The First Mama and Her Son
Her name is Francesca and in this photo she is shown holding her son Rodrigo. I fell in love with them both from the minute I received the photo from one of our facilitator, ten years ago next month. This Mayan mama’s smile spoke to me. Hidden villages with emotionally reticent women residing in them don’t make for outgoing, easy-to-read women. These female citizens of a deeply machismo country have learned that it is safer to hold your emotions close, buried under your layers of hand-woven traditional clothing. Francesca’s smile was the tiniest of platitudes, and by facing our facilitator, she indicated a comfort that comes from knowing the heart of the person behind the camera. She trusted him. Knowing how hard that trust was to earn, his messages to me became more urgent.
“This mother needs help,” he wrote.
“Francesca’s son has a high fever and there is no medical care in her remote Guatemalan village.”
From the clothes Francesca wore, the disrepair of the adobe huts in the background and the lack of running water in the village, I knew our staff member spoke his truth. Living in a tiny and vastly remote enclave of Northwestern Guatemala is a birthright of millions of women and children who then inherit a lack of vital resources. Doctors afford cannot to run a medical practice in geographical areas with high poverty rates. Medicines can’t be sold in stores that don’t exist. Traveling to health care providers is fruitless if you happen to be one of the millions of women in Guatemala who speak only a local dialect: leaving you powerless to communicate with professionals who can assist you in a time of crisis. Finding transportation, once you become desperate enough to seek it out, means standing on the side of a rutted road, in hopes that a pickup truck will allow you to pile on the back for a few pennies you most likely don’t have. In other words, the infrastructure of rural Guatemala can be a duplicate of the state of life in the United States hundreds of years ago.
Rodrigo’s fever raged on. The messages from the facilitator became increasingly distressed. “Can you send money for medicines?” he asked.
“The baby is having a seizure” he wrote. “I am very worried.”
There was no Finding Freedom through Friendship at the time. I had never transferred money to Guatemala: Western Union? MoneyGram? They seemed as mysterious and challenging to me as learning a new computer program. Finding Freedom was not on my radar. Staring a nonprofit? The thought evaporated as soon as the words swept through my brain.
Within days there was no more reason for our friend to write. Francesca’s arms were empty and the shallow grave at the end of the village held one more Mayan child who died without significant reason. I raged emotionally. My own son was lost to me at that time: transferring my feelings of despair onto Francesca felt as natural as if she had stood beside me, sharing her grief. My anger ran deep for a mother who had held a precious son who lived no longer: for a village of women who had even fewer options than Francesca, because they had nobody to get their message out in time of need. I wrote to anyone who cared to listen about the injustice of women like Francesca who had to live in a country that diverted healthcare budgets into graft, lining pockets of local politicians.
After processing the weight that the loss of Rodrigo had placed in my heart and imagining the emptiness of Francesca’s arms, Finding Freedom through Friendship became less of a vapor of thought and more of a solid plan. The particles of thought congealed into a recipe of obsession. Having worked as a board member for a medical nonprofit in Guatemala for years, I knew that I possessed the rudimentary tools needed to move forward with this (idiotic or brilliant) idea. I was never one for believing that “everything happens for a reason”….Rodrigo did not need to die so that FFF could be born. But his death would be the last one that I no longer had the tools to prevent.
Ten years later we have assisted over five hundred women and children in two hemispheres. Thirty three houses have been built and donated. Hundreds of scholarships were awarded starting the year after Rodrigo died. Thousands of women and children in Guatemala and Egypt have received free health care. The nourishment of mind, body and soul continues, with the help of a committed and compassionate board and our dedicated donors.
Francesca’s arms are no less empty, but there are hundreds of other women who have had their burdens lifted since Rodrigo died. This program is his legacy.
