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Aldine and Adam's five-year-old daughter Ivy is among those currently being helped by the clinic.

Aldine says the demands of home-schooling their two other children during Covid while also looking after Ivy meant "things fell by the wayside as a parent", and she and Adam did not fully realise how compromised Ivy's development had become.

"She had no interaction with anyone her own age, so that slowed down her development," Aldine says.

The line swelled with need accumulated over the 2½ years since Social Security shuttered the building on Aldine Mail Route Road and its entire network of field offices at the start of the pandemic in 2020, sending employees home to telework.

But it was communication problems that were on most everyone’s mind in Houston, where many people had showed up at the Aldine Mail Route Road office after no one had called them back, or they had waited on interminable holds on the phone.