Have you ever met an unlovable person?
I know, I know. God loves everyone… and as His children we are called to love like He does… The issue here isn’t whether we should love the person or not… but rather… sometimes, we come across someone who is extra hard to love… who, no matter how hard you try to be kind, they have a prickly edge to them, a dissatisfied reaction, a disgruntled response… We eventually avoid that person rather than keep on trying… (and that person becomes even more alone and gruff.)
Maribel was that person for me… I met her back in 1996… never happy… always demanding something but never thankful, never content… Her tone of voice, facial expressions, attitudes and actions pushed others away… Her “glue jar” was never far from her nose… sometimes it would be shoved down her shirt if the police were going by or if I insisted I didn’t want to talk without her putting the glue away…
I honestly don’t have one memory of a happy conversation or a funny anecdote of the many times I ran into her on the streets… I accompanied her to her sister’s house once when she was trying to get off the streets… (the lady wasn’t her sister… but was raising Maribel’s little girl…) She was trying to get off the streets… but… the next time she was on the streets… she had run off with her sister’s bedspread…
The main memory I have of Maribel is when her little baby boy was sick… If I remember right, he was around 5 months old… but about the size of a newborn… I remember his skin, especially on his hands, was all crusty and gross… The skin was a minor issue… I can’t remember specifics about the other issues…but we took him to a Christian pediatrician…
The doctor asked Maribel to step out for a minute… He said something like this… “There is really nothing physically wrong with the baby… he is dying from lack of love… No medicine will make him better… he needs love.” I’m sure I talked with Maribel about it… encouraging her in her baby’s care… but it wasn’t too long afterwards that I bought a tiny little white casket…
All of these years, whenever I have thought about this situation, I’ve always shed tears for the baby… How could a precious little bundle live… actually not live… How could a precious little baby DIE without love? Years ago I heard about babies in Romanian or Russian orphanages who died because of a lack of physical touch/love/care… Babies who weren’t held or loved couldn’t “thrive”.
But I’ve always sadly wondered how could a baby die from lack of love when he was held by the mother who carried him within her womb… who delivered him… and heard his first cry… who breast fed him… and saw him grow… How?
…and I’ve always thought, that poor little one…
Rosendo taught me a lesson several weeks ago… I need to write it down so it’s not forgotten…
I met him in ’96 when he was shining shoes in a park downtown; he was about 18 or 19… He started running away from home when he was 7… His mom would look for him and bring him back home but he kept running away… In the end, she gave up… The municipality would find the 7 year old on the streets, haul him away to a boy’s home… but, Rosendo would escape… Eventually, they gave up too… Now he has basically lived 29 out of his 36 years, on the streets… Rosendo only had 7 years of “home life”… and if he kept running away from it, I highly doubt that it was a healthy environment…
It’s been YEARS since I had seen Rosendo… Out of the blue a few weeks ago, he showed up at El Jordan on a very wet, very cold and very miserable afternoon… He was shivering, soaking wet… a little wide-eyed… holding onto his shoe shine box… accompanied by Franklin who used to shine shoes in the same park but now has a family and is working a “regular” job… This was obviously something more than just a “drop in to say hi” visit…
Drinking hot coffee to warm up… Rosendo started telling his story… Do you remember Maribel? To make sure we were thinking about the same Maribel I asked a couple questions… Of course I remember Maribel…
Apparently he lived with Maribel for a while. He has a little “room” on the edge of town where he is a “caretaker” and therefore doesn’t pay rent… He’d take her “home”… but then she’d start sniffing glue again and go back to the streets… His shoe shining buddies thought he was crazy… why would he chose a glue sniffer as his “woman”? But apparently, he loved her…
Maribel wasn’t too interested in settling down… and ending up back with her glue sniffing crowd… A while later she was arrested and sent to prison on a couple charges… On May 9th of this year, she was let go… Maribel was apparently sick… and the word was that the jail didn’t want her to die inside… so they let her go!
Free once again, Maribel returned to the streets… to the “Vuela, vuelas” (the “Flier, fliers”…. Rosendo’s word for the glue sniffers who “fly” all the time) …but Maribel really was sick… and when she couldn’t keep up with the rest of her “friends” when they went to “get” money for their drugs, they would leave her behind…
Maribel was all alone, sick, couldn’t eat, couldn’t walk and couldn’t even sniff glue. Her thin legs were bloated out of proportion and she was crouched in the shadows of the streets, enveloped in an oversized sweater… That’s when Rosendo walked by… Maribel called out to him… He couldn’t recognize her… and was afraid it was Marina who left a scar across his face a few years ago… “It’s me… Maribel…”
“She wasn’t ‘my woman’ any more…. but I couldn’t just leave her there.” Rosendo took her “home” and for the next month or so tended to her… She didn’t want to eat… so he’d cook her up some noodle soup and spoon feed her… Her legs would ache…. So he’d rub her down with some cheap Chinese menthol rub… Even being sick, Maribel would kick and complain (I can just imagine!!!)… but Rosendo would patiently wait until she was sleeping… and then rub her legs… There wasn’t any money to take her to the doctor… and even if there was, Maribel flatly refused to go to any hospital…
Rosendo would shine shoes during the day… and then come home and make her some food… and they would eat… “You’re going to get better! Just eat this for me…” “If you keep eating, soon you’ll be able to walk again…” Maribel seemed to be getting better… Rosendo was happy… it was like he had found a reason to work… and go home… Maribel slept in his “bed”… and he made himself a bed on the floor beside her…
And then Maribel got a terrible diarrhea… and she lost all of her appetite… She had terrible sores on her lips and she insisted on trying to peel them whenever Rosendo wasn’t watching… Rosendo couldn’t go and shine shoes very often because Maribel needed him to carry her outside to go to the bathroom… it got to be so uncontrollable that Rosendo had to always wash and change her clothes…
“Hermana” Rosendo told me, “She didn’t want to eat any more… I made her soup but she didn’t want to eat…” That night Maribel was so weak and sick, Rosendo sat on his little shoe shine box, right beside her… He talked with her and told her that they needed to pray… that “the One above” was the only one who could help them… and make her better. “Pray Maribel. Pray… He will help us… He will get us through this…”
By this time, both Fabiola (the interim administrator) and I were getting all teary eyed…
At about 4 a.m. Rosendo couldn’t keep awake any longer and he rested his head on the bed and dozed off… He woke up a couple hours later… and Maribel was no longer responsive… her shoulders up were all cold but her body was still warm… He tried to wake her up… and his frantic calls started to bring the neighbors…
Rosendo didn’t know what to do… He looked for Maribel’s “sister” but she didn’t want to help… “Let her die… we tried to help her so often and she’d always take off stealing something…” It was a terribly cold and wet day… Rosendo had left his “home” with only 2 Bs. to his name… He wandered all day looking for someone to help him... His shoe shine buddies scared him by saying that if Maribel died in his care, the police would charge him with homicide…
He met up with Franklin… who brought him to us…
“…and Maribel? What happened… where is she?” Rosendo’s eyes got really wide again… and he said, “I don’t know. I tried to wake her up but she wouldn’t wake up…” So here we have been talking for almost an hour… and poor Maribel is all by herself… we don’t even know if she is still hanging on?? If she is still alive, what can we do with her? If she isn’t, what can we do with her?
Oh dear me!!!!!!!!!!!!!! How do I get into these situations!???!!! At the time, Marco and I were sharing my truck so I called him to please bring it to me… and for him to stay with the kids… I called the AIDS clinic to ask if they would have room for a patient if I happened to bring someone… and off we went… (I had heard rumors that Maribel had AIDS… and asked Rosendo if he knew anything… Apparently he had heard rumors as well… but I don’t think he believed any of them until I said something… He started asking questions about whether he might be sick now too… and about getting tested.)
Fabiola accompanied me… she is a medical doctor so if Maribel was still alive maybe she could help… In any case, I figured it would be an eye-opener for her to see where our girls come from… It was already 5 p.m. by the time we got to Rosendo’s neighborhood… A group of neighbors were standing around… it didn’t look good.
A neighbor lady had looked in on Maribel around lunch time… and she had already passed away… They had no way of getting a hold of Rosendo… nor Maribel’s sister… so in the end, they called the police… who came in the Homicide truck (minutes before we got there) to pick her up… Poor Rosendo…
Rosendo went to his room to find Maribel’s sole document – a photocopy of her “freedom papers” from jail… The neighbor lady took us to show us where Rosendo lives… It was a tiny shack, a few pieces of tin roofing covered maybe three quarters of the roof… the walls were made of little pieces of wood and rags… I CAN NOT imagine how cold and miserable it must be in our winter weather… There was no outhouse… no running water… no stove or gas tank… There was a little cot with a couple old blankets on top… the room wasn’t terribly much wider than the bed… and I could imagine Rosendo sitting there on his shoe shine box… holding Maribel’s hand… “Pray Maribel. Pray. He can help us…”
In that terribly miserable situation, Maribel was shown kindness… patience and love… Rosendo must have cooked over a little fire outside… and he must have brought water from a neighbor’s house to wash clothes… and his bathroom must have been the little bushes off to one side… In that little spot, hours before she passed away, she was urged to “cry out to God…”
To me, she was irritating… I didn’t have the patience to show her love, kindness, hope… Wow… Rosendo, you who have no background of love, showed me a lesson… a huge reminder…
“If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love,
I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge,
and if I have a faith that can move mountains,
but do not have love, I am nothing.
If I give all I possess to the poor
and give over my body to hardship that I may boast,
but do not have love, I gain nothing.”
Thank you Rosendo.
The story doesn’t end there… A few neighbors, Rosendo, Fabiola and I were standing outside of his “room”… They were wondering what needed to be done now… they wanted to give Maribel a decent burial… I offered to pay for the coffin if Rosendo and the others figured out where to bury her… (Not really out of generosity… it was more a quick, easy way out… because I knew I wouldn’t have time to be running around looking for documents and a cemetery plot…)
In Bolivia, you are required to bury the person within 24 hours… We found out that the policemen had taken Maribel’s paper and that it had to be picked up at the morgue… Nothing could be done without that paper… so everyone was telling Rosendo he needed to go to the morgue… He said, but I don’t know what to say… I get too nervous to talk to people… I felt bad for him… and said that I could at least take him there and get things underway… He was also too afraid to call Maribel’s sister (Teresa) because she had talked so nastily in the morning about not wanting to help… Fortunately, the sister softened and offered to help...
In the end, it was crazy… they finally buried Maribel on the 5th day… We had to knock on many doors… pleading… trying to find loopholes… because Maribel not only didn’t have ANY documents… NO one knew where and when she was born… NO one knew the names of her mom and dad… nothing… She was completely alone in the world… No one knows where three of her four living kids are… none of them carry her name… The fourth has been adopted and raised as Teresa’s daughter…
Teresa met Maribel when she was only 10 years old and wearing only underwear and a t-shirt… Her aunt had kicked her out when the “uncle” tried to abuse her but the aunt blamed Maribel… Teresa and Maribel’s paths didn’t cross again for another 4 years… Teresa and Rosendo say that Maribel NEVER, EVER talked about her mom or her dad… No one knows anything about her family… except that one situation with the aunt… What happened before Maribel was 10 and ended up living with the aunt? Why was the topic of her parents so closed for her? Where did she go after that until she ended up on the streets a couple years later? Nobody knows… Maribel died with her painful secrets…
All of a sudden, Maribel being very unlikable is more understandable… The situation of her baby dying from lack of love takes on a different slant… an unloved mom who didn’t know how to love her own self… maybe she despised her own self so much she couldn’t love her son who was part of her… I’m ashamed that I could never see beyond her negative exterior… How could she ever understand a God of love when “love” was so distorted… Rosendo might have been the closest to actually portraying what love should mean…
How many people do we write off… avoid… dislike… when maybe that person so desperately needs someone to care for them???? We have the greatest example of selfless love in Jesus Christ… who laid his life down for us…
Now we need to live it… put it into practice...
Thanks Rosendo for your reminder…
Thank you for your patience in listening… I appreciate being able to share my lessons with you… God bless you richly… and trust you have a great week….
Corina… for Marco, Keiden and Marlee…