Ana's Story: A Journey of Hope

PREFACE

In 2006 I began working as an intern with UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund. As part of the program, I documented the lives of children raised in poverty, particularly children who were abused, neglected, and marginalized.

UNICEF in Latin America and the Caribbean supports and advocates for children and adolescents so that they can overcome the obstacles that poverty, violence, disease, and discrimination create. As part of the program, UNICEF encourages gatherings of young people affected by AIDS. I visited a community group that included women and children living with HIV/AIDS. At the close of the meeting, Ana, a seventeen-year-old mother, stood before the group and said, "We are not dying with AIDS; we are living with it. She glanced down at her baby daughter balanced on her hip and concluded, We are survivors."

I was impressed with Ana’s maturity and confidence; I was intrigued by her positive outlook despite her infection. Maybe it was her vitality and beauty, or the fact that she was holding her baby, but in that moment Ana seemed so full of life.

Ana and I arranged to talk the following afternoon. We continued meeting regularly for more than six months. I listened to her tell the details of her past, and I spoke with her family members and other loved ones. The more I spoke with her, the more she inspired me. Hers is a story of survival, strength, and resilience.

This book is based on Ana’s childhood and adolescence as she told it to me. It is a mosaic of her life, using words instead of shards of broken tile to create an image of her past and a framework for her future. It also embodies all of what I’ve learned working with UNICEF. In order to write it, I interviewed and spent time with many people other than Ana—the people most important to her as well as other children and their families living in similar circumstances, nonprofit leaders and workers, and my knowledgeable UNICEF colleagues.

While I was moved by Ana’s story, it became clear that she represented all the children I worked with, and I wanted the book to portray both the realities and the emotions of all the people I came to know.

This is a work of narrative nonfiction. I have written the dialogue based on what others expressed to me. Names and places have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved. I have made every attempt to convey what Ana told me of the situations and emotions in her life honestly and accurately.

Ana’s story is unique, but many children around the world share similar experiences. The book is set in Latin America because that is where Ana grew up, but her hardships happen far too often to children in the United States and throughout the world. According to UNICEF’s State of the World’s Children 2007 report, 2.3 million children live with HIV/AIDS worldwide, and millions more suffer from child abuse and neglect. Ana put a face on these statistics; she made these abstract numbers very real and personal.

Ana exemplifies a universal truth about secrets: Children need to be free to discuss all of life’s issues—including the traumas of physical or sexual abuse, illness, or neglect—with safe and trustworthy adults who can educate them and help them handle their situations. Equipped with information and knowledge, children can then take the steps necessary to protect themselves and to break the cycle that perpetuates abuse and spreads disease from one generation to the next.

While Ana’s story is compelling in its own right, the final section of this book also provides information about how you can move from knowledge to action.

It includes:

Suggestions for how readers can help children in their own communities and around the world

A list of websites and organizations for readers who want additional information about the themes of the book

Myths and common misconceptions about HIV/AIDS and abuse

Discussion questions that can be used while reading the book at school or in book groups to encourage conversations about the challenges Ana and other children face

Using these resources, you can help UNICEF and other organizations that assist children throughout the world succeed in preventing and easing the suffering of those like Ana. A portion of proceeds from this book will benefit the U.S. Fund for UNICEF.

Ana's Story

A Journey of Hope

1

Ana had one picture of her mother. It was not an original photograph but a color photocopy.

The image had been laminated, sealed in plastic for protection, so that it would last forever. When she was ten, Ana decorated the corners with sparkly stickers of flowers and stars. She handled the photocopy so often that the corners had started to curl and the plastic had begun to fray and come apart.

All of her life, Ana’s aunts and uncles told her that she looked just like her mamá. Ana sometimes stood in front of the mirror, holding the photocopy next to her face. She wanted to see if her eyes really were the same as her mother’s. Ana shifted her focus from her eyes to her mother’s eyes until the images blurred and she could not tell where her mother ended and she began.

In the photocopy, Ana’s mother was young; she was only sixteen when Ana was born. She had big brown eyes and feathers of dyed blond hair. Her skin, the color of cocoa, looked fresh, smooth, and polished. Ana hoped her family was right; she hoped she looked like her beautiful mamá.

Ana’s mother had been gone for so long that Ana could only recall the curves of her face by looking at the ragged photocopy. Ana taped the picture to the wall of her bedroom at pillow height so that she could stare at it before she went to sleep, comforted in knowing that if she ever forgot what her mother looked like, she could glance over and remember.

2

Ana had only one actual memory of her mother. It was not vivid but vague and somewhat confusing. She remembered this piece of her past like a black-and-white movie, the images blurred and out of focus, beyond reach.

In the memory—Ana’s first—she was three years old. She stood in the hallway outside a bathroom; her mother was on the other side of the door, sobbing and wailing.

Mamá, Ana whispered through the wooden door. Are you okay?

She could hear her mother crying, then trying to catch her breath.

Mamá?

Ana put her hand on the knob and turned it. She pulled open the door and peeked inside. Her mother leaned against the wall with one hand and turned and looked at Ana through puffy red eyes. Her mother’s hand trembled as she reached up to wipe the tears that streamed down her cheeks.

Ana, her father said from the hall, leave Mamá alone, por favor. Ana felt confused and afraid. Her papá’s eyes were also red and he, too, had been crying.

Your sister Lucía—, he started, then stopped. He drew a deep breath and then said quickly, Your sister has died.

Ana heard the words, but she didn’t really understand. She was too young to comprehend the meaning of death and grief. All she saw was that Mamá and Papá were crying, and that made her uneasy and afraid.

Okay, Ana whispered, backing away from the door.

She knew that her mother had gone to the hospital and given birth to her youngest sister in the summertime. She knew that Lucía was sick and that her mother had come home without the baby. Mamá went to see Lucía at the hospital every morning but always returned home alone.

Ana had never met her baby sister, and now she never would.

Lucía died when she was two months old.

3

Lucía’s death was Ana’s first secret. During her first days of school, Ana and her classmates marched like sailors, wearing the mandatory school uniforms of her country, white blouses and navy pants or skirts. When anyone asked, Do you have any sisters or brothers? she usually responded, Yes, I have one sister, Isabel, and she looks exactly like me.

Ana considered the response truthful, if incomplete. She willingly and openly spoke about Isabel, who was not yet in school because she was two years younger, but she didn’t want to talk about Lucía. Lucía’s life was like a dream, disconnected and private.

4

When friends asked about her family, Ana talked about her life as if it belonged to someone else. She recited the facts like poems she memorized at school. But so many memories were missing that her past was like Swiss cheese, filled with holes.

Mamá died when I was three, Ana told anyone who asked where her mother was. This was true, but in the place where childhood memories belong, Ana had nothing—a void. She only repeated what other family members told her about her mamá.

Ana didn’t remember Mamá growing weak and pale in the months after Lucía’s death. She didn’t remember Mamá’s face becoming gaunt and skeletal; she didn’t remember her mamá’s breathing becoming labored and slow, the pause between breaths growing longer and longer, until her breathing stopped. Ana’s mamá was not yet twenty when she died of AIDS.

She was sick, Ana told those who pressed for more information.

With what?

I don’t know, Ana replied. It was the truth because that’s all she would know for many years.

5

Long ago Ana stopped asking for details about Mamá’s sickness. She stopped asking about Lucía’s death. She stopped asking why every morning and night her abuela, her grandmother, walked to the kitchen cabinet and pulled out an orange pill bottle and passed Ana the white pills that she swallowed with water.

Ana did what she was told. She accepted her life at face value. After Mamá died, Ana and Isabel moved in with their abuela. At age twenty-one, Papá didn’t think he could raise two toddlers on his own, so he took his daughters to live with his mother. Ana and Isabel shared a bed in their grandmother’s small home.

Abuela’s tin-roofed house was in a poor barrio in the rolling hills just outside the city. Cars and buses sped along the dirt road in front of her house, sharing it with the dogs, chickens, and horses that roamed freely.

Ana’s barrio looked nothing like the modern, urban skyline of the city just ten miles away. Her country was one of