Wings of a Bird

In pictures: E Timor's angel of mercy - BBC News
Since East Timor's independence in 2002, factional fighting has wracked the country and driven thousands from their homes.
Many have fled to Sister Guillermina's convent in Dili.
Sister Guillermina is a university lecturer, but spends much of her time running the camp for people sheltered in the Canossian Sisters of Charity convent.
Tom Greenwood photographed and interviewed the nun known for rescuing people caught up in fighting and stepping in to reason with violent gang members.
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In September 2006, rival gangs surrounded the convent for five days, throwing rocks over the walls. They targeted it for sheltering people from both sides.
Sister Guillermina convinced them to stop.
"I locked the gate. I shouted: 'Please stop stoning because Sister Guillermina is coming'. I am amazed that my voice is so strong at certain times."
She approached the leaders first and then the boys individually. "In times of crisis I kiss and embrace thousands of boys."
Working for peace is dangerous, even for nuns. Sister Guillermina has had a knife held to her neck 11 times and a gun pointed to her head three times. "The first time I was scared but then I got used to it."
...
Sister Guillermina calls being a nun "a great blessing. I am free to save everyone without preference." ...

Labels: compassionate people, war

India's poor are denied a painless death - International Herald Tribune
It was a neighbor screaming in pain 35 years ago that set M.R. Rajagopal on the path to his nickname: India's "father of palliative care."
"He was dying of cancer, with lots of tumors on his face and scalp," Rajagopal said. "His family asked if I could help, and I couldn't. I was just a medical student."
Today, the same neighbor with the same cancer would almost certainly die the same way - unless he lived in the tiny state of Kerala, where Rajagopal runs his Pallium India clinic here in the capital. Although opium was one of the chief exports of British India and the country still produces more for the legal morphine industry than any other country, few Indians benefit. They end up like millions of the world's poor: spending their last days writhing in agony, wishing death would hurry.
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Elsewhere, the state laws enforcing the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, passed in 1985 to curb drug trafficking, are complex and harsh. The book outlining them is 1,642 pages, and even minor infractions can mean 10-year sentences. Legal morphine use in India plummeted 97 percent after 1985, reaching a low of 40 pounds in 1997. It has since crept up.
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Rajagopal's manner is soothing; he sits on beds, holds hands and even strokes patients as he questions them.
"For a senior doctor in India, that's just unheard of," Leng said. "They usually keep a formal distance."
Talking unravels fears. Chandraprabha, 40, who like many people here uses only one name, avoided her hourly pills because she could not bear to look at a clock. it reminded her she was dying and her children would go to a stepmother she detested.
Abdulaziz, 62, said that what upset him more than death was that he felt too unclean to pray.
"My body is not pure," Abdulaziz said. "Also, because of the bandage, it's difficult to bathe."
He had sung the call to prayer at his mosque for 20 years, but had to stop in January when mouth cancer left him able only to mutter. Then the aggressive tumor ate through his face, making a beefy crater. as if a firecracker tucked in his cheek had gone off. Then, worse: A fly got under his bandage, and maggots began emerging, leading his imam to "excuse" him from attendance.
That was something Rajagopal's team could help with, cleaning out the ghastly invaders. And the six five-milligram morphine pills Abdulaziz takes daily have taken away what he called "a catching pain, like a fishhook in my face."
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As a young anesthesiologist, he helped a professor with a cheek tumor by injecting alcohol to kill the nerve. It worked - but the professor hanged himself two nights later."I learned from his cousin that the fact that I had treated him for his pain alone was what told him his condition was incurable," Rajagopal said, still feeling guilty about it. "None of us had ever asked him what he knew about his disease, or how he felt. If only we had, maybe his children could have had their father for a couple of years more." ...

Labels: compassionate people, suffering

Journey's end for a paralyzed soldier - Seattle P-I
Capt. Drew Jensen almost lived long enough to see his fellow soldiers from the 3rd Stryker Brigade come home.
Jensen, a West Point graduate, was shot in the neck and paralyzed in May. On Friday, doctors and his family followed his wishes and turned off life support at the Puget Sound VA hospital.
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Jensen was on his second deployment as a mortar platoon leader when a sniper's bullet struck him in the neck during an insurgent attack in Baqouba, Iraq. Jensen was wounded as he tried to help a fellow soldier who was pinned behind a vehicle after a bomb explosion, according to e-mail updates sent to friends and family by his wife.
One of Jensen's last actions in life was to look out for other wounded soldiers at the VA Hospital in Seattle. Before his death, he designated that a $10,000 fund established in his name should go to help offset the housing costs of other families who travel far to be near their wounded loved one's bedside.
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Jensen fought to regain as much function as he could. He was transferred to the Puget Sound VA on June 1.
"It was a great day when I walked in, and Drew announced he had been cleared to swallow water," his wife wrote in an update.
Doctors at the VA were also able to adjust his ventilator so he could use his own voice when he spoke, which freed up their communication.
"We usually read his lips and while perfecting this talent may help with my future career as a spy, I much prefer to hear his voice," she wrote. ...

Labels: compassionate people, war

After thousands of interviews, it is I who have been enriched - Susan Paynter, Seattle P-I
... Myrlie Evers, wife of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, had stayed blindingly busy and had never before talked about that night her husband fell dead in the driveway. "The bullet went through his body, a window, a Venetian blind, a wall, hit the refrigerator and came to rest -- you won't believe this -- under a watermelon on the counter," she told me in 1972, four years after I started here.
I can still hear the lush timbre of her voice saying she had been so full of hatred that she sat in court wanting a "slow, torturous death" by her own hands for the man tried twice but never convicted in the killing. And how she'd severed herself from that hate.
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Remarkably unexpected stories also found me in a bland building that contained the secrets of the "dead by unnatural causes" on Seattle's Alder Street. Inside, tender-hearted Dr. Richard Harruff ushered me into a walk-in refrigerator where nine bodies lay wrapped in plastic pods. He treated each with the reverence their families might have wished for but surely didn't expect in the clinical, stainless-steel realm of a King County medical examiner.
In 1999 -- before TV's "CSI" -- the man in owlish spectacles had treated the remains of Kurt Cobain and an incinerated baby with equal respect. Almost as incantation, he murmured, measuring tragic waste along with organs. "Ridiculous," he said over gunk-coated black-tar spoons and the still-strapping remains of young men shot for money.
Like food, I have found raw, unprocessed feelings to be the most nourishing.
[Richard is a longtime Kadampa Buddhist. - ed.]
...

Labels: compassionate people

Lottery winner spreads fortune to others - Whittier Daily News
When Virginia Andujo - now of Pico Rivera - won the Mega Millions jackpot nearly two years ago, it changed her life.
Andujo, 57, now is trying to change the lives of others with her $50 million windfall.
She's going to give about $11,000 to St. Hilary Catholic Church for a new shrine for cancer victims.
And Friday, she gave a check for nearly $600 to Jesus Lopez, 16, of Whittier to allow him to buy a letterman's jacket.
"My thing is to help people as the Lord helped me," Andujo said. "I like helping people. That's the type of person I am. If somebody asks me for something, I will help them."
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But when she won the lottery, she and her husband, Victor, were both out of work, about to be evicted from their Montebello apartment and relying on food banks in order to eat.
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Andujo said she is giving the money to St. Hilary because the church helped her out during tough times.
Two years before winning the lottery in December 2005, five family members died over the course of a month.
Andujo and her late husband, Victor, were so poor they didn't have enough money for funerals.
"I came to St. Hilary and the father said, `Don't worry about the money."'
Andujo said her ultimate goal is to open a women's shelter.

Labels: compassionate people, karma

Seahawks wide receiver makes play against sickle cell: Engram raises awareness, money - Seattle P-I
... "The confusion turned into anger, then turned into a fact-finding mission," said Engram, a wide receiver for the Seattle Seahawks. "The only thing I knew about sickle cell was it was painful."
To help raise awareness and money for research, Engram created the Walk for Sickle Cell Disease ...
"I was dealing with my daughter, but I saw other people in the trenches and wanted to know how I could use what I know and what I have to help," Engram said.
In sickle cell disease, the protein that carries oxygen in the blood changes into sickle-like shapes that clog blood vessels and block blood flow. Patients suffer from severe pain episodes that can last for days. The disease can also cause anemia, organ failure, infections and sometimes death.
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Though her pain episodes have become less frequent as she gets older, Engram still has his "Bobbi Kit" of heat packs, salts and massage oils to help her endure the pain. He describes her ordeal like a painful full-body muscle cramp that lasts for days. ...

Labels: compassionate people, sickness

Baby boy born five days after father's death in Iraq - Seattle P-I
... Five days after her husband, Joel, a Fort Lewis soldier, was killed in Iraq, [19-year-old Alia ] Dahl gave birth to their first child.
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Her ordeal, however, was compounded last week when a thief stole her car and everything inside. Albuquerque residents were furious, said Bernalillo (N.M.) County Sheriff Darren White.
"I can't tell you how angry I was at this low-life creep who did this," White said by phone Friday.
"The community has really felt strong about righting this wrong. Alia's life had been turned upside down and to add to it having her car stolen -- that was enough to put the community over the edge."
Dahl's water broke Thursday night just after deputies recovered her 1988 Honda Civic. It was damaged, with parts torn out. Dahl wasn't concerned with that. Also gone: a baby quilt made by a grandmother, photos of her husband and a CD of their favorite songs he had made for her before he left.
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White said the response from the community was electric. More than $30,000 had been collected for the fund by Friday. "I've probably been offered 15 cars," White said. "The hallway outside my office looks like I had a baby shower; (it's) covered in baby supplies, diapers, wipes and clothes." ...

Labels: compassionate people, war

Soccer team provides hope for refugees, coach - MSNBC.com
Players have escaped war, but not poverty and racism
... But the members of this soccer team, aptly named the Fugees, are anything but typical American teens. They have come to this small town on the outskirts of Atlanta to escape their war-torn homes in Afghanistan and Sudan and Bosnia. In a way, this soccer team, started by a young woman who once felt lost herself, provides an escape from the hardships that they now face as refugees starting over America.
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“One kid on my team saw his dad shot to death. I’ve had another kid see his dad’s fingers cut off in front of him and then his shoulder slashed. Some of the moms have been raped. These kids, the rebels take them and they say, oh, you’re gonna be a soldier for us. And they give them drugs. They give them weapons. They’re giving them a bandana to identify which group they’re with. And they send them out to kill and you’re thinking about them and you’re like, how can — you know, how did — how did you survive that?”
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While they are physically safe now, Luma knows that life in America poses its own challenges. Most of the kids’ parents have no education so the poverty at home is often crushing. They battle constant racisim on and off the field. Some of her players told Luma it feels as if they have exchanged one war for another.
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In one game, Luma instructed her players to smile no matter what. The team obliged, even when the opposing coach got ejected for calling one of them the "n" word.
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Luma has become more than just a coach to her players, who range in age from 9 to 17. She has become an advocate, fighting for better fields; she is a source of income, having started a cleaning business that employs six refugee women; and she is a pivotal figure in her players' attempts to integrate. She knows the soccer field may be their refuge, but the classroom is their future. So with the help of volunteers, she’s instituted tutoring sessions after each practice. ...

Labels: compassionate people, suffering

For Poor Families, an Added Burden of Too Many Pets - N.Y. Times
Phillip Swetman is an accidental owner of 13 dogs. Most, Mr. Swetman said, came from “drive-bys.” “They hear a dog bark and they throw theirs in the ditch,” he said. “Then for us, it’s either let them starve or get hit by a car, or take them in.”
Midnight dumping of unwanted dogs is common here on the southern tail of the Appalachian Mountains, where large numbers of poor people are attached to multiple pets but cannot afford to sterilize or vaccinate them, and where impoverished county governments do not maintain animal shelters, require licensing or enforce requirements for rabies shots.
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“I’d do without food myself before they do,” Ms. Swetman said. But they say with some despair that veterinary care, which can run $100 a year per animal for vaccines and $100 or more for spaying or neutering, is far beyond their reach.
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Alicia Swetman looked especially anguished because she learned that one of her puppies, the one with one blue eye and one brown eye, had a health problem that made surgery too dangerous. To Ms. Swetman’s relief, as the puppies were brought out, their tails wagging furiously at the reunion, Dr. Love said it was probably a curable worm infection.
“I’d happily give these two away to a good home, where they’d be loved,” Ms. Swetman said, not entirely convincingly, as she hugged the afflicted puppy.

Labels: animals, compassionate people

School of second chances puts troubled kids at head of the class - Seattle P-I
Interagency Academy a place where every student fights the odds to graduate
... The first thing students see as they arrive at the University District Youth Center School in the morning is teacher Mike McCann's welcoming smile.
One by one, the alienated, the angry, the scared file through the door. McCann offers a simple "hello" and a handshake to each. He's not the only one: Colleagues Kevin Geloff and Richard King also stop to greet students.
They make sure to look each student in the eye, and the meaning is clear: I notice you. I care that you're here.
"It's this corny little routine," McCann admits. "But I love it."
Interagency teachers' jobs are about more than just academics. At times they may serve as a counselor, mentor, nurse, drill sergeant, social worker, confidante.
In one 10-minute stretch, Frye may have to get a student started on his PowerPoint project, withdraw grant money for an expectant mother to buy maternity clothes, help a girl brainstorm senior project ideas and help another absent-minded student find his graduation tickets.
Teachers connect students with case managers and counseling, help them land a job or an internship, provide access to a food and clothing bank, or guide them through the state's labyrinth of social services.
They know personal, sometimes intimate details of each student's life: whose father is doing time for gang-related crimes, or which girl is afraid to go home to her verbally abusive mother.
Sometimes, the hardest part is listening without judging.
"You have to be neutral about everything," Frye says, a touch ruefully. "You can't share your personal opinion or beliefs. Your role is guiding them to a decision that will work for them."
...
[See also the associated profiles of 3 of the students.]

Labels: compassionate people

Photo gallery: Portraits of Alzheimer's patients and the family members who care for them - Newsweek
... John Hummel, 50, lifts his mother, Virginia, 91, in their St. Louis apartment. Hummel quit his job as an auto mechanic and moved in with his mother because he believed that the nursing home where she had been living was neglectful. He says that he does not regret his decision. He is his mother's only child and remembers how she left her career when he was born. 'It's time I do that and take care of her. I feel turnaround is fair play,' he says. ...

Labels: compassionate people, sickness, suffering

Amid the Chaos of War, Gifts of Music - Washington Post
Thanks to Couple's Efforts, Troops in Iraq Get Instruments
... And that is how Sgt. Jason Low received an acoustic guitar from Steve Baker, a Vietnam veteran of modest means and powerful purpose. Baker and his wife, Barb, run Fergus Music, a shop here in a rural patch of Minnesota not far from the North Dakota line. Together, they have shipped more than 300 guitars, mandolins, harmonicas, drums and wind instruments to Iraq to ease the strain of the soldiering life.
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In 2004, his stepson, a soldier in Iraq, requested a guitar, so he sent one. The stepson's friend wanted one, so he dispatched another. Pretty soon, the requests were coming faster than the newly christened Operation Happy Note could respond. The waiting list is now more than 150 names long.
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"When I was in, nobody cared. I mean, Vietnam, my God," he said, recalling how some Americans swore at troops. "All I got was hooting and hollering, and I remember that to this day. There's no way I'm going to allow that to happen to these kids."
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After learning of Happy Note from an officer in his unit, he e-mailed the Bakers and quickly received an affirmative reply. He had to read it twice before it sank in. When the guitar arrived in a 3-foot-by-2-foot box, he considered it "satisfying and overwhelming that the kindness of the world has not diminished and people still care about us over here." ...

Labels: compassionate people, war

Off the Street and in an Apartment, but Unable to Escape Homelessness - N.Y. Times
For years, Johnny Five lived not on the streets but below them, in the dark underworld beneath an abandoned train station in the Bronx. Johnny uses two pieces of plywood as the door to the place he has called home for 21 years. He had to crawl in the dirt at the edge of a concrete platform to get in and out. He bathed with rubbing alcohol, but still his skin was covered with insect bites and infections. He said God talked to him there, sometimes through a portable radio, yet he considered his cave a kind of hell: overheated in the summer, frigid in the winter, a sunless place hard on the body but worse on the soul.
It was Christmas Eve when he first heard the news: Someone was offering him a way out. After reading an article about Johnny in The New York Times, Peter D. Beitchman, the executive director of the Bridge Inc., a nonprofit group that provides housing and services to mentally ill homeless people and others, immediately arranged for him to move into an apartment.
Days later, Johnny celebrated with the one person who had looked after him, Sister Lauria Fitzgerald, a Roman Catholic nun who helps the homeless in the Bronx. They ate dinner with another nun at an Italian restaurant in the Arthur Avenue section, three miles from the cave and around the corner from Johnny’s new home. He feasted on a plate of eggplant parmigiana and enjoyed his first taste of tiramisù.
But he didn’t want to touch the white linen napkin on the table. It was too clean.
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For the next several months, Johnny would drift between his old life underground and his new one above it, struggling the way a man freed from prison must readjust to society.
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Johnny’s homelessness was not about a lack of housing. It was more complicated, a result of a variety of spiritual, psychological and emotional causes. “Everything just bothering my conscience,” he said of the reasons he was homeless. “How can I ask God for forgiveness when I don’t forgive myself? So I’ll torture myself and go to the cave.” ...

Labels: compassionate people, forgiveness, homeless

They labor to leave no child in our state behind - by Seattle P-I columnist Susan Paynter
... Doreen Cato and her staff have performed transformations and salvations daily for a decade at the ... First Place School for Seattle's homeless, neediest children.
... Too many of the kids at First Place School witness violence, death and loss firsthand.
I think of a boy I met who watched his estranged father kill his mother. About his strength and his dream come true to go (with help from P-I readers) to camp where he could surf the ocean off Vancouver Island.
Too often, traumatized children like that don't get the help they should, Cato told me. They live in perpetual fear. They get suspended from school. And they rarely can articulate what is causing them to fail.
Cato knows because she was one of those kids.
She was hospitalized from age 3 to 5 with tuberculosis at the tender time when bonding either happens or does not. Then, at 9, her mother died, leaving her struggling single dad with four kids. And leaving the kids to the attentions of predators.
She and her two sisters were sexually abused. But, even that wasn't the worst of it. "Kids didn't have a voice back then. They weren't believed, especially if the abusers were leaders in the community," Cato said.
She refuses to let that happen to kids on her watch. It's why her energy never wanes. ...

Labels: compassionate people

Victims' mothers trying to move on, save others - Philadelphia Inquirer
... Mandell's 13-year-old son, Koby, was stoned to death in a West Bank cave six years ago by Palestinian attackers; Giddings' and Washington's loved ones fell victim to Philadelphia's gun-violence epidemic.
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Several of the women who met Friday with Mandell belong to Mothers in Charge, a Philadelphia antiviolence group that offers mentoring, anger management and other supports. It is headed by Dorothy Johnson-Speight, who started it after her son was shot to death over a parking space in 2001
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Giddings recalled how her son Andre, along with a friend and her mother, were shot to death at her mother's home more than two years ago in a neighborhood dispute by a man whom her son knew. ... "The loss of a child is one thing, then the loss of a mother is another. But to put those two together, do you know what the total sum would be?" she asked.
She tells people she is coping better, but she has her "moments." A nun told her once: "You can have a moment, but don't take an hour."
Her work with Mothers in Charge and her teenage daughter keep her going, she said. ...

Labels: compassionate people, grief

Hard life for African street children - BBC News
Unicef estimates that more than 200 million children are living on the streets globally.
In Uganda, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that rebel groups are snatching homeless youngsters and forcing them to become child soldiers.
Marsali Campbell, a nurse from Portree in the Isle of Skye, has been working for a mission in Kampala, the country's capital, where she helps to turn around the lives of these vulnerable children.
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Many suffer from depravity, disease, hunger and abuse. We see newborns to teenagers and families headed by children."
Marsali has witnessed five-year-olds living alone on the street and has even seen teenage girls who have spent their whole life on the streets having their own babies while homeless.
These are broken, troubled children who have only ever known suffering
She has also come across numerous abandoned babies. They have been found on the street, in dustbins, tied up in plastic bags and found in pit latrines and swamps. ...

Labels: compassionate people

Across cultures and borders, families of shooting victims are united in grief - A.P.
... Professors, too, were drawn from around the world. Liviu Librescu, 76, survived the Holocaust, Cold War repression in Romania and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before arriving in Blacksburg, Va., as an internationally recognized scholar.
Witnesses said Librescu was shot while holding his classroom door closed so that his students could escape through a window. ...
***
[There's a more detailed article about Prof. Librescu in the N.Y. Times: Professor’s Violent Death Came Where He Sought Peace]

Labels: compassionate people, karma

With a Charity for Soldiers, Youths Make Recycling Pay - N.Y. Times
Two teenagers in Boston have raised $1 million for phone cards for American troops overseas by cashing in on used cellphones.
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On Tuesday, the Bergquists opened an e-mail message — one of more than 50 they get most days — from Sgt. First Class Luis Arzadon, 42, of San Gabriel, Calif., a helicopter mechanic with an Army medevac unit in Iraq.
“I want to let you know that although we don’t know each other, I am extremely proud of you,” Sergeant Arzadon wrote, thanking Brittany and Robbie for helping him stay in touch with his wife and two sons. “I couldn’t do what you have done thus far in touching peoples lives.”
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Three years later, the Bergquists’ recycling network spans more than 4,000 drop-off sites located in every state and in England, Canada and Japan, and yields some 20,000 cellphones a month, which fetch an average of $5 each from a Michigan recycling company that refurbishes them for resale. ...

Labels: compassionate people

Nursing student still works long hours, but the reward is priceless - Seattle P-I
It's a leap from working on Wall Street to being a student nurse at the University of Washington, but former New Yorker Mike Nicholls has made it with a smile on his face.
... Nicholls had plenty of time to think about his financial career when he wound up in a New York hospital four years ago suffering from mental and physical exhaustion. He said he used the time to reflect on his life and decided he wanted to be part of something larger, more meaningful and humane.
A nurse named Irene who cared for him in the hospital became his role model. When he began considering a major career change, he was drawn to nursing because of the compassion Irene and other nurses demonstrated.
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His parents, emigrants from the Bahamas, raised their four children in Brooklyn. His mother was a teacher and his father worked for the Transit Authority. Nicholls was the youngest child, born four minutes after his twin brother, Ed.
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"I know I'll never make as much as I would have at JP Morgan," Nicholls said. (Washington nurses average about $63,500 annually.) "But the daily sense of satisfaction can't be bought."
Although he won't graduate from the UW until 2008, he's already planning to specialize in mental health. He said he was reared in a culture where depression or other mental health issues were not discussed, and those afflicted were looked down upon.
"You were considered less of a man, expected to snap out of it if you were down," he said. ...

Labels: compassionate people, mental illness

A visit to the US military hospital at Landstuhl - Der Spiegel
... A stretcher is lifted from inside the bus out into the rain.
It arrives in the form of a broken man, a body almost completely covered in gauze bandages, darkened in spots, and connected to various machines -- he is unconscious. The chaplain at the head of the welcoming committee personally greets the new arrival, just as every new arrival at Landstuhl is greeted personally, whether he is awake, asleep or in a coma. The priest stands next to the stretcher and leans in toward the patient, almost as if he were bowing, and, addressing him by his first name: Michael, he says, "you are safe now. You're in Germany."
As the priest's purple-gloved hand forms the sign of the cross in the air above the wounded soldier, the hands of many others are already whisking the stretcher away toward the hospital, where it is loaded into an elevator and taken up to the ICU. The soldier's wounds are critical. Every minute counts at Landstuhl.
Four men are loaded onto stretchers from the second bus. Although their injuries are not life-threatening, they arrive with tubes in their necks and noses, wires in their chests, limbs in casts, skin burned, even with fingers, toes and legs already amputated. Each new arrival is greeted with the same soothing words and given the same blessing. By the time the delivery ends, 10 men have descended from the side door of the bus, some on crutches and others with no apparent injuries. The latter -- men with vacant eyes, eyes blinded by the images of war -- have come to Landstuhl for psychiatric treatment.
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Dawn Garcia, a 40-year-old native of Texas, is difficult to overlook. She exudes a sense of kindness that changes every room she enters. She lives in Landstuhl with her husband and two daughters, has been in the army for 18 years and clearly loves her work. She is a remarkable person.
Garcia worked in Iraq for an entire year in 2004, the year of the battles for Fallujah. She worked in operating rooms resembling slaughterhouses, often under fire and during power outages. She saved hundreds of lives and comforted dozens of dying soldiers, held their hands, wept and prayed with them, promised not to leave them alone and never broke her promise, even when the war was raging around her.
On some days in Iraq, when blood supplies were low, she would donate her own blood up to two times a day. On other days 18-year-olds died in her arms, and all they could say was that they wanted to protect their country and hoped that their efforts hadn't been for nothing. Dawn Garcia sat by their sides like a mother, selfless and courageous.
She does her job. "My family is my support system," she says, "and I run six miles a day. That helps." When asked how she keeps herself from despairing when faced with so much suffering, she says: "You have to be able to cry when it's time to cry. That's important." ...

Labels: compassionate people, war