Gabriela

Though most students at the college are from our diocese, we do have a few from outside. Gabriela Mamani, interviewed here by volunteer Kate Cimini, came to us through conBoiliva, an organization of dedicated people based in La Paz and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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She’s wearing one of probably two pairs of pants she owns, and a grey button-down shirt, her school uniform. Her chestnut hair is long and straight, carefully brushed until it shines, and she has a gap between her two front teeth. Gabriela Mamani Almonte, 20 years old, comes up to my shoulder, maybe, and has a shy, sweet voice to match her smile. Her home on the Isla del Sol is a day’s journey away, and fairly expensive, so if she ever sees her family during the school year, she meets them about halfway in the city of La Paz.

Both of Gabriela’s parents work in farming, her mother with the animals and her father as an albañil, a mason. The biggest industries on the island are in farming and tourism, and rather than follow everyone’s lead and go directly into those careers, both of which are available at the college, Gabriela noticed a lack of both emergency and everyday health care on the Isla del Sol. The island has one health post that is open irregularly, and is not well-staffed. From her town, it is an hour-long hike to the health post, or a three-hour boat ride to the hospital in Copacabana, the largest town on Lake Titicaca. Gabriela wants to set up more health posts on the Isla del Sol, posts that are open regularly and have qualified nurses and doctors. She talks about how the elderly die on the island without access to regular medical care, and how pregnant women have a dangerously high mortality rate. How babies that are born with any problems have a difficult time surviving as well. Gabriela wants to change this, and make something just a little easier for people for whom everything is a battle.

Gabriela says all this without blinking, without looking away timidly, like she does with every other question I ask her. Every word about wanting to help the people she’s grown up with has a steel rod shot through it. This is a young woman it took me two weeks to track down because she’s so shy, who normally sits and shields half her face behind her hair. Yet talking about her vision for the future of her people, suddenly she becomes bolder than I would have thought. She shakes her hair out of her face, looks me straight in the eye and tells me that this is what she is going to do.

And with that drive about her, I have no doubts that she will do what she sets her mind to.