‘Ma’ shares blessings to help homeless

This Holiday Heroes profile is from 2009; nominate your hero for 2010.

Around her southwest Atlanta neighborhood, she’s known as “Ma” or “Mama Nelloms” by the homeless people who frequent the area.

When they come to her doorstep, Mary Nelloms doesn’t send them away.

The 81-year-old is known for telling them to wait on her porch while she goes inside to put together a small bag of snacks or a hot, covered plate of food. Sometimes, she gives them clothes.

The retired teacher’s assistant said that she isn’t afraid of the vagrants. Many times, she’s met them before. There’s Tyrone, Blue, J.W. and others who have different names but share the same circumstances. What she is afraid of, she said, is what the Lord might do to her if she turns away someone in need.

“The Lord has been so good to me all my life,” Nelloms said. “While I’m living, I want to do something for the Lord.”

The widow, who has eight daughters, lives on Social Security. But that doesn’t stop her from going to the grocery store each week to get day-old cakes and bread and surplus canned goods that the store managers give her for free or at a deep discount.

She doesn’t have a car and usually relies on the help of neighbors to get to and from the store. If no one can take her, she walks the couple of miles to the grocery store. Once she’s there, however, someone usually recognizes her and gives her a ride back, or they pay for a cab to get her and her packages home.

Nelloms also collects secondhand clothes to give to the needy and homeless in her area.

“If the clothes don’t look to suit her when she gets them, she’ll wash and press them before she gives them out,” said a former co-worker, Bertha Somerville, who has known Nelloms for 25 years. “Growing up, she didn’t have very much.”

Recently, Nelloms got a fleece-lined warm-up suit that she saved for one of the regular homeless people who visits her, a man she calls J.W., who sleeps in abandoned houses in the neighborhood.

“I told him, ‘J.W., now here. You put these on tonight if it gets cold over your clothes and it’ll be just like pajamas, but you’ll be warm,’ ” she said.