By Rasheeda Wint

A third-year student at Hunter College majoring in urban studies, Avone Logan shuttled between one of the toughest and poorest neighborhoods in the city and North Carolina. Usually, her mother provided for her family with a combination of federal benefits, including welfare, Medicaid, food stamps and a bit of her deceased partner's Social Security benefits. In the good times, her mother landed jobs in senior or child care centers.

Logan wants a very different life for herself. She hopes some day to be a teacher or work in a non-profit agency. ``I just want to help people. I don't know how or what,'' she says. ``But I am going to do it, even if I just volunteer somewhere.''

Logan clearly means what she says. She is currently a mentor to a 17-year-old high school boy who she describes as outgoing and open-minded. She feels that it is a privilege to be his mentor. ``He's had other mentors,'' she explains. ``He is my first mentee so I learn from him.''

Logan, 21, describes a childhood in many ways typical of New York City's poor. Her father died early in her childhood and she recalls seeing him only once. She shared a bedroom with her sister in a two-bedroom, Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment.

The most painful memory, she has about being a child on welfare she says, with a slow smile, is being embarrassed about receiving food stamps. ``It represented a true sign of poorness. Sometimes I wished my mother would get married, so we could have money.''

When Logan was 14 years old, her mother had a seizure. She was diagnosed with diabetes and given insulin. One month later, her mother took the sisters and moved to North Carolina. With the stress of city life gone, her mother recovered enough to get another job at a day care center.

To Logan, the family's life was as bad in the South as it had been in New York because her mother was still very poor. She was no longer on welfare and the job didn't cover her medical expenses.

``It was awful,'' she says, shaking her head from side to side. ``Not only did my doctor bills outweigh her paycheck, but we also had no car to get around.''

She recalls with melancholy in her eyes being a tall, large-boned teen-ager weighing 270-pounds suddenly transported to a new car-centered community. She describes herself as extremely frustrated.

Her isolation was also compounded by the fact that she had no car and had to walk a half-mile to work.

``You really need a car down South,'' she says.

In an effort to help her mother and fill her spare time, Logan landed a job through the Summer Youth Employment Program. When the summer job ended, she found an after school job at a shoe store. Between the two jobs, Logan managed to save more than $1,000--enough for her to buy a used car.

Her health continually deteriorating, her mother abandoned the South again. Logan gave the car back to the loan company and the family returned to New York, moving in with a family friend.

Her mother applied for disability benefits and, learning that families were not eligible for subsidized housing unless they were actually homeless, the family moved into a shelter, where they stayed for 10 months awaiting housing.

``It was isolating at the shelter,'' Logan sighs. `` It was my senior year in high school and I wanted to be closer to my school friends in Brooklyn. But I understand that being homeless was the quickest way for us to get the apartment.''

Logan's nomadic education did not prevent her from graduating from high school on time. Unable to find a job, she entered a three week job training program called STRIVE , a Harlem-based social-service agency. The program assisted her in getting a job at Toys 'R' Us. The job's wages were too small to affect her mother's welfare allowance, but the hours were enough so that she didn't have to participate in the city's Workfare program. She was grateful for STRIVE because they helped her gain real work experience.

She left home and enrolled in college at the Stonybrook campus of the State University of New York. Her mother then persuaded her to return to Brooklyn and she transferred to Hunter.

Her academic success has not inoculated Logan from the uncertainty she experienced throughout her childhood.

``I don't know how my life is going to be different after graduation,'' she says. ``I just hope all the hard work pays off.''