Latinos love meat.

Pernil.  Pollo asado.  Pollo frito. Lechon. Chuletas.  Biftec.

Even meat — or stuff that resembles meat — that come in cans makes many of us salivate: Salchichas. Corned beef (basic instruction for cooking: Dump in a pot with some tomato sauce, sofrito, and a few papa fritas; mix, heat up and serve with white rice.)

And how about that morsilla?

So now I’m hearing one of the cool things to do now is “D.I.Y. butchering.” As in do-it-yourself butchering.  So says a recent article in the New York Times.

“ … D.I.Y. butchering also allows self-conscious carnivores — who in the past were candidates for vegetarianism — to justify their flesh-laden dinners. By learning to slaughter and butcher, they say, they can honor their pigs and eat them, too.”

Ha!  Latinos have been doing this for years. For better or for worse.

So on behalf of Latinos everywhere, I guess I can say: Welcome D.I.Y. butchering newcomers.

I was just a little kid living in Puerto Rico when I learned – very unexpectedly – where we get our chuletas from.  It was shortly after we moved back there from New Jersey after my grandmother, Mamita, got sick.

In the morning, the sound of roosters would signal the start of a new day for us.  We didn’t own any but it sounded like everyone else in Barrio Blondet did.

And some mornings, I would also hear high pitch squeals coming from the direction of the house across from us.   My “Nancy Drew” addiction hadn’t yet kicked in, but still I knew there was only one thing I could do: Go and investigate.

I set off alone one morning.  I crossed the street and walked towards the sound coming from the backyard.

I stood there and watched as the neighbor slit the throat of a screaming pig.  I didn’t move while I watched the blood flow from the gaping wound into a bucket.  I didn’t leave until the ghastly sounds subsided.  I never returned.

Many years later, as an adult, when I was walking with my mother Ines on Bergenline Avenue in Union City, I would avert my eyes whenever we passed the stores where live chickens in cages waited to meet their destiny.

The thought of fellow Latinos slaughtering pigs and sentencing chickens to death never bothered my mother.  In fact, she herself was quite handy with a knife (as one of my father’s girlfriends found out when she showed up on our doorstep).

And my mother never quite understood why her daughter did not want to eat meat.  Here’s a typical scene that played out year after year after year.

“I found the most beautiful chuletitas en Shop-Rite.  Mira que linda son! I’m going to make you two.”

“I don’t want it.  Yo no como carne!”

“Que que?  Pero estas muy flaca.   Tienes que comer!”

And often I gave in.  It was tough to look into her hurt eyes and say no.  You know how it is.

My mother is no longer around to tempt me.  I don’t eat meat anymore.  At least I do my best not to.  When I eat out, I’ve learned to ask if pork is used when I order habichuelas.

For so many years, I simply didn’t want to eat meat for ethical reasons.  And it turns out my eschewing animal flesh also has health dividends. And yet, when I talk to Latinos about this, I often get puzzled looks.  Like the ones my mother used to give me.

And while we may have differing views when it comes to meat, I have a sneaking suspicion there won’t be a lot of Latinos in these D.I.Y. butchering classes.

Their families would probably laugh themselves silly if they found out they had to pay to learn how to “honor their pigs and eat them, too.”

This November 4th, many of us will have an opportunity that we as people with disabilities and family members of people with disabilities cannot pass up. We have within our hands a mandate to change the face of this nation’s capitol.

Why a mandate you ask? Because we as a group cannot afford four more years of poverty and indifference from those we “supposedly” put into office. We must not tolerate the cold shoulder we received from the Bush Administration when it came to issues of housing, employment, stem cell research, and civil liberties violations. Everyone I know is poorer today than they were eight years ago and they are enraged. Enraged at the lengths to which people with disabilities are suffering at the hands of politicians too rich to feel their pain.

You may be thinking, “Sarah Palin understands my needs as a person with a disability; she has a son with Down syndrome and a nephew with autism.” However, that does not qualify her to run a country! I know many mothers of children with special needs who are more qualified than she is. The argument that she will protect our interest as a group is weak and full of holes. Let me list a few:

Mrs. Palin is new to disability culture and history, as new as her child is old. I have had a disability for 25 years but my mother does not ever claim to understand the “special needs” I have. Many mothers of children with disabilities would tell Mrs. Palin, “You haven’t seen anything yet.”

How do I know? Because I have heard from parents of schoolchildren who are teased until they cry about their “special needs.” Because they have asked me, “If she is so talented why won’t anyone give her a job?” Because I don’t know what to say to the immigrant mother of a 17-year-old autistic child who will not qualify for health care in a year.

Mrs. Palin recently proved in an interview that she is too rich to care about the average person with a disability. In an interview on Colorado News 9 on Oct. 21, she stated that she was against Amendment 51, which seeks to raise the sales tax by one cent on every $10 spent in each of the next two years.

The money would go to help the roughly 12,000 kids and adults in Colorado who currently are on a wait list to receive state services such as home nursing care and job training. They suffer from autism, Down syndrome and mental retardation.
Mrs. Palin said “that there must be an alternative to raising taxes,” in contrast to Colorado’s former First Lady, a Republican who supports the amendment. Besides never having visited Russia, she obviously has never visited a developmental center.

Last, Mrs. Palin, like many politicians before her, thinks she has a chip she can cash at our table. People with disabilities are not a commodity one cashes in every four years. They are part of America’s promise for a better future and inclusion regardless of your place on the economic ladder. Don’t be fooled into thinking this election is about an innocent little boy in Alaska. It is not! It is about those 12,000 kids in Colorado who in the estimation of “some” are not worth one cent on every $10.

Your vote. Your Choice. Your Future.

http://www.thisabled.com/

Whenever death may surprise us, let it be welcome if our battle cry has reached even one receptive ear and another hand reaches out to take up our arms.
Che Guevara

I know, I know, it’s been a long time since I’ve written on my LatinosNJ.com blog. However, as you will read in a few minutes, it has been a busy summer. While there are many places to start, I will try to start as close to the beginning as possible. While the above quote may sound strictly revolutionary it can also be used in every-day context. That is the context I will try to use it in on this blog.

The beginning of the summer started out like any other summer. Mainly planning vacations and dealing with some health issues. As many of you know, I am a quadriplegic and use a motorized power chair. What some of you may not know is that as a quadriplegic, I do not have the use of my stomach muscles. The stomach muscles are basically what keeps you from falling forward as gravity is constantly pulling your body down. Even when sitting if I go forward too much I may leave the comfortable point where gravity is not affecting me and fall forward on to my knees. Needless to say ever since my accident in 1983 I have had a constant battle with gravity. (Of course as I get older I have another different type of battle with gravity but that’s neither here nor there).

One Sunday afternoon when my wife was dropping off our daughter at a birthday party, I strolled out in my power wheelchair from our dining room to our patio area. I am not sure if it was my Puerto Rican style of driving a wheelchair (insert speeding ticket joke here) or the threshold between the dining room and the outside patio, but the chair went straight, and then the top half of my body fell forward and on to my lap (basically, I ended up with my head between my knees). At first, it appeared to go slowly like the leaning tower of Pisa. I almost thought, as I’ve done thousands of times before, that I could catch myself and straighten up. But I didn’t. It was one of those moments that I sometimes think about but never really expect.

I did not mention before that when a quadriplegic falls forward without the use of stomach muscles they are pressing up against their diaphragm, which basically controls breathing. As I was falling forward I felt my body losing all muscle control. I sat there for the first few minutes struggling to get up, but it was no use. In fact, it probably made it worse. Funny thing is that just a few minutes before, I was talking to my wife on her cell phone. She was on her way back to the house but was still about half an hour away. When I fell forward she was probably about 15 minutes away which does not seem like a great deal of time. Except when you are pushing on your diaphragm it becomes very difficult to breathe. After a few minutes I realized something –I was going to die!

I felt my inability to breathe growing stronger and could no longer hold my body up. I fell further forward on to my legs and knew that I would not be able to breathe for much longer. So what does a person think about when they know the end is at hand? I did what every former Catholic converted to Lutheran who eventually questions his faith does - I accepted the truth of my mortality. Then, I prayed that my daughter would know a good future, that my son would find what has been looking for since his birth, and that my wife would live a long and healthy life. I asked that my two sisters, my mother, and father live greater lives then they had seen to date. It is funny that when you accept your demise you can only think of others. Death is the great equalizer in matters of humankind. Whether you’re rich or poor, black or white, Latino or not – you will one day have to face death. Don’t get me wrong; I was pretty scared! I really started thinking about all those Catholic sermons, but in the end I realized things are what they are and it was too late to change. I prayed that I had done the best I could, and everything went dark.

I woke up for a minute inside an ambulance, then I was out again. I finally was coherent in the emergency room. Eventually, after four days of testing, I got the green light to go home. I was fortunate that despite how close I came to the end, I left the hospital with no physical repercussions. However, the event did impact my life in other ways.

I am grateful for every breath I have, and always wear my chest strap when alone in the house so that I can avoid a similar situation from happening again. It impacted my wife as well. It took her almost a week before she could bring herself to tell me what happened after I blacked out. Eventually she told me that when she came home she looked for me in the house but could not find me. Then she went outside, and found me slumped over in my wheelchair. She picked me up and said my lips and tongue were blue. I was not breathing. She ran and called 911. She told me that she thought she lost me. When she came back I started breathing again. While on the phone with the operator, she kept rubbing my scalp with her nails (one of my most sensitive areas) and touching my face, kissing me and talking to me, saying my name and trying to get a response, but there was nothing. She was incredibly frustrated with the ambulance because it seemed to take forever. The operator kept telling my otherwise mild-mannered wife to “calm down” as she was yelling at the operator to tell the ambulance driver to hurry up. Finally, the emergency people came and she was screaming at them to move faster. Again, she was told to calm down. She let them know never to insult her by telling her to calm down while her husband is in this situation, and then told them to hurry up again.

Amy is really the rock to which I anchor my crazy ship. Everyone in our lives helps us grow a little, but the people who have died have helped to makes us grow immensely. I feel that death has chased me my entire life and, like Che Guevara, “I welcome it” if I have touched at least one other person through my life here.

Peace.

Copyright J. Robles 2008

I am perplexed. It’s been a month since I completed my Peace Corps service and returned home. Yet, despite the familiarity and excitement of being home, things do not feel the same.

Perhaps the two years has changed the country or, the more likely, it has changed me. Either way I realized that this is a period of discovery and finding answers to the new frontiers I encounter before I take the next step forward.

The main difference is (from as far as I can tell) the grandness of the United States. Before I went to Ukraine I never appreciated the natural beauty of America. From its sophisticated architecture in New York City and Chicago to the preserved parks in New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the clean rivers and lakes all throughout the land. When my brother Omar drove me home from JFK Airport, I was stunned by the sheer immensity of my surroundings: the wide highways, the Hudson River and the Verrazano Bridge. Even though these sights were familiar, it felt as though it was the first time I’ve seen them.

This past month has been a month of firsts, or shall I say second firsts. For example, as I wandered in my mother’s apartment, I discovered a kitchen closet full of grocery products. I stopped and stared at it. It boggled my mind. All the food we had in storage. It just didn’t really make sense. I lived with much less in Ukraine. Yet this closet was there before I left. I forgot about it and now that I rediscovered I asked: Why so much food? Why all the junk food? I know it’s not part of the shelter – we don’t have any – so what’s the deal?

So a part of the grandness in the States is also the size of our plates. I don’t remember the many times I defended Americans while abroad from the stereotyping that we are all obese. Now, I have a better understanding why they said this. The amount of food served during lunch and dinner is far more than an average human being should eat. And if you fall into the cycle of eating everything that is served on a plate then you are bound to be overweight. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.

In conjunction with this is what occurs if you don’t finish that delicious t-bone steak with super-sized french fries, and a jumbo soda combo; you will be throwing the rest of that food away. That’s what happened when I went to American Steakhouse in Connecticut. The vast amounts of food that is being wasted everyday is an act of carelessness when there are children in Africa and parts of Asia that are eating a bowl of rice a day. Also, I don’t believe there’s a difference between throwing food away and throwing money away. They are both essential to our survival and if someone doesn’t want it, someone else will be there to take it.

So this is what I am going through. I feel like a foreigner in my own country. And I’m feeling like we need to take a step back and admire the beauty of our country … and minimize the excessive nature of our eating habits.

The fight for the poor is not a necessary evil in a stance where terror has refocused our mission on spending dollars across worlds and nations. Our children are sacrificed every time a bomb explodes and more children are killed with aerial miscalculations. I sit and keep quiet because my words and my mind have been calling this excuse to kill a fraud. I heard this was called the war on “terrorism” but somehow I feel like we’re fighting on the side of the Christian God. And for some reason, no matter when I get paid, I feel the pinch because I’m paying $3.75 a gallon for gas because my dollar doesn’t go as far. I’ve stopped dry cleaning because it has become too expensive; I’ve even stopped drinking because the expense has been passed on to me at the bar.

So my point of view is more realistic than some, because I know that there are kids out in the streets running with guns. In 2005, a 5-year-old child was shot with one, and to prevent from this happening again, nothing was done. I sat and pondered what if that was my niece? Hatred and anger would have brought me to my knees. So with no financing and no help from state government I created a mentoring program to alleviate the pain with ease. With quick success I believed to have something worth living for and receiving support. Just like many things in my life, I was wrong. State government with smoke and mirrors created $100 million programs that already existed and to get this funding you need to be a non-profit already existing (and as we found out, it was money for more police, cameras, and correctional facilities). Unfortunately, I’m on the New Jersey Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Commission, meaning I have to fundraise because the state is in a deficit where it can’t even help its children (MLK is a volunteer commission). Even at the League of Municipalities my commission was a part of the smoke and mirrors along with myself. We presented programs that in theory would work well but we have no funding for them. So in essence we are presenting an empty promise to the people of the state.

So, I went broke funding the program, and the Amistad Commission assisted with a van to pick up some kids to take up to the College of New Jersey. Kids that didn’t want to attend college were mentored in the program and felt that this cause was now worthy. So hoping to receive financial assistance from the Commission being a state entity, I was told, “what a great program good luck fundraising” and put your personal goals on hold while this will give us good press needed greatly. So, I’m out here fundraising. Businesses don’t want to donate because they don’t want to fall in the whole “Pay to Play” bit. I found a non-profit to help and maybe things will alleviate, but I just wonder who will now really donate. The program begins again in September. I wonder if we will have money to actually take these kids to museums out of the state.

The vision is simple: teach children that education is the key to economic success. Why state government is placing our kids in last place has me vexed but I have to say no longer perplexed. People may call me crazy, but I work in urban areas where babies are killing babies. I’ve seen mothers burying children since I was 16 and trust me — none want to be dead before finishing their teens. I came to ask, is $20,000 going to make a difference in a $3 billion deficit? I’m in debt more than I can handle from being homeless and hungry in the past, but if I see someone less fortunate, I will give my last dollar or buy a meal because I’m a humanist first, Salvadorian-American or plain American last.

It’s funny how a commission created to commemorate a great man who gave his life to serve others, is not being provided support by a government “of the people, by people, for the people.” I just want funding so this program, on its own two feet, can stand. Then maybe I can concentrate on making my escape out of this place. I’ve been told that I’m just “frustrated”; well you would be too if your people were being castrated and left for dead with no help for education because of your skin color and race. Or maybe it’s not even that, maybe it’s just priorities go elsewhere like a war in Iraq and Vietnam, or a war on drugs 37-years-old going on more. Or maybe because there is plenty of land in the Midwest to build more prisons to put us all in, maybe that’s why we aren’t educated properly; just imagine if that’s the case, what a sin.

So fundraising ideas are great, but just know that while we waste time on feeding people so we can get a cut to fund programs, that’s a disgrace (and just so you guys don’t say I don’t do my part: I’m selling tickets for a fundraiser at the Trenton War Memorial on June 26th, $45 a ticket, get them while they’re hot!). And between now and then, more children will already have found their fate, either joining a gang, or being carried out in a box or found guilty to live the rest of their lives behind gates. Our state senators are also at fault. Look at me taking on everyone: what gall!!! Yes, they are who they are because we elected them, and when issues get tough they stay quiet like if they were losing votes for being pro-urban education. I ask all to make an observation: who built this great nation? Who was hung on trees and killed for learning to read? Oh…yes those African-Americans, but let’s not forget also the Mexicans. And Puerto Ricans are sometimes considered Americans, only when they can vote and join the armed forces for the sacrifice of unjust wars on nations (there is a connection from past to present to future). All this is intertwined in simple programs that don’t get funding, because while the elected officials are sipping on hot cocoa and “sitting down, I’m out-standing” organizing and slowly dying.

And now that I know what it feels like to be inside of government, I know now why our Latinos and African-Americans leave because it is such a discouragement. We fight the system and we fight our own people who are trying to make a difference, I don’t want hand-outs, well unless they are given, but for too long we are the ones suffering for sins that aren’t forgiven.

*Note: Other social services in the state are being cut, Health and Education to the poor especially. This has nothing to do with race, but class. Unfortunately the majority of the lower working class happens to be African-American, and Latinos. And the programs affected by this at the MLK Commission are the V-free grants, MLK grants, of course mentoring, etc.

I am STRESSED all the time! And I hate it. Really. I wish I could escape the details of my life sometimes but I can’t. I’m a responsible woman with a lot of responsibilities. I’m a good girl. I do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. I can’t just fly to Paris or Barcelona or Rome and get away from it all. Shop, eat a lot of really good food, flirt with good-looking men, visit museums, read books in outdoor cafes.

Fantasies. How they save my life sometimes. In the minutia of daily living: working, mothering, household CEO and philanthropic giving, I can escape in my travel and interior design magazines, my Marc Anthony CDs, dancing in my living room, even folding clothes is relaxing. It’s heaven really.

I have a GREAT life. I’m not just saying that. I really do. I have a good family, great friends, an amazing daughter, a great job, a beautiful home, I give back to others. I have purpose coming out of my ears!! And I’m tired. All the time.

I’m reading a parenting book “Shalom in the Home” by Rabbi Shumley Boteach. (I’m also reading about four to five other books at the same time but that’s another story.) He talks about how the modern woman/mother is exhausted. So much is expected of her: earning a living and contributing financially to the household, raising children and running the house. This is me. My life. I so appreciate his understanding. His acknowledgement. I love that he calls women “Modern Day Heroes.” His mom was a single mom. He gets it. It’s hard sometimes. And amazing other times.

I was recently interviewed by a media company. They are doing a story on Microsoft Mothers. The interviewer, also Latina, asked me how I balance it all. Truth is I do the best I can. I could be at a parent/teacher conference in the morning and be on conference calls the next three hours. Get a call from my daughter’s school she is not feeling well, i.e., she’s bored and wants to come home while I’m at a meeting. So I get on the phone and convince her aftercare will be fun and I’ll see her soon. Then go back to my meeting. I shift gears like a NASCAR driver!

I’m taking my daughter to Disney this week to celebrate her birthday. She’s turning seven on Good Friday. She’s an amazing girl. I love her more than I could ever put into words. But, at the end of the day, she will be the judge of whether I’ve been a good mom to her. I pray for wisdom and patience a lot as I raise my angel. And she is an angel. I believe God gave her to me to show me a God-like heart, a pure and loving spirit. That’s the amazing thing about God. He loves me through my imperfections. And that’s my greatest strength as a mom. I know I’m not perfect but I do my very best.

As you can see from my last entry, it has been a while since I last wrote on this blog. You can say I have been having a little bit of writer’s block, which I have concluded happened because I just couldn’t put the right kind of words together to express the feelings of “electoral frustration ” I am having with the presidential campaigns. Since Iowa, then New Hampshire, Nevada and now South Carolina, I have watched how real issues are becoming second place to “race and gender” spins calculated by the Clinton campaign and propagated by the media.

But a story last night on CNN spoke about the reality: Black women voters in South Carolina are more concerned about the issues that impact them (i.e., the economy, health care) than about the race or gender of the candidate. At last, I said, somebody is talking to real voters … are Clinton and Obama listening?

While President Bush and Congress try to put together an economic package to jumpstart the economy, the two main presidential candidates are engaged in a tug of war as to who is really making history, a woman or a black candidate. Meanwhile, the only candidate with a real plan to change the economy for middle-class Americans, John Edwards (the not so historic candidate because he is a white Anglo-Saxon male), barely gets an opportunity to highlight how his plan would really jumpstart opportunities for working people and end the health care crisis of this country.

And we do have a crisis in health care! Just here in our Garden State, we have more than 1 million residents who are uninsured (almost 48 million people nationally) and more and more hospitals everyday are closing because they cannot get reimbursements for all the charity care they have to provide to poor working Americans. The closings of the two hospitals in Newark highlight a growing trend in our state: Hospitals who serve poor people in working class neighborhoods cannot afford to provide health care to citizens anymore.

What is the solution? What are cities like Newark to do when hospitals close? No one really has an answer…those should be the real type of issues candidates should be addressing when they visit our state. Or, in this case, those should be the right kind of questions we voters should be asking of them every time they show up in our backyard claiming to be the real candidates for change.

Latinos, just like African-American women in South Carolina, do care about the issues more than they care about the race and gender of the candidate. But while Clinton can depend on her popularity (and that of her husband) to get the majority of the Hispanic vote, her actions in Nevada demonstrated that she cannot ignore our issues because Hispanics are also listening to Obama, and some to Edwards. In Las Vegas, she went to war with the Culinary Union when the union decided to start talking to its mostly immigrants members about Obama’s record for working families. And yet, Obama has a lot to learn about putting together a national campaign to reach out to Latino voters.

We have a lot of time left to keep demanding answers from our candidates. In that regard, I decided my frustration should be turned into action to get voters to vote on our primary day on February 5th. At the end of the day, it does not matter who we individually vote for because by voting our conscious we will remind Clinton, Obama, Edwards and the Republican candidates that our issues matter, not just our race or gender.

And if you do get a call from any of the candidates to remind you to vote on Tuesday, Feb 5th, PLEASE do ask them what they plan to do about our health care crisis. Let’s make that the issue to debate in this presidential campaign!

On December 1st, countries around the world recognized AIDS Day. The day came and went, but the facts remained unchanged. According to UNAIDS, the number of people infected with HIV/AIDS is 33.2 million. The figure is less then was originally anticipated last year (40 million), even though the numbers are stagnating, infections are still rising.

One place where the number is rising is Eastern Europe and Ukraine. Ukraine is the European country with the fastest growing HIV infection rate. According to UNAIDS – Ukraine, about 12,000 people have been infected this year alone, bringing the registered total to 117,000. Though this is the official number, the real number is assumed to be twice as much according to the World Bank because of trials in the documentation process.

On the ground, there is a lot to do. I believe that the Peace Corps and UNAIDS have taught me more about the HIV epidemic than I knew before starting my service. Peace Corps receives PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief) funding to offer grants to initiate HIV projects at our sites. (PEPFAR funds in Ukraine are used primarily for prevention - education and training.)

It’s hard to speak about my project because with an epidemic so large it is difficult to measure progress. Using PEPFAR grant money, I trained eleven school psychologists (who work as health teachers) to implement new lesson plans on HIV prevention. They in turn organized an HIV Week in all the public schools in the city for students in the 9th – 11th grade (students graduate in the 11th grade here).

I only had $700 to work with and I used my resources carefully. By the end of the week, the Board of Education claimed (from surveys) that 550 students learned how to protect themselves from HIV. I attended lessons in eight out of eleven schools. I hope that the survey results were correct in order to curve the adult HIV rate in my town which is about 1 for every 40 people.*

*Statistic from the Oleg Dmetrovich, Director of Social Services for Family, Youth, and Children in the City of Pryluky.

In a time when shows like “The Biggest Loser” that encourage people to lose weight are so popular, I’m proud to say I’ve gained 50 pounds over 10 years and I couldn’t be happier.

At 13 and 60 pounds, my life depended on gaining weight. Though I originally intended to go on a diet to look “skinny and pretty,” my struggle with anorexia nervosa nearly killed me two months shy of my 14th birthday.

I first began cutting down on cookies and other fattening sweets, restricting my daily fat intake to three grams. My weight dropped to 86 pounds, and I regularly received compliments from my school friends and neighbors.

Gradually, my devotion to counting fat grams and calories became an obsession. I ate only wheat toast with strawberry jam, and jars of banana-flavored baby food, about 300 calories a day. If I was still hungry, I would chew on Tums or drink ginger ale to curb my appetite.

Growing up in the Cuban culture, where food is love, my parents were baffled by my weight loss. They cooked my favorites like rice and beans with chicken and caramel custard and begged or bribed me to eat.
“I’ll give you $5 if you finish this sandwich,” my dad would say.

To convince my parents that I was “eating,” I would push my food around the plate, or tell them I would feel more comfortable eating by myself. When they would leave me alone in the kitchen, I would either throw my dinner out the window or feed it to my dog, Bingo. As I became skeletal, trying to hide my bony frame in baggy clothing, Bingo’s girth steadily increased.

As anyone who has suffered from eating disorders knows, self-starvation, taking diet pills and exercising for four hours at a time are a few of the superficial symptoms of the disorder. I had such bad self-esteem, I couldn’t walk by a mirror without criticizing my “thunder thighs” or the shape of my nose, or how my stomach was not completely flat. After awhile of not eating, I would feel numb but powerful. Years of being bullied at school had me helpless, but in starving myself, I felt I had “succeeded” at something. I may have been physically frail, but I was untouchable.

But my Cuban family found the concept of an “eating disorder” hard to fathom.

“If you were here, I would tie you down and force feed you,” wrote my mother’s cousin Mimi from Miami in a letter to me. By March of 1997, after exhausting possibilities of cancer and ulcers, my parents took me to the emergency room at St. Mary’s Hospital in Hoboken because I had become severely anemic and hypoglycemic - low blood sugar. While in the pediatric unit that week, my pulse was so low I was in danger of going into cardiac arrest and dying. All I kept thinking was, “Please God, don’t let me die. But I don’t want to gain weight either.”

“You are going to die just like Karen Carpenter,” the nurse on duty said, referring to the 70s singer who struggled with anorexia nervosa and died in 1983, the year I was born.

My week-long stint at the Hoboken hospital was followed by my saga at the Eating Disorders Unit at St. Claire’s Hospital in Boonton where I spent most of 1997 - including my favorite holidays, Easter, my birthday in May, July 4th, Thanksgiving Christmas and New Year’s. Every time I would be discharged, I would go back. In fact, the other patients and I would joke about that, since I would only go home for two-week intervals and that was my “vacation.”

During my stay at the Pepto Bismol pink-colored Eating Disorders Unit, I was held down several times as doctors and staff there placed a naso-gastric tube - a thin tube that went from my nose to my stomach - that, like an intravenous, would provide extra nutrients if I wasn’t eating all my meals.

My turning point came at 17, when after years of inpatient and outpatient therapy, I grew tired to being sick and tired. After meeting men and women who’ve quit law school, jeopardized their relationships and went on disability leave at work, I knew life was more than about counting calories.

Eating “fear foods” like cheesecake and French fries were tough at first, but the alternative would be a revolving door between the hospital and my bedroom. I wanted to go to prom, go to college, become a journalist and get married. Living my life fearing food and taking diet pills was not a life. Though I felt “powerful” by starving, I learned I had no control if I was sitting in an Eating Disorders Unit hearing bulimics trade “binge and purge” stories as the anorexics find ways to hide food and smuggle in gum and other “contraband.”

Though I have relapsed twice, I find productive ways of dealing with despair: I dance, write, read and volunteer. The most powerful feeling is knowing I’m healthy, and able to help others with their struggle.