Quantcast

An Eyewitness Account From The ‘War Zone’ in Queens

"There are times I cry myself to sleep because it is so bad out there."
It’s a first-hand observation of a foot soldier in the "war zone" — not Bosnia or Chechnia, but Elmhurst, Astoria and Jamaica, where the "body count" remains invisible to the rest of us.
Rosa Pardo is a social worker who helps hold together the flimsy safety net that stands between her clients and desperation, or death; the homeless in their shelters, mothers and children who might go hungry or wives abused by brutalizing husbands.
The 31-year-old Pardo is more than a social worker. She’s a hometown hero — one of four in the city honored on Dec. 7 by the Robin Hood Foundation, an agency that funds programs to fight an uphill battle against grinding poverty that threatens the lives of so many New Yorkers.
Pardo, who works for the Queens Guidance Center across the street from Elmhurst General Hospital, was handed her award by Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg at a breakfast ceremony at Tavern on the Green in Manhattan.
"I don’t think of myself as a hero," she told The Queens Courier. "To my mind, the real heroes are my clients who must fight poverty, disease alcoholism or drug abuse."
Pardo typifies the cadres of social workers in the borough who struggle with rising case loads, declining budgets and government apathy as they confront crisis after crisis on the streets of Queens.
Their nightmare is the screaming headlines of a homeless person pushing a girl in front of a subway or striking another with a brick.
She is appalled by the policy of arresting homeless people. "Putting them in jail is punishing them — and undeservedly so."
In her presentation to the Robin Hood Foundation, Pardo described one of the 12 to 14 cases she handles:
"Now imagine you’re Maria, one of the women I work with. You’re poor, you’re pregnant and you live in fear of the next time your husband beats you. When it happens, you try to protect your unborn baby by bending and instead taking the blows to the head.
"Your first child stutters and when he gets frustrated he throws his food against the wall. You worry that the landlord will see the stains and evict you from your cramped two-room apartment. Your second child needs orthopedic care, but you have no health insurance. You ask for help at the hospital and they finally refer you to a clinic, but you can’t fill out the paperwork because you’re functionally illiterate. The fact that Maria could even wake up in the morning is impressive.
"Maria found the strength to leave her abusive husband and was fortunate enough to find space in a shelter for herself and her children. I say fortunate because in New York City there are more shelters for animals than battered women. Maria had a hard time dealing with her young sons because she would project onto those boys her experience with their father. Or in simpler terms, dad hits mom, mom takes it out on kids. Maria had another baby boy and we worked on bonding them while healing the breech that was already created with the older boys.
"After working together for three years, Maria now has a strong loving relationship with all her sons, a stable apartment, and even has gotten her GED, motivated by the desire to help her sons with their homework. Without early intervention, I have no doubt these children would have become statistics in the system."
Pardo tells moving stories about the children caught in the middle of this social chaos she encounters in Queens.
"I had a case of a little girl of four years whose father was jailed," she said. "The child felt the absence of her father was her fault — that somehow she had done something to alienate him and daddy doesn’t love her anymore."
The social worker said that after leaving the family, she sat in her car and cried.
"I have a four-month-old and I don’t know what I’d do if he felt that way," she said.
Pardo, raised in South Ozone Park and now a resident of Rego Park, earned her master’s in social work from New York University. Her husband, Mario, works in his family’s bodega. Her mother works for Spanish Heritage Tours in Queens and her father is an interpreter at the United Nations.
"It’s a tragedy, a human disaster we are facing," she said. "We’re fortunate here because we are completely funded by private sources such as the Robin Hood Foundation and our own board members."