It was summer of 2024 and Sandra Mbiki paused to look out the window of Hawthorne Place, a family shelter where herself and her three children had been living. Across the street she saw Novant Health’s Presbyterian Medical Center.
“I looked out and I was like wow — outside of the window from the shelter we were living in was the hospital where I gave birth to my son,” she remembers. “I never knew when I was there, when I had him, that I would ever need this kind of help.”
Sandra was born in Central Africa in the Republic of Congo, where she grew up as the fourth of eight children in a tight-knit family. Today, her family stretches across continents. For more than a decade, Sandra has been building her life in North Carolina. Here in Charlotte, thousands of miles from where she spent her childhood, Sandra is part of a new, smaller close-knit family comprising herself and her three children.
Becoming a mom impacted Sandra’s life more than anything else. For her, motherhood is the thing that expanded her view of the world and of herself the most.
“I think differently,” she says of motherhood. “Bigger than what I was thinking before.”
Being a mom is also the thing that motivates Sandra to get up and keep going, even when the math doesn’t add up and the path forward isn’t clear.
“When I look at my children, I feel proud of myself,” she declares. “I want them to be really respectful, responsible, and to be safe. I’m just doing my best with the little income that I have.”
Sandra works as a teaching assistant at Mallard Creek Elementary School. On top of that role, she also works part-time as a media teacher. However, like many single parent families, she found herself caught in the cycle of living paycheck to paycheck despite all of her hard work. For Sandra, the feeling it gave her was unacceptable. She knew there had to be more she could offer her children.
“I cannot keep living this way,” she remembers thinking. “I need to leave a legacy. I need to pass on something to my children so I cannot just live day by day.”
In early spring of 2024, she decided not to renew her lease at their apartment. The rent was too high and each month she was barely covering the cost of her other essential bills — groceries, utilities, school supplies for the kids. Something had to change.
“When I left that apartment, I was trying to go to another apartment, but they kept rejecting me. They say I’m not making enough,” she recalls. “Each time I was paying $99 for the application or $50. So I said I’m not going to go further. Let me just call shelters, programs, whoever will take me.”
Those calls led her to Charlotte Family Housing (CFH). Sandra remembers it feeling like the moment an unexpected door swung open.
“Sometimes in life, we never know what is going to happen,” she says. “When an opportunity comes, you never know if there is another one coming… you have to just embrace it.”
Sandra displays the extraordinary resilience that is often a hallmark of immigrant families. She accepted help not as defeat, but as the next move forward.
“It gave me hope and courage,” she says of navigating that period. “And also endurance — you might think that you are in a bad situation or bad shape, but there is always a way. It just gave me that confidence to keep going.”
After a brief stay in the CFH shelter, the Mbiki family moved into a subsidized apartment. Living someplace she can comfortably afford, Sandra is finally free of the cycle that was draining her bank account and her spirit. WIth that mental load lifted, she has pivoted to focusing on her goals — right now, to earn her bachelor’s degree in accounting and to become a homeowner.
With her determination and hope, no goal is out of reach for Sandra. After everything she’s been through, she now believes that hope is more of a practice than a feeling — she returns to it every day, because she has seen, more than once, what it can draw toward you.
“Life has a lot of surprises, good and bad,” she says. “That’s why we need to keep having hope. Keep your hope, because when you hope, hope always draws what is good next to you.”
This story is part of our “Mighty Like A Mother” series celebrating Mother’s Day and honoring the strength of single mothers in our community. Read more: Mighty Like a Mother – Charlotte Family Housing
