2023-09-24 04:00:33
U. of A., from which his son graduated.
23/09/2023
Monica is an institution. And that needs no further proof: he has been feeding the city’s future doctors for 28 years outside the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Antioquia. In fact, to be precise, it seems more like a legend: Moni? Of course, there around the corner. Moni? Yes, she started there at the goal selling wafers. Moni, Cristian’s mother, the doctor? Yes, she is still there, now she sells fried foods: cakes, sticks, carimañolas, salchichón with arepa. Better said, she says: ask for what she doesn’t see.
Everyone knows Mónica in the Juan del Corral sector of Medellín, where this faculty and the San Vicente Fundación and Alma Máter de Antioquia hospitals share a neighborhood. There, for almost three decades, she has fed prospective doctors who are excited regarding their careers, and the ‘cacaos’ of medicine whom she calls ‘doc’ or calls them by name because no one is more than anyone else: be you a doctor, lawyer, taxi driver or shoemaker.
And Mónica even gives a ‘political’ line at the Faculty of Medicine. A few days ago her story went viral on social media in the midst of the campaign for the deanery that is taking place there. Mónica appeared in an interview with one of the doctors who aspires to the position. Sitting, in her skirt and feet crossed, with her hands hidden in the pocket of an apron, she answered each question. How long have you been here? And where did you have the sale of wafers? Did they give you the opportunity to have this site? And now what does Cristian do? Whether he is a good doctor or not?
The best, she responded, that talk was not lost! But before she told any details regarding her son, the doctor who seeks Monica’s favors among the academic community interrupted her and hit the nail on the head: Monica, more than Cristian’s mother – a boy who graduated as a doctor from the same school. —, has been the substitute mother of dozens and why not hundreds of boys who, as students, did not have the means to drink a red wine or pay for a chicken pie.
He has nurtured generations of doctors on canola oil, the doctor who aspires to become a dean told him. And she answered yes, that with fried food she has taken care of the students who achieve the long-awaited place in the faculty. But the road has not been easy, she later says in person. Because working on the street is hard and what I am telling you today, she says, might be the story of thousands of families in Medellín. What happens is that we turn a blind eye.
A holiday promise
Mónica found herself as a street vendor on the outskirts of the university not because of a twist of fate, but because of the poverty that her family was experiencing. Because things have to be said head-on, without a filter, like she does. Sitting on the same bench where the doctor interviewed her, two meters from the module she now manages, she remembers that she made that decision following seeing a scene that she cannot erase from her head and that led her to force herself to make a promise. .
Since the situation was difficult, she and her husband took the opportunity to celebrate ‘August’ in the December lights there 28 years ago. But ‘August’ was spent more by water than by sales and what was recorded for Monica was the portrait of her two-year-old son wrapped in plastic, wet, while the rain poured from the street into the river. They were under a bridge and there, at the foot of the colored light bulbs that brightened Christmas at that time, she said to herself: I will not allow my son to go through this. Whatever, but I have to study it.
Well, yes, by coincidence or necessity, his mother Ercilia came to his house one day, in Leuven, and told him that she had seen a place where they might set up their sales. She replied that she had seen one too. And see the surprise, it was the same one, there, in the first little window, next to the goal! That’s how Monica went to school to sell wafers. She had a small square table and so she did not imagine that building the business was going to be so difficult or that she would have to fight tremendous battles with those from Espacio Público.
The first two years she didn’t sell anything, she says now, and remembers that her husband Uber Ortíz insisted to her: no, mija, stop and you’ll see that it works out; time to time. Meanwhile Cristian grew up. She picked him up last in the followingnoon at daycare. And then, as her husband predicted, the miracle happened. You saw how those wafers began to sell. The thing is that people already knew me: the boys, the doctors, the teachers.
The wafers were sold with everything, well packaged: arequipe, milk cream, blackberry candy. Mónica arrived at the college with five kilos of arequipe, a jar of heavy cream and another of blackberry candy, and that ran out quickly. He even left early, following keeping the chuzo there further up Juan del Corral where a lady called Miriam, and managed to pick up Cristian at the right time.
But the wafers became vinegar, she remembers with a laugh, and they stopped selling. She ended up making chicken pot pies with her mom, at the same point, and that was like starting from scratch. But this occurred eight years following she arrived in the area. Her son was already ten and her youngest, Rebeca—who was regarding to graduate in psychology—was six. Mónica ran a lot, drunk and with Cristian by the hand while she stocked up to sell wafers. Then came the task of stopping the chuzo once more and removing Espacio Público.
The thing is that what Mónica has in college is not a little. She has witnessed what has happened there in thirty of 150 years of history. She kept a record of the paving of the area, which was an impassable dustbin; She had to use the first modules for vendors, which had no ventilation or power – what a farrowing house! -; and she witnessed the…, how do you say —she hesitates—, yes: the restoration of the Manuel Uribe Ángel and Andrés Posada Arango buildings, in which she later studied and the eldest of her two children graduated.
But let’s go back to the business that went bankrupt and the one that had to be born at the same time. Monica says that she has always had a good back for sales and that sooner rather than later things fell into place. Her fried food business began to grow and, following benefiting from one of the modules, she gained more stability.
But the module, my dear, did not arrive alone: nooo, blessed! Oh, how we had to struggle with that. What happened is that with the remodeling project they wanted to get us out of here. We, the street vendors, did not appear on the Public Space plans. I went to those offices, I did everything. But it was a boy, says Mónica, who saved us. He was a representative of the students and united them. He said, according to Mónica: if they don’t find them, we will strike, because who is going to feed us. Inside everything is very expensive and many of us don’t have anything else.
Thus, between setbacks and attacks, Cristian graduated from school and had already supported his mother at times. He wanted to study and she wanted to fulfill the promise that was made under the downpour 28 years ago: to give him an education. Since he grew up among doctors, Cristian dreamed of applying to college. But he also opted for a career in the National. After doing pre-university, the good news came: that it had happened to both parties, says Mónica. And there she sees, he decided on medicine.
Now Cristian is a general practitioner at the San Vicente Fundación, as far as his mother’s fries go and where they first knew him as Mónica’s son and not as a doctor. There he works in the emergency room and does extras with another institution. He works 24/7, he says, so that his mother can leave sales at some point. And although she says that the rotator cuff and knee pain have been tormenting her for some time, it is not yet time to leave school.
What regarding Cristian, of course, fills her with pride. But it is perhaps Mónica’s closeness to so many doctors and specialists that gives her the calm and fresh expression that she offers both to those who come to buy salchichón with fried arepa and red wine, and to those who do an interview: come on, let’s talk. What are you going to have for breakfast? And carefuly tells me that he is going to pay me. I invite you!
What Mónica says is that yes, what a joy that her son is now a doctor, but that for her it was always first to raise good human beings. ‘My boy’, the song by Diomedes Díaz with Rafael Santos, describes her feelings with precision:
That’s why Rafael Santos wants to / Leave you told in this song / That it inspires you to be a shoemaker / I just want you to be the best / Because the doctor is of no use / If he is the bad example of the people.
And in this way Mónica became an institution. Because you are going to question that among the students and professors of the faculty. He gets into an eleven-hour shirt, with that I tell him everything.
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