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 The
young women were just 18, one raised amid wealth in America, the other
amid poverty in Peru.
They united in trying to save the life of a child, and in that battle
something else developed. They were teaching each other lessons to live
by.
They met in September 1998. Alejandrina Santos Barolo had given birth
14 weeks earlier. Her baby boy had a horrible birth defect, a cleft
lip and palate that left him with a hole in his face so disturbing that
the young mother was hiding him in their one-room home. Unable to nurse,
he was starving to death.
Julie Rosenberg had just arrived in Peru, a recent American high school
graduate who was starting a yearlong volunteer project before enrolling
at Harvard College. She was walking into a new world, the despair in
Santos's one-room home and the community around it.
Rosenberg's first reaction was a sense of helplessness. But she overcame
the feeling, and came back the next day, and the days after that. In
the end, she found a way to help Santos keep the baby alive, and then
to achieve the nearly impossible: allowing him to face the world with
confidence.
And Santos, who at first wasn't sure whether she could trust Rosenberg,
began telling the story of her life and then started building a life.
Along the way, she taught Rosenberg about poverty, illiteracy, domestic
violence, and social injustice, not as abstract notions but as forces
that had daily meaning.
Rosenberg was working at a Lima-based health care organization, Socios
en Salud, which she had heard about from her father, Mark, then a senior
official at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. Socios knew
about the Santos baby from a worried neighbor. Rosenberg and Jennifer
Furin, now a junior resident at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston,
went to find him one day.
"We were both horrified by what we saw," said Rosenberg, now
a sophomore at Harvard. "I remember walking down the hill afterward,
feeling almost a sense of panic, trying to figure out what I could do."
The baby, Qleider (pronounced KLY-dehr), couldn't nurse because his
cleft lip and palate prevented him from sucking.
The next morning, Rosenberg returned with a baby spoon and a plastic
container filled with a smooth paste, a mixture of powdered milk, warm
water, and a nutritional cracker. The day after, she came again carrying
the same container. This would become her ritual day after day. At 7:30
a.m., Rosenberg would take a bus, hop in a shared taxi, and then walk
the steep hill to the Santos home.
"At first he wouldn't eat," Rosenberg said recently from her
dorm room in Cambridge. "If we could get one or two spoonfuls in
his mouth, it would be a successful day."
The routine continued for several months. There were many difficult
moments. Qleider's older brother, Elkim, then 3, often threw temper
tantrums. Rosenberg had difficulty communicating in her broken Spanish.
"In the beginning, the days often got harder and harder because
Qleider was coming alive to me, and I felt more passionate about seeing
him live and really wanting little signs of hope," Rosenberg said.
"The situation with the baby was making the family fall apart in
a lot of ways."
Gradually, Qleider took more of the food and slowly gained weight.
"She saved that baby's life," Furin said one day last month
as she approached the Santos house. "It's so rare that a human
being can actually do something like that, but she did it."
But there was more than that to the visits. Daily, Rosenberg's Spanish
improved. And bit by bit, the two women grew close.
"At first, we didn't know what to say to each other," Rosenberg
said. "I couldn't understand how someone could be living with a
baby so close to dying. But after spending time together, I could see
what Alejandrina was going through, and how she ended up in a situation
like she did."
Santos also keenly remembers that time. Sitting outside the new corkboard
hilltop home she moved into in 1999, which was built with a small grant
from Socios, she said she didn't know at first why Rosenberg would be
helping her. No one had ever done that. Her husband blamed her for the
boy's condition, often stomping out of the house to drink and then returning
to beat her. When Rosenberg first came, her husband told her that the
American might be plotting to kidnap the baby.
"I was alone in the world," said Santos, whose family lives
in a hamlet at the edge of a rain forest, more than a day's trip away.
"Sometimes it felt like Julie was my only friend in the whole world.
Julie knew all my problems. She kept telling me not to worry."
Together, the two women decided on the next step for Qleider: surgery
to correct the boy's cleft lip and palate. It would not be easy. Seventeen
times, they took an hourlong minibus trip to a hospital to plead for
help. Some days, they waited in line for hours without reaching a doctor.
Other times, doctors, exhausted from the steady stream of patients,
closed their doors.
Finally, the two women found a doctor who took an interest in Rosenberg.
He flirted with the American; she humored him. It worked. The doctor
agreed to do the surgery to repair Qleider's lip.
Two more operations followed, one to close the lip a second time after
the boy fell and cut it open, and the other to begin to close the palate.
After nearly a year in Peru, Rosenberg returned to the United States
and began premed and anthropology studies at Harvard. She kept in touch
with Santos through letters, hand-delivered by members of Partners in
Health, a nonprofit organization in Cambridge that works in Peru and
several other countries.
Last summer, she returned, apprehensive about what she would find. Santos
was reinvigorated. She had more confidence, had reconnected with her
parents and a sister, had started a small store out of her home, and
had even changed her hairstyle.
"She had taken control of everything," Rosenberg said.
And Qleider was running around with children in the neighborhood, the
stigma of his cleft lip just a bad memory.
"I realized that Alejandrina and I had connected on a basic human
level and we learned that we were more alike than it may have seemed,"
Rosenberg said. "In a lot of ways, she gave more to me than I gave
to her. She kind of opened my mind and showed me how we can get past
things that normally block us, like class or race or even languages,
and how similar we all are."
There was another lesson, too, said Rosenberg, now 20: "She also
taught me a lot about what I want to do with my life, about what's important
to me, and what can be done in terms of sticking with something and
having a goal and fighting for that."
In Lima, Santos, now 20 as well, looks forward to their next visit,
which they hope will be this summer when Rosenberg returns for a month
to work on a video on Socios's work there.
"She's going to be Qleider's godmother," said Santos, standing
on her hilltop in slacks and a Marblehead T-shirt, a present from Rosenberg.
"It's my dream to have Qleider's baptism with Julie because she
loves him. And I, too, can't wait for her to come down. We have a lot
to talk about."
-Boston Globe, Sunday, March 25, 2001
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