Maria, a gentle, soft-spoken woman of seventy, had always managed to view the world with a child's sense of wonderment1. She greeted the dawn of each new day with the brightness of the sun itself and found joy in the smallest of things: a dove perched on her birdfeeder, the fresh morning dew, the sweet scent of jasmine2 in her garden.
A widow, Maria lived alone in a run-down3 neighborhood in Deerfield Beach, Florida. One day while out tending the small garden in front of her modest home, Maria had been injured in a drive-by shooting. The bullet had pierced through4 her skin with a ferocious5 bite and lodged itself in the old woman's right thigh. Crying out in agony6, she had dropped to the sidewalk. When the mailman found her unconscious nearly an hour later, her injured leg had been bleeding profusely7. She'd made it to the hospital just in time and later, the doctor had told Maria she was lucky to be alive.
Returning home, Maria didn't feel so lucky. Before the shooting, the elderly woman had always been grateful that she was healthy for her age. Now just getting the daily mail required a Herculean8 effort. In addition, her medical bills were mounting alarmingly, straining her meager9 income. And although she had watched the neighborhood deteriorate10, somehow things had seemed safe in the daylight--but not anymore. For the first time in her life, Maria felt frightened, alone and vulnerable11.
“ I feel defeated,” she had told her friend Vera. “ I'm just an old woman with nothingto do and nowhere to go.”
When Vera came to pick up Maria for her checkup at the medical center, she
