Lila Laporte was practically born a fighter.  In Haiti, where she spent her youth, she often fought peers and schoolmates who bullied her younger siblings. “My childhood was kind of hard. My parents were very strict, and worked all the time,” Ms. Laporte recalled. “Growing up, I would fight a lot, for my sisters and brothers, when we were very young.”  Ms. Laporte, whose father was a carpenter and whose mother was a shop worker, also fought to keep her family afloat, cooking meals and caring for her siblings while her parents worked.  When Ms. Laporte was a teenager, she received a green card to come to the United States and arrived in 1988 with her parents and two of her siblings. The family settled in Queens, and she began working as a home health aide.  “I love people, helping people,” she said. “I love taking care of people.”  She took little time off, working up to seven days a week for $5 an hour, and even slept at patients’ homes, depending on their needs. She bonded with the people as though they were family.  “My grandmother passed when I was very young, so taking care of them was like having another grandmother,” Ms. Laporte said. “I’m helping them, but they’re helping me, too.”  Not long after settling in the United States, Ms. Laporte struck up a conversation with a cabdriver who offered to drop her off at home after a party. He was tall, handsome and welcoming, and that chance meeting led to a relationship and eventually marriage.  Yet, though they had children together, their marriage was not ideal, she said, and not just because he was twice her age.  “I met him when I was 19, and didn’t know he was already married,” she said. “After we’d been married, with children, I found out he was married to the woman he said was his sister.”  A young mother of four, Ms. Laporte held the family together while working demanding hours. But despite years of endurance after this disclosure about her husband’s other relationship, she ultimately chose to end their marriage.  At this time, in her late 30s, Ms. Laporte started to experience intense pain in her hands and joints. After dropping her heavy cooking pot in the kitchen one day, she realized she needed to see a doctor.  “There wasn’t even an accident. Not like something happened to me, just one day I felt pain right here,” she said, massaging her forearm, wrist and hand. At the hospital, doctors told her that she had carpal tunnel syndrome in both hands.  She tried to improve her movement and strength through physical therapy and the use of medical braces, but treatment did not help. Ms. Laporte said the condition, along with her underlying arthritis, had worsened to the point that she could no longer care for her patients.  In recent years, Ms. Laporte’s health has declined in other ways, too: The list includes ankle surgery, treatment for a slipped disk and biweekly steroid injections to alleviate pain in her knees.  Now 50, and less spry than she was as a child in Haiti, Ms. Laporte has leaned on her fighting spirit to persevere through debilitating arthritis, her other health challenges and bouts of depression.  Around 1999, she said, she was living in a shelter with her children when “I got a call from Joana’s school that she was hospitalized,” she said, referring to her daughter. “I get there, and they kept asking about my ex-husband. I couldn’t stop crying.” Ms. Laporte was taken to Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan for psychiatric treatment.  After years of outpatient therapy for depression, followed by years without, Ms. Laporte was referred to Brooklyn Community Services, one of eight organizations supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. She receives therapy for trauma, in both group and individual sessions.  When she joined the Brooklyn Community Services program, Ms. Laporte said, she wanted it to help her live independently and find a new job. In early October, she fulfilled one of those goals by moving into a new apartment in Flatbush, Brooklyn, away from the commotion and smoke-filled hallways of the residence she shared with her boyfriend.  “To have a roof over your head is a blessing, but it was hard living there,” she concluded. “The noise was too much, and my asthma got worse.”  Ms. Laporte gets $733 a month in Social Security benefits, and pays $358 in rent and other bills. To help with her move, Brookyn Community Services provided $200 in Neediest funds to buy a portable closet for her clothes.  She continues practice physical therapy for her achy joints. She also spends time with her children, Max, Joana, Jeff and Pirterson, all of whom live in Queens.  Ms. Laporte said she hoped her pain subsided so she could rejoin the work force and care for others again.  “Sometimes I help with my children’s kids,” she said. “But I would really like to work with children, maybe on a school bus.”  Donations to the Neediest Cases may also be made with a check or over the phone.
Joint pain and depression have kept Lila Laporte from her work as a home health aide. But as she longs to return to her calling, the Neediest Cases has given her a fresh start.