My mother, my best example.

My mother was a very kind woman. She was a fighter, that's how life had made her. She came to this country carrying her oldest son, in her country things weren’t going well and my father decided to come here first to send money to look for her and my oldest brother.

They came to this great country from Portugal, crossing the seas for more than two months. I don't know how my father knew when and at what time the ship would arrive and I can't imagine the things my mother would go through in order to arrive with a small child. My brother should have been about 3 years old when he got here.

I believe that I inherited from her that spirit of progress on account of enduring difficulties with a persevering spirit.

When my parents arrived in Venezuela they did not have any relatives here. There were Portuguese acquaintances from their country that had arrived first and then they began to work hard to progress at the same time that they thought about having 5 more children in these lands.

My mother was always a woman of the house; she knew how to knit, embroider, sew, cook, and care for her children and husband. That was what she devoted herself to all her life.

I always wanted to have uncles and grandparents. It made me nostalgic when classmates talked about their relatives. I would return home and ask my mother about her parents, my grandparents, and she told me with nostalgia that she never heard from them again.

My mother didn’t go to school. Her parents were from the country and couldn't send her that far from home to study. My mother couldn't even write her name, but what she was lacking in proper education she made up with values ​​and many things that she taught her children. Things that used to be taught at home and now are left to be taught at school.

I wanted to have grandparents, I wanted it with great fervor. I wanted a magic wand to wish them to appear here, so that I could love them and them me. But I met them in the photos that my mother brought as a souvenir. We were a family of five brothers and my parents. My oldest brother was left by dad working in a business of some friends since he was little. He visited him every fortnight, when he wanted to have some more money for his expenses. He would go to that place, take the money and then come home as if nothing had happened.

My brother, when he turned 21, stopped working and came home. It makes me so sad that my father thought of using my brother only to have money and didn’t leave him with us to live as family. I met my oldest brother when I was 10 years old, he came home one afternoon and asked about my mother, when I asked him on “behalf of whom” he just replied: "Tell him that it’s her eldest son."

I stared at him thinking it was a joke and ran to tell my mother that there was a boy outside who claimed to be her oldest son and wanted to see her.

When I saw my mother's face, I knew that he was really my brother. No one talked about him at home, because my dad didn't say anything about him and dad was always the one who said everything at home and we had to be quiet, to listen and obey.

But when we all grew up, each one of us made their own path. Not without first having so many problems and arguments with our father, that thought he could have us like mom, submissive and obedient. But he couldn't handle that many children, not after they grew up. We all studied, that's what my mother wanted. We all went to college, and each one of us issued their own condition that Dad had to accept even against his will.

My mother died when I finished my degree in medical school. She was suffering from lung cancer that killed her after a year. Being in my undergraduate internships I learned of his illness and although she received treatment, nothing could be done.

She felt very bad and was in bed waiting for me to arrive. I went alone to receive my degree in the lecture hall and then returned home to be with her, in her last days. It took two months, two months where I never left her, until her last day.

Then I left the city and began to work in a rural town for a year and returned home, to then go back to work in another rural town.

She was only 65 when she died and she was a strong woman that everyone loved. I still remember her as she was before she grew old because of that disease that took her away.

I took care of her and she felt sorry for me, she said that she was a lot of work for me, that she had five more children, but they all left everything to me because I was the family nurse and doctor. They all stayed home with their own families while I took care of my mother. It didn't weigh me down. I would do it again, because she was the most sacred thing I had in my life.