Five minutes ahead of schedule, the University of North Carolina Wilmington's well meaning clock tower bells a few bars of the school's alma mater and declares it to be 4 p.m. Across the March-green quad, at the far end of a 50-yard strip of pavement, a half-length bus chugs the first leg of its horseshoe pattern through the Warwick Center parking lot. Tangles of pastel-shirted students bulge around a tiny Plexiglas shelter as the shuttle wheezes to a stop, blows its hydraulic door and unloads a gang of passengers. A few seconds later, the impatient scholars mass into a pulsating line and gallop up the transports three short steps in awkward combinations of politesse and anxiety. They fill the five rows of worn, gray seats and spill into the aisles. Voices swarm and collide in the heavy, cramped air.
Perched at the helm of this rumbling freight, an auburn-haired woman counts her passengers and scratches a number onto a clipboard. Her uniform consists of a blue baseball cap with W.A.V.E. emblazoned across its front, a pair of oval sunglasses and a short-sleeved, button-down, white shirt with a pack of Doral menthols tucked secretively into the front pocket. Although she is a small woman, her presence extends beyond the nylon seatbelt that crosses her generous lap. Unbothered by the cacophony bubbling behind her, she scans the parking lot to ensure that all are aboard, closes the shuttle's double doors, cranks the oversized steering wheel to the right and sighs into yet another run. She is the driver, and this is her bus.
Her name is Sherry Moreno. Her job is neither glamorous nor exciting. She wakes at 5 each morning, and she falls into bed 17 hours later.
She makes the same scheduled stops, traces the same monotonous loop and answers the same repeated questions (“Where is this shuttle going”? “Can you make this next stop?” “Are you going to park-and-ride?”) each day. Some people might consider her job boring, routine. But spend an afternoon talking to Sherry Moreno and you will discover that the cramped shuttle, the duplicated scenery and the clockwork pick ups and drop-offs fade quickly into the background. Spend an afternoon listening to Sherry Moreno and you will find yourself wishing that you had more time to hear everything she had to say.
“It would take you two years to write down all the stories I could tell you,” she says.
And she's right. Sherry Moreno has many stories to tell. She is a person from whom we all could learn something.
Sherry Moreno is a country girl.
“I'm originally from Tabor City, they call it the "Yam City." It's got three stop signs and three red lights. We're country people,” she says in a Southern accent as thick as hand-churned butter. “We (Sherry and her two sisters) grew up on a farm and didn't have no brothers. We had to tote hog feed and crop tobacco like three little old boys, and we've been tough women all our lives.”
You can see the country in the calluses on her hands. She has an edge to her - unrefined but honest. The resilience born and bound in her rural roots has served Sherry well. She is a strong woman; she has had to be.
Sherry never finished high school. She married for the first time at the age of 16; at 19, she gave birth to a son. Her husband, a construction worker who was himself only a year Sherry's senior, traveled constantly, following the pavement and the paychecks. In the beginning, the marriage succeeded.
“We just thought we was so in love,” Sherry says.
It didn't last. Twelve years with husband number one produced two children and a few fond recollections, but the bruises are what Sherry remembers most. Drugs brought out the worst in this man, and Sherry, to protect her children, bore his abuse.
Nine years later, Sherry married a former professional soccer player from Bear Creek, Mexico and moved to Conway, SC. A broken leg had ended her second husband's soccer career, and he looked for solace in a bottle. According to Sherry, he was an entirely different person when he drank.
Eventually, fearing for the safety of herself and her children, she called the police. They arrested her husband, and then they told Sherry to go back to her house, gather her children and everything else she could carry and head out of town before he was released from jail.
So it was that in 1989 Sherry arrived in Wilmington, NC with $20, a suitcase, two kids and no idea of what to do next.
“At the time,” Sherry says, “I didn't know there was such a thing as women's shelters.”
