(A-93) Status: Maria is now sponsored for one year! Thank you!
Needs: food, water filter, double mattress,
UPDATE Dec 21, 2012: Maria received the gift of a blanket!
To help Maria with these needs, please click here. To sponsor her at $35 a month, click here.
For more stories and photos of the ancianos in the Feeding Program, please consider purchasing a book compiled of our participants. All profits go to the Elderly. You can preview the book here.
Maria doesn't say a word during our visit, but lets her daughter speak for her, while four kids run circles around them.
"She suffers all kinds of sickness: infection, gastritis, headaches, problems with her nerves. This August she'd had two operations on her eyes, so that's why she wears the glasses, even indoors.
We got a loan to pay the debt, while my husband's working doing day labor to repay it. I make bracelets. I have to dip the needle into each tiny bead. I'm afraid my eyes will go bad too because of that.
When I was 8 my father died. There were seven of us kids. So because my mother had to take care of all of us, we couldn't go to school. There just wasn't any money, no real opportunity to go, like that. When I turned 13 I went to work in a jewelry factory, and that's where I learned to make these bracelets. After a while I went to work in a hotel in Panajachel. That's where I learned Spanish-- the owner of the hotel gave me the opportunity to learn, and so I learned.
Now I'm the only one who's here, caring for Mom. It's difficult, since I have my own kids and she's sick a lot. I don't know where we'd be if she couldn't eat with the Program everyday. We don't have money to buy clean water, so we drink the tap even though it's bad. Sometimes there's no food. Sometimes my mother can't get out of bed."
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