Noelia:
Maybe I could have saved
|
 PERU Focus |
One of Pastor
Julian’s volunteers is a 14-year-old girl called Noelia Castillo
Miranda. In some ways her story is typical of many young people in this
area. She lives next door to the church with her mother and three siblings,
one of whom is a mother of two herself. Noelia’s father left them
when she was quite young and her sister’s husband has left her
with two small children, too.
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| Noelia Castillo Miranda, 14, with 11-month-old Akoni. Noelia helps Pastor Julian Tarazona Bermudez with the Pan de Vida project in the Esmeralda de los Andes Church (`Emerald of the Andes`). Lima, Peru. Photo: UBS/Stein Mydske (PER03DJ-29.JPG) |
“I had two other sisters but they died,” she says. The youngest died at birth because the doctors didn’t provide the care she needed. The other sister was 12 years older than Noelia and committed suicide four years ago.
Just ten years old at the time, Noelia blames herself for not having done more to save her sister’s life. She tells the story with tears in her eyes.
When her sister was 22 she started to spend every day with her boyfriend. Her parents objected and beat her to try to stop her from going out. In desperation she started taking pills. Noelia still remembers how she went to her sister’s room on the night she died. She could see that she was sick but she didn’t dare wake her mother.
“Maybe, if I had woken my mother up so that she could have gone to the hospital, I could have saved her life that night,” she says. These days, by working as a volunteer helping with the breakfasts and with Bible classes for the youngest children, she is trying to help children whose situation is even worse than her own.
“I want to be a teacher when I
grow up,” she says with a tentative smile. (WR
388/9 - 10/11.04) 