She would work for free if he would give her a chance.

Seven days a week, she packed lunches and took three buses with her two children to the East Los Angeles shop, where she cleaned and learned to make floral arrangements.

Morris told Lopez that she would save part of her AFDC checks, and after about seven months, helped move her into an apartment with money from the checks. Eventually the shop owner started paying her, enabling her to get off welfare and receive work papers. After four years, she was earning $200 a week, working 55 hours a week.

Seven years ago, the shop closed, and Lopez found work at Pico Rivera Florists, where she now is a manager. She was able to bring her oldest son from Mexico, where he was living with her mother. Each day, she picks up her three sons--15, 13 and 10--from school and drives them home.

The city can be a dangerous place, she says, and she doesn’t want them to be alone after school: “I love for them too much.” Her dream belongs to them. One could be a doctor, she says, to help save lives. The second, maybe, a lawyer--or, perhaps, it would be good to have two doctors. The little one wants to be a firefighter.

“Why not?” says Lopez, 32. “Everything is possible.”

Welfare reform is necessary, she says, because too many people cheat the system, waiting for checks instead of working. At the same time, she fears the exclusionary climate being created by Proposition 187 and welfare reform.

Lopez says she has the papers to apply for citizenship. She is proud to have achieved the freedom that comes with self-reliance. She pays taxes, and now she wants to be a participant in the government process. “I want a voice,” she says, “I want to vote.”

She has worked hard for it.