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By Brandy Campbell January 27, 2008
When Ammy Chisaguano's parents brought her home to her family's one-room cement house in Carapungo, a community in the northern part of Quito, Ecuador, the newborn girl's cries never stopped.
Just weeks old, Ammy had no way of telling her parents, Victor and Lourdes, about the prickly pain that wrapped itself around her eyes, slowly spreading toward her brain. She could only scream, rubbing her red eyes with her tiny fists.
Where other babies reached toward light and movement, Ammy buried her face in a blanket, blocking the searing pain. Her parents trudged with Ammy repeatedly to medical clinics.
She weathered a constant barrage of doctors shining bright lights into her eyes and shaking their heads sadly. Then finally they found a reason for the baby's suffering. But they couldn't look her mother in the eye when they pronounced their diagnosis.
The words the doctors used sounded so foreign to Lourdes — retinoblastoma, malignant, metastic. Yet Lourdes had no medical encyclopedias to research her daughter's disease. All she knew was that it was cancer. And that it could soon spread from Ammy's eyes to her brain. Without surgery to remove Ammy's eyes, the infant would not live to celebrate her first birthday.
Lourdes and her husband had little time to save up the money for their daughter's surgery. So they begged for help from friends and neighbors, knowing they would never be able to repay their debt.
When Ammy was 8 weeks old, surgeons removed both her eyes. Her recovery was slow and painful, and her family fell deeper into debt. They knew the doctors would withhold care when they learned there was no money to pay the bills. And there was no
guarantee that Ammy's cancer would not return. "I was so glad my daughter was alive, but I wondered what kind of life she would have," says Lourdes. "It was hard for me to accept the fact that she was blind. I worried that the cancer would come back. I woke up every day thinking she might be dead."
In the midst of Lourdes' depression, she found Compassion's El Shaddai Child Survival Program, offered through a church in her community. Lourdes hesitated at first, afraid to subject her daughter to the stares of strangers.
But when she saw how gently Compassion staff at the church held Ammy, how they looked into her face with no disgust or fear, Lourdes believed that maybe they could help her daughter.
Compassion's health workers immediately went to work on Ammy's behalf. They arranged for her to be fitted with prosthetic eyes, a surgery unheard of in poverty-stricken Carapungo.
Compassion covered Ammy's medical bills, and a month later, Lourdes held Ammy in her arms, staring in wonder at her daughter's blinking brown eyes. "Before the prosthesis, her eyelids were sunken and her face was deformed," says Lourdes. "But after, she was blinking and it was like she was looking at me. I know that she can't see, but now people will not make fun of her or laugh at her."
Ammy is now an active 4-year-old who has just transferred from Compassion's Child Survival Program to Compassion's Child Sponsorship Program and has a sponsor. "She is the spark of our lives," says Lourdes.
Each morning when Lourdes wakes Ammy, the child reaches up with her chubby hands and feels the lines of her mother's face, patting her cheeks gently. "Mummy, I love you very much," she says. And sometimes, her nimble fingers can feel her mother's tears of joy.
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