How did it all start?
With a personal crisis. I was working in a bank very unmotivated, my daughter was two years old and I spent the day crying.
How did it go?
I hadn’t been to 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 grandma’s love.
And what did he find there?
Seeing that I was crying, the priest approached me and said: “Take care of your daughter, which is the most important thing”. It made me very angry, but he insisted that my problems were not and that if he wanted to lend a hand, he should go to the La Fe hospital where there was a sick child who was alone.
did you go there
Yes. “Can I stay to keep him company?” I asked. “It would be very good for us”, replied a nurse. “Which group do you belong to?”.
He could do nothing in his personal capacity.
No, I asked him which collective I should sign up for and he told me there wasn’t one for that. I left angry with the world. I got home, held my daughter in my arms and kept seeing that boy. This went on for months.
what did he do
“Did you know that there are sick and lonely 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 head, I created Mamás en Acción. 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 it was not a child, very hard things were happening there.
He ran into reality.
That boy was turned to dust. We spent five months with him day and night until he was discharged. Since then we have accompanied thousands of children, from newborns to teenagers.
With all kinds of pathologies?
Yes, abuse, babies who are born sick and their parents give them up or who are born with withdrawal syndrome, children with cancer, suicide attempts, depression.
Teenagers from juvenile centers?
Yes, they wait for someone to take them in, until they reach the age of 14 or 15 and know that no one will and that at 18 they will have to leave the children’s home. They wonder where they will go and what they will live on and fall into depression. Growing up is a punishment for them.
How do they receive you?
Unfortunately, but if you stay there, after a few days they start talking, telling you about their lives, and the most beautiful thing is that when they are discharged, many of them who wanted to die tell you: ” Majo, when I grow up I want to be like you”.
How did they get to all of Spain?
Abused children develop aggression in their recovery, but it does not happen to those we accompany. In 2018, La Fe’s pediatrics team did a study and found that all those children alone recovered faster and better with our presence.
What did they do with this important data?
They presented the study at a national pediatrics congress, and from then on we got calls from a lot of hospitals.
Is affection a healer?
There was a two-year-old boy, abused, who refused physical contact. He did not control the sphincter but changed his diaper alone.
Did you accompany him without touching him?
Yes, but soon she 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 had to be fed.
Did they get him to eat?
Yes. You do what you would do with your child: you cradle him, sing to him, hold him in your arms, and 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 always comes love.
Are there requirements to be a volunteer?
Our volunteers take care of calming, consoling, hugging, singing, reading stories, giving bottles, chatting and running through the corridors if there is no pain… And they range from university students to grandparents.
To a teenager in an orphanage, the name Mamás en Acción must sound fatal.
“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 toilet. Do you really think I need you to accompany me?”, a 16-year-old Algerian immigrant rescued at sea told me.
What did you say to him?
That we would stay there. When he was discharged, he wrote us a beautiful letter that said: “Blessed ship that threw me into the sea that made me know the love of a mother”.
