By Taylor Armerding
I'm meeting Margaret Pena for the first time, and I can't stop thinking about threads.
Everybody's life is a weave of them — family, friends, experiences, successes and failures — that eventually form a virtual garment. For a fortunate few, it's a beautiful and unspoiled thing. For most of us, there is some damage here and there, but it holds together. In some, it is frayed, decayed or torn to pieces. But sometimes, even when the fabric gets torn in a way that seems irreparable, new threads knit it back together into something even better.
That's what occurs to me watching Margaret, a tall, graceful 17-year-old, relax on a couch with Pastor Juan Melo, his wife, Jacqueline, and daughter, Wilmary, in their second-floor home on Lowell Street in Lawrence.
A year ago, Margaret and the Melos had never heard of one another. While they are all natives of the Dominican Republic, the Melos haven't lived there for 15 years. They left when Juan Melo was transferred to Lawrence to become the pastor of Iglesia de Dios de la Profecia, an evangelical church on Haverhill Street. Margaret was a 16-year-old high school student with dreams of going to university and becoming an industrial engineer.
Under normal circumstances, their lives never would have intersected.
But then Margaret's life was torn. During an argument with her stepfather, he threw a floor-cleaning solvent at her, causing horrific chemical burns. The wounds healed but the scars remained, starting just below her mouth and running down her neck, across her left shoulder and arm, like a livid, miniature lava flow.
With no hospital in the country equipped to do the surgery it would take to make even partial repairs to her skin, she thought she would be disfigured for life.
And she might have been, were it not for some seemingly random threads that came together to restore her life and her body.
One of them is Craig Hammon of Essex, executive vice president for CURE International, a Pennsylvania-based Christian nonprofit that operates hospitals and clinics in about a dozen developing countries, primarily focused on curing childhood disabilities such as cleft palate, club foot and spina bifida.
Hammon, coincidentally, had just moved to new office space in Gloucester last fall, and discovered that his new landlord, Ralph Pino of the Pino & Shea law firm, had chaired the board of the Shriners Hospital for Children in Boston.
"We talked about CURE," Hammon says, "and we thought there must be some way we could work together to help kids around the world."
Those threads led to Margaret. Hammon sent out e-mails to the nine executive directors of CURE hospitals and soon heard about Margaret from Ruth Brito, who works for CURE in the Dominican Republic. In the next few months, Brito arranged for Margaret's visa, passport and a ticket to Boston.
Pino raised some money for expenses and contacted still another thread, Dr. Robert Sheridan at the Shriner Hospital, who agreed to help with surgeries.
Then Brito, through a mutual friend in Miami, contacted the final thread — the Melos. They immediately agreed to take Margaret into their home for the three months or longer that the surgeries would take. On Feb. 20, she got on a plane for the first time in her life and flew to Boston.
And now, with bandages on her neck following her second surgery, she sits and talks with the Melos as comfortably as if she had lived with them her whole life.
That's how they all feel, according to Juan Melo, a man who smiles almost nonstop. "There is something natural about it," he says through Wilmary, who translates for them all. "It is an immense joy for us to serve the community. We've become a family with her."
They've even created a MySpace page, with songs and pictures, so her family and friends back home can keep up with what is going on.
While Margaret is a bit shy with a stranger, she says she "likes it a lot," living with the Melos. They all plan to keep in touch after her stay ends.
That joy extends to every thread involved. Hammon, who initiated the whole thing, says he is overwhelmed by Margaret's courage and by the generosity of those who brought her to the United States.
He says he hopes the connection between CURE and the Shriners Hospital will continue — that Margaret will be only the first of many.
Sometime later this spring, Margaret will return home, with her body restored and with a new extended family. And a life, while torn, is more beautiful than before, thanks to threads of friendship and compassion.
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Taylor Armerding is a staff columnist. He may be reached at 978-946-2213 or at tarmerding@eagletribune.com.
