How it all started?
With a personal crisis. She worked in a bank very unmotivated, my daughter was two years old and I spent the day crying.
How did he get out of there?
I hadn’t set foot in a church for 20 years, but as a child I accompanied my grandmother to the church of Sant Nicolau. One day, walking with my daughter, I returned to that parish, I suppose looking for my grandmother’s affection.
And what did he find?
The priest approached me when he saw me crying and told me: “Take care of your daughter, that is what matters most.” He felt terrible to me, but he insisted that my problems were not such and that if I wanted to lend a hand I should go to La Fe hospital where there was a sick child alone.
Was?
Yes. “Can I stay and keep you company?” I asked. “It would be very good for us,” answered a nurse. “What group do you belong to?”
He couldn’t do anything personally.
No, I asked him which group I should join and he told me that there was none for that. I left angry with the world. I came home, I took my daughter in my arms and I couldn’t stop seeing that child. That lasted for months.
What did?
“Did you know that there are sick and alone children?” she commented at work to her friends. Nine months later, in 2013, tired of not being able to get that issue out of my mind, I created Moms in Action. Today we have 3,000 volunteers and we are in 39 hospitals throughout Spain.
Do you remember your first accompaniment?
He was a 7-year-old boy, his parents had burned 60% of his body with boiling water. I was very scared, I suddenly realized that this was not playing with babies, very hard things happened there.
He came across reality.
That child was devastated, so we spent five months with him day and night doing shifts until he was discharged. Since then we have accompanied thousands of children, from newborns to teenagers.
With all types of pathologies?
Yes, abuse, babies who are born sick and their parents give up or who are born with withdrawal syndrome, children with cancer, suicide attempts, depression.
Adolescents from juvenile centers?
Yes, they wait for someone to take them in, until they reach the age of 14 or 15 and they know that no one will and that at 18 they will have to leave the children’s home. They wonder where they are going to go and what they are going to live on and they fall into depression. Getting older for them is a punishment.
How do they receive you?
Bad, but if you stay after a few days they begin to talk, to tell you about their lives, and the most beautiful thing is that when they are discharged, many of them who wanted to die tell you: “Nice, I know I want to be when I grow up: I want be like you”.
How have they reached all of Spain?
Abused children develop aggression in their recovery, but that doesn’t happen to those we accompany. In 2018, the La Fe pediatrics team conducted a study and found that all those children alone recovered faster and better with our presence.
Where did this important information take you?
They presented the study at a national pediatrics conference, from there they called us from a lot of hospitals.
Is affection healing?
There was a two-year-old child, abused, who refused physical contact. He did not have sphincter control but he changed his diaper on his own.
Did you accompany him without touching him?
Yes, but soon he wanted to sleep in my arms. You realize how in a few hours a child who receives affection asks for affection. There was another baby who didn’t want to eat and they were going to probe him.
Did they get him to eat?
Yes. You do what you would do with your child: you cradle him, you sing to him, you hold him in your arms, and you patiently try to get him to eat. The problem is that there was no one who would invest the time to give him that love that made him want to eat. Putting love where there is no love, love always comes out.
Are there requirements to volunteer?
Our volunteers are called to calm, console, hug, sing, read stories, give bottles, talk and run through the hallways if there is no pain… And they range from university students to grandparents.
For a teenager from an orphanage, Moms in Action must sound terrible.
“I am an orphan, I have lived badly in many countries, I have been shipwrecked, and now I am in a warm room, with three meals a day and my own bathroom. “Do you really think I need you to accompany me?” a 16-year-old Algerian immigrant rescued at sea told me.
What did you tell him?
That’s where we were going to be. When she was discharged, she wrote us a beautiful letter that said: “Blessed ship that threw me into the sea that made me know the love of a mother.”
