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Meet a few people who have greeted challenging circumstances as opportunities for a new kind of success.
(page 8 of 8)
This is not the first time Alvino has attended college, nor is it her initial foray into the medical field. After her graduation from high school in 1987, she took courses at DelTech in Georgetown, where she received a diploma in medical transcription. For the next year, she worked as a transcriptionist at Beebe Medical Center in Lewes, transcribing surgical and radiology reports and medical procedures. Though Beebe gave her a taste of hospital work, the job wasn’t fulfilling what she felt was her calling—a career on the front lines of health care, providing one-on-one care. She left Beebe after only one year and started a family.
More than two decades later, her children are nearly grown. Alvino, 40, is the single mother of three boys, ages 16, 19 and 20. Nicholas, her youngest, attends Woodbridge High School in Bridgeville, and at this young age, he has already developed an interest in learning more about weather patterns. Through his mother’s encouragement, he has talked about the possibility of studying meteorology in college, in the hopes of someday becoming a television weatherman. “Nicholas has a natural inquisitiveness about so many things,” Alvino says. “I constantly impress upon him how important it is to think about his education right now, rather than wait like I did.”
In her words, Alvino is pursuing her new career “with prayer and tears” and help from a large support group of friends and family, led by her boyfriend Robert Lewis, her grandmother Grace Martin, and her place of worship, the Grace Baptist Church in Seaford.
“On the day I was let go from Invista, my first response was, ‘How am I going to make it?’” Alvino says. “Now my feeling is, ‘I know I’m going to make it.’ I believe that there are no accidents. I’ve been given a second opportunity and I’m grateful for it. You have no choice. You either make the most of it or you hold yourself back.”
