It Ain't Over (41 page)

“Things that once seemed so important were suddenly insignificant,” Vicki says. “When I heard this woman complaining, I couldn’t put on my usual sympathetic mom face. I was ready to burst into tears.”

For Vicki, it had been a long and tough journey. Cori had been wracked with seizures since she was an infant, at one point suffering an episode so serious that she lost all of her memory. (“She had to relearn how to tie her shoelaces, use a fork, comb her hair,” says Vicki.) She continued to have as many as 20 seizures a month, and doctors warned Vicki that the cumulative effects would cause permanent damage to Cori’s brain.

Then Vicki heard about a procedure that could stop Cori’s seizures completely. According to her daughter’s neurologist—Dr. James Wheless, a world-renowned expert in pediatric epilepsy—Cori could be a candidate for a rare neurosurgery in which doctors would implant electrodes into her frontal lobe in an attempt to pinpoint the precise spot where the seizures originated. Then they could surgically remove that faulty part of the brain. Dr. Wheless told Vicki she should bring Cori to Houston for the surgery.

It was all very risky, but it promised hope that Cori might live a more normal life. So in October 1999, Vicki and Cori flew to Texas. They were supposed to be there for just two weeks, but those weeks dragged into months. Cori spent every day tethered to monitoring equipment, but the specialists had a hard time determining precisely where the seizures were originating. Then the bad news: Surgery was no longer a possibility.

Vicki was devastated. “We had just spent a third of the school year in a hospital room,” she says. “I kept thinking,
Why did I put my daughter through this?
” Several months later, Dr. Wheless called and said there was a new device, a sort of pacemaker for the brain, that was showing good results in adults and he wanted to know if Cori could be one of the first kids to try it. After much debate, they went back to Houston for surgery. “He thought it would help Cori reduce her medications and her seizures, and it did.” Remarkably, she was able to get off all her meds.

But through all those months by Cori’s side, Vicki had seen things at the hospital that made her realize they were more fortunate than most families. So many of the young patients were alone.

“I’d ask them, ‘Where are your mom and dad?’ and they’d say, ‘At work. And I have brothers and sisters at home, too, so it’s hard for them to leave.’

“It broke my heart that these little kids were undergoing surgery and recovering from major illnesses,” says Vicki, “and they didn’t have anyone there with them. It also made me sad for the parents who couldn’t be there.” It was the first time Vicki had come face-to-face with this kind of poverty. She had grown up privileged, and life had remained comfortable: She enjoyed a marketing career, married a successful doctor, and was able to leave her job when Cori was first diagnosed with epilepsy.

“My daughter had me by her side, full-time,” says Vicki. “It truly opened my eyes to see these other kids. I knew their parents didn’t love them any less than I loved my daughter. It was strictly about resources.”

So Vicki did whatever she could to right that wrong. In the hospital, she played with the children, and whenever her family visited (her husband, Joel, and their nine-year-old son, Cameron, flew in every other weekend), she asked them to bring toys and electronic games for all of the kids. Her brother even hired a clown.

“All you had to do was look at the smiles on the kids’ faces,” says Vicki, “and you’d know how much they needed this.”

Back in Tampa, after the hair-bow incident at the grocery store, Vicki realized that she couldn’t go back to her old life of volunteering at Cori’s school, playing tennis, and having lunch with friends. She was haunted by those lonely kids in Houston and their suffering families. She knew she had to find a way to help.

Her first stop was the local hospital in Tampa. She, Joel, and their kids began by regularly delivering baskets full of crossword puzzles, coloring books, and
model airplanes. (“I remembered how much those things meant to the kids in Texas to keep them busy,” she says.) They also volunteered at a shelter for abused, abandoned, or neglected children, organizing craft activities for Valentine’s Day and Easter. Then, as Thanksgiving approached, Vicki signed up with a program through the school system to serve five homeless families for the holidays, bringing them turkey dinners and fulfilling their Christmas wish lists.

But there was one mom Vicki couldn’t get out of her mind. Her name was Shelly and she lived out of a motel room with her two young boys. Vicki kept wondering why Shelly, who had held down a steady job for ten years, couldn’t afford a real home. The thought kept after her:
How much did that Thanksgiving meal really help this woman?

“It seemed like a Band-Aid,” Vicki says. So two days after she met her, Vicki took the plunge and called Shelly. “Can you meet me for coffee?”

“It all made sense once she explained her life to me,” says Vicki. Shelly had been the victim of domestic violence. She’d escaped the relationship for the fifth time, but couldn’t bear the thought of taking her kids to a shelter yet again. Her job paid enough to cover the motel room, but Shelly couldn’t
come up with the $3,000 she needed for a deposit on an apartment and utilities. So the family had been living in the motel for nearly a year.

“What if I found a way to help you get that apartment?” Vicki asked. “Would you be able to pay the rent?”

“Absolutely,” Shelly answered.

So Vicki went out and found a small house for rent not far from the motel, paid the deposit, cosigned the lease, and helped Shelly gather donated furniture to fill her new home.

All went well, until one day, when Shelly mentioned that she needed to dash around town to pay her bills.

“I said, ‘What? You don’t have a bank account?’ ” When Shelly admitted that she always cashed out her paychecks instead of depositing them, Vicki told her it was time she opened a bank account. She also taught her how to pay her bills through the mail and how to make a budget. By the end of the year, Shelly had paid all her debts and had even tucked away $1,600 in savings.

“She was filled with pride,” says Vicki, “and gratitude.”

That year, Vicki helped five more families for the holidays, including a high school sophomore named Gabby who was struggling at school. Vicki soon learned that Gabby was having headaches in class, so she took her to an optometrist who prescribed glasses. She then helped Gabby fill out applications for colleges and financial aid. Two years after they first met, Gabby graduated with a 4.03 GPA and a full scholarship to the University of Central Florida.

By this point, Vicki had recruited friends and neighbors to join her in her outreach efforts, and by 2005, the group was helping 200 to 300 families every year. They brought the families food, even beds—and offered extra assistance to high school students, like a book or school supplies. At one point, Vicki asked her son, Cameron, if he was jealous of the time and energy she was putting into other people’s kids.

“Jealous of kids who don’t have beds?” he asked incredulously.

By 2007, word of Vicki’s efforts had spread to the mayor of Tampa, who called Vicki and proposed turning her mission into a bigger, citywide effort. And that’s what happened.

Today, Vicki is the executive director of Starting Right, Now, a nonprofit organization that pairs mentors with homeless high school juniors and seniors. Thanks to its work, Vicki has attended more than 100 graduations of kids who might otherwise be on the streets or in jail.

As for Vicki’s own daughter, Cori, she has “defied every odd.” She lives in an apartment with a roommate, has earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Tampa, and has launched a career as a hairstylist. Cameron, who graduated from Stanford University in June, recently surprised his mom by nominating her for a service award from Bank of America, which she ultimately won.

In the application, he wrote: “I have set up more beds in stranger’s apartments, traveled to more unfamiliar places to deliver dinner, and been reminded of how fortunate I am more times than I can remember, all because of my mother.”

“When I read that, I felt like I had already won,” Vicki says.

“My daughter’s seizures were the worst thing that ever happened to our family but also turned out to be the greatest blessing,” says Vicki. “Her remarkable recovery not only brought her back to us, it also led us to these other children, who had incredibly difficult lives of their own. If it weren’t for everything we went through in that hospital, I would have never known about these kids, and the blessing you get from extending your hand to help someone else’s family.”

Jessamyn W. Rodriguez, 36

New York, New York

J
essamyn Rodriguez’s entire life changed, and all because she heard something wrong.

Sitting at a conference, Jessamyn heard a speaker mention the nonprofit organization Women’s World Banking and misheard the name as Women’s World
Baking.

Even though Jessamyn laughed when she recognized her mistake, the words took her back to the kitchen of her great-grandmother, Minnie Starkman, where, as a little girl, she and Minnie, along with Grandma Perlmutter, would spend an entire, long hot August day baking kreplach, as many as 400 of the small tasty dumplings.

They would roll out the dough; insert ground meat, mashed potatoes, and other fillings; close them up; then freeze them until Rosh Hashanah, weeks away.

“We did this for years,” says Jessamyn. “At first, I was little and people had
to watch me around the stove. Now my great-bubie is gone, and I am grown and have to keep an eye on my grandma.”

For years, the words Women’s World Baking stuck with Jessamyn. And in 2006, while working at a high school in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, she thought,
Why not? Why not a place where women from around the world—immigrants like my family, who came to Canada from Romania and Slovenia, and worked in sweatshops—could come together and bake? And not just bake, but learn English, learn to market their skills, learn to run a business?

This brainstorm wasn’t random; it came from a deep place in Jessamyn. The daughter of civil rights activists, she had left Columbia University with a master’s degree seeking a career devoted to helping others, which she did in a series of jobs, including one at the United Nations, where her work focused on human rights, education, and immigration issues.

“
Desk-y
jobs,” she called them. Too far removed from the people whose lives the policies were actually affecting.

Jessamyn knew that if she was going to make the idea of Women’s World Baking a reality, the first thing she’d have to do was learn more about the profession. Taking night courses, she acquired a baking certificate from The New School. Then she spoke to her husband, who is in the wine business; he spoke to the sommelier at Daniel, one of New York’s premier restaurants, who spoke to the “chef Boulanger” (head baker), Mark Fiorentio, who invited Jessamyn to interview.

“I told him that I wanted to learn so I could teach others,” Jessamyn recalls. “Mark is a benevolent soul. Because there were no women working in restaurant bakeries, he knew that taking on a woman could only improve the industry.”

During her 18-month apprenticeship, Jessamyn would get up at dawn, work at the bakery for a few hours, then spend all day at her school job. “I loved it!
I loved the smells, I liked being on my feet and working with my hands, and I liked the people.” After the apprenticeship she spent six months working at the bakery, and then took off on her own.

In 2008, Jessamyn launched Hot Bread Kitchen out of her house in Brooklyn, creating a place where immigrant women not only could capitalize on the baking skills they possessed, but could acquire the other skills that would help them and their families escape poverty and move into the middle class. After all those years at a desk, Jessamyn was finally feeling the human connection she’d hungered for.