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Approximate location of the accident.
Sensible readers beware: The following story is a weepy. Shirley Torres Garita is a 13-year old girl who lost her legs in a terrible accident involving a truck driver whose blood alcohol level was detected at being over the legal limit. Despite this tragedy and the abject poverty she endures with her six siblings in Pococi, province of Limon, Shirley thinks that God spared her life for a specific purpose: To become an English teacher in Costa Rica, because that’s her dream.
Shirley would also like a home where she can enjoy the company of her mother and siblings. She is temporarily staying with a cousin until her mother seeks a solution to the present ordeal. As reported by Carlos Arguedas and Reiner Montero of national news daily La Nacion, Shirley and a friend were hit by a truck transporting gravel as they were crossing a bridge on March 19th. Her legs were crushed under the truck’s tires and had to be amputated; one above the knee and the other below.
She has been given a wheelchair, but she can’t get traction on the dirt floor of her 4 square-meter home, which lacks windows and pretty much everything else. Bathing and cooking for this family of ten is accomplished next door at the home of Shirley’s grandmother, where there are 19 people living in an old wooden structure with tin roofs and dirt floors.
Shirley’s mother is a 37-year old farmhand who was devastated when told by medical officials that her daughter could not stay in her humble home. There are concerns of post-amputation infection, so she must be carried 700 meters down a dirt road to her cousin’s home each day. Taxi drivers usually help, but Shirley wants to be with her family, she wants a home, she wants to keep going to her 6th grade classes, and she wants to one day teach English.
According to La Nacion, Shirley somehow gets the strength to smile:
“I am taking it well, like nothing happened. One day I was crying in the hospital, and my friend Erika calls me, and she was hit by the truck as well, and we talked and talked, and then I felt better. She gave me strength when she told me what happened, which was the same that happened to me.
I used to like messing with boys and laughing with them. I am in the 6th grade now and do not want to drop out, but most of all I want to be home with my mother.”
Since the accident, Shirley has reconciled with her father and a lost brother. She is making up for lost time, or so she thinks.
Those who would like to help Shirley achieve her dreams, please contact her mother Yesenia Garita Céspedes at 8577-2636. You can see Shirley here and follow her story (in Spanish) here.
Dear readers, it’s time we discuss something. You see, Shirley is in a bad way. Deep poverty and disability are putting her at great risk of becoming part of The Nobodies as described in the poem by the great Uruguayan bard Eduardo Hughes Galeano. You can read the English translation of the poem here, and you can listen to it spoken by Mr. Galeano here (MP3). It’s poignant, and it tells us about how life for Shirley might turn out if she does not get the help she deserves.
Below please find The Nobodies adapted into the style of The Costa Rica Star. We are stripping it of its beauty, but that’s fine since the only beauty we should be discussing now is Shirley’s soulful disposition in the face of inscrutable adversity. We hope Mr. Galeano does not mind, and we also hope you understand that Shirley truly deserves a certain minimum quality of life so that she can fulfill her dream of one day becoming an English teacher in Costa Rica.
Fleas may dream of buying themselves a dog; nobodies dream of escaping poverty someday.
Nobodies pray that, one magical day, good luck will suddenly rain down on them, and that it will pour down in buckets.
But good luck doesn’t rain down. It didn’t rain down yesterday nor today, nor will tomorrow nor will ever.
Good luck doesn’t even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, no matter if they do a rain dance, or even that their left hand is tickling them, or even if they start off the new day on their right foot, or bring in the New Year with a change of brooms.
The nobodies are nobody’s children. They are owners of nothing.
The nobodies are the no-ones, the no-bodied. They run like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way.
They are those who are not, but could be.
They are those who don’t speak languages, but dialects.
They are those who don’t have religions, but superstitions.
They are those who don’t create art, but handicrafts.
They are those who don’t have culture, but folklore.
They are those who are not human beings, but human resources.
They are those who don’t have faces, but arms. Those who don’t have names, but numbers. Those who don’t appear in the history of the world, but in the crime reports of the local newspaper.
They are the nobodies, those who are not worth the bullet that kills them.
