Patricia Mendoza
Thirty-five-year-old Patricia Mendoza is too young to allow herself to be crippled by arthritis. So she works through the pain. “My arthritis started when I was eight years old. My hands would hurt when I did my homework in school.” By now, Patricia’s arthritis has spread through her whole body. “It hurts all over. Sometimes when it hurts too much my husband tells me that I shouldn’t go to work, but I tell him that my job is a commitment I have with the company, with the tenants and with my coworkers. Because if I miss a day, it’s not just my paycheck that’s affected, but everyone else, too.”
“My job is to clean the bathrooms. I clean both the men’s and women’s bathrooms on seven floors from 6:00 to 10:00 every night. That’s 14 bathroom floors, 35 toilets, 14 urinals, 28 sinks, 14 mirrors, and 14 bathrooms that I dust from top to bottom. I have to hurry to finish it all, and it’s important to clean the bathrooms very well so that diseases don’t spread.” For her hard work, cleaning contractor GSF pays her just $6.75 an hour. “But if I miss a day, they take away the ‘bonus’ and my pay goes down to $5.85 for the whole pay period.”
Economic necessity has dampened Patricia’s ability to work in her chosen profession. “I’m a tailor. I do all kinds of sewing in my home. This is what I really love to do. But it’s difficult to make a living that way here, because it’s so easy for people to run out and buy new clothes from the store instead.”
Ironically, her children are both the reason she works as a janitor and the reason she most regrets having to do it. “Who likes to clean toilets? I do it because I need to earn money to support my family. But what bothers me the most is the time I lose with my daughters by working at night. Maybe they’d be telling me about what happened in school today, maybe they’d be asking me something about their process of growing up.”
Whatever happens, Patricia is determined to be around long enough to see her daughters raise their own children. “I don’t want to die young like my mom.” Patricia inherited her severe arthritis from her mother, who also faced the harsh medical and economic reality of working through extreme pain in order to support her children. “In order to work, she had to take a lot of pain medication. She died from complications with taking excessive amounts of over-the-counter medications, which damaged her organs over time.”
Patricia knows first hand how important it is to get proper medical care. “I need to go to a specialist in order to get medicine that’s appropriate for my condition.” Patricia and her family have been getting their care through the Wishard Advantage program, which is designed to provide low-cost care to those with very low incomes. But she dreams of a day when she and her coworkers have good jobs with health insurance of their own. “It would be fantastic. I think that every immigrant dreams of one day having health insurance in order to know that they will always be able to keep working.”