A VERY STRONG WOMAN BY DANIEL MEJIA CALLE

A VERY STRONG WOMAN

Beatriz Calle is a medical delegate that works for dermatological sector. Every morning, she wakes up at 6:00 o´clock. She prepares the breakfast and then, she takes a shower. At 7:30, she rides her car and makes her way to her office. She has two brothers, Fabian and Silvia. And her parents are Marcos Calle and Mariana Arango.

In her childhood, she lived in Guadalupe. Her parents were very poor. A cause of that they had to live inside a school. Her father was a public functionary and he was in charge of some public schools of the zone. And her mother was a housewife. When Beatriz was a teenager, she had a lot of problems with her mother. Mariana was very strict and she sometimes didn´t let Beatriz to go out with his friends. When those kinds of things happened, Beatriz always escaped from her house while her parents were sleeping.

When Beatriz was about eighteen, she started to work for “Exito” stores. There, she made some friends and she was a seller of fashion department. Someday, she was working and she received a call from an important friend. That friend had been living in the United States for many years. The friend of Beatriz invited her to pass sometime in the American land with the aim to get a better job and to live a different experience. Beatriz didn´t have enough money to fly to “Bogota” and ask for the visa. So, she decided to take the illegal way. She had to travel to Mexico by plane. When she was in Mexico, she had to take a bus to a town near the border. When she arrived to the town, she met “El Coyote”. “El Coyote” is a person who is in charge of the transportation process. He is a kind of guide. Some people of the group had to cross the border hidden inside of trunks of wood. Another group had to take a special truck and the women crossed the border by quad bikes. Beatriz arrived to San Diego, California. There, she called her friend and she took a bus to New Jersey. Weeks later, Beatriz already had two works and she lived in a flat with some friends. She had been feeling a lot of stress, when some day while she was working, she suffered an epileptic attack. Her colleagues took her to the near hospital of the area. There, she regained consciousness and her doctor told her that he had identified an epileptic focus in her brain. Days later, she started to work again but she was worried because the medicine that she needed for reduce the attacks was very expensive. Two years later, she returned to Colombia and she went to a hospital for a general evaluation and her Doctor told her that the epileptic focus had disappeared.

Here, Beatriz got a new job with a small dermatological laboratory. While she was working there, she helped the owner to take up an important stance inside the medical market. Nowadays, that small laboratory is a leader of the sector and Beatriz has been working there for fifteen years. Beatriz has a better quality of life and actually, she is my mother.

That is the reason why she is the person who I really admire.

By

Daniel Mejia Calle