Another Child, Another Chance To Honor Life

“Your children are not your children. 
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. 
They come through you but not from you, 
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.”

-Khalil Gibran

This fragment above is from a poem I read at my daughter’s funeral in September 2009. The tears I’ve cried for Brianna have been consoled by the mere concept withheld in Gibran’s spiritual words: that God places his most prized possessions in our hands only for a short while.

Brianna

The thought that God gave me the opportunity to parent Brianna, if only for a while, has ceased being just a consolation. It has given me sincere joy. And now, behold, the opportunity of having another child in the house. Angel, age five months, who has a congenital heart disease.

Brianna died at one of Houston’s best hospitals at age 3½ of a rare, incurable condition called pulmonary hypertension. I recently learned that, ironically, thousands of children in developing countries die of congenital heart diseases that are treatable because treatment is scarce or nonexistent where they live.

One logical stopgap to that tragic irony is to bring those children, one-by-one, to facilities in Texas and Louisiana to receive lifesaving surgery and send them back with Mommy and Daddy to live normal, healthy lives. So, when I learned that this was the mission of HeartGift and that this nonprofit was establishing a chapter in Houston I knew I had to be part of this.

I was invited to participate as board member, an honor I accepted in December 2010. My first request was to become the host parent of the fist child patient from a Latin American country. That way I could be a translator/interpreter as well.

Mingjuan (patient's mom),
Yan (patient) and
Yao Ming

HeartGift Houston’s very first patient was an 11-year old boy from China. He was very lucky in the sense that the most patients with his condition do not get to live beyond 20 years of age without corrective surgery. During his visit to Houston he was well received by the Chinese community and even got to meet Yao Ming.

Angel

Angel, who lives with his parents in a small town in El Salvador, will be our second patient, but the first one in 2011 and also the first one I will get to see since I became a board member of Heart Gift Houston. Last Saturday, I received Angel’s photo for the first time, as my husband TJ and I will be his host-parents. We wept as we saw how cute he is and at the thought of having another baby in the house. That’s when I blurted it out on facebook -sorry guys!

Dr. William Douglas scheduled Angel’s surgery for Wednesday, May 25 at Children’s Memorial Herman Hospital. Our other partner organization, Childspring International, is taking care of the Angel’s (and his Mommy’s) passports and humanitarian visas, which must be ready before May 21. They are also conducting a background checks on my husband and me (the ironies abound, as my husband is a police officer).

Angel must then travel with Mommy on Saturday May 21, at the latest, so he can have time to attend his pre-surgery appointments and tests.

Hopefully, everything will go according to this tight schedule because even though there would be another window of opportunity for surgery on early June, each day without the surgery poses risks.

So, little Angel could not come any sooner. Some of our closest friends have volunteered help. One of them already brought us a truckload (literally) of toys and baby necessities. Now I know why Texas must have big pickups: they need them to haul around all that generosity and compassion.

After the surgery, which I know in my heart will be successful, Angel will still stay with us for a few weeks for his recovery, until Dr. Douglas says he his healthy enough to fly back to El Salvador. In the mean time, we want to have a party for him here at home.

If you want to celebrate with us, shoot me an email or leave a comment here.

I'm not that kind of Guru

It doesn’t get any swankier than the Junior League ofHouston. The audience could not be more prestigious than The Baylor Network. That was the setting of the stage I had the honor to share with some of Houston’s most established gentlemen in media.

Fox 26 Anchor Melissa Williams, the Emcee of the morning event, introduced the panel: Lance Roberts, financial advisor and radio talk show host on KSEV; Michael Berry, former Houston Council Member and current radio talk show host; D’artagnan Bebel, General Manager at Fox 26; Tom Koch, news anchor at ABC 13, and social media guru Sandra Salazar.

Goosebumps! Did she say the G-word? Holy Mac! Trying to live up to that expectation was quite challenging, especially sharing the panel with celebrities.

AT the beginning I found it difficult to even introduce my self, but once I got engaged in the discussion, I got caught in a case of “Help! I’m talking and I can’t shut up!”

Many things were left in the proverbial inkwell/microphone/keyboard, so I was compelled to write a little about this amazing experience.

D’artagnan was absolutely right to say that Youtube is the ultimate video news deliverer. He gave an excellent example with the recent Japan earthquake and tsunami events. However, he did not give his medium (television) enough credit for something social media has a hard time delivering: context.

I applaud Lance for giving free advice on the air without advertising his business. This is what social networking is all about. There is an expectation of free, and as I mentioned briefly at the panel, the other side of this coin is the principle of reciprocity. I do disagree that radio is a dying medium. Like television, radio helps in providing context to breaking news.

Michael had an excellent point in mentioning user-generated content. Any integration of users is the essence of the paradigm shift D’artagnan had mentioned at the beginning. Radio has been doing this ever since the first talk show host asked “caller are you there?” In that sense, talk radio is the pioneer of social media.

We cannot think of social media as competing with traditional media. In fact, the mere idea of competition belongs in the old paradigm. Sharing and embracing belongs in the new paradigm. As Tom said, television co-mingles with social media. The station produces a news item, and, sometimes before it airs, it is posted online. The station and the talent each have their facebook and twitter accounts and “push” the links to the stories through those social media accounts.

Does ABC 13 get any revenue from their social networks? No. But, can their sales staff get by with just the Nielsen data like they used to back when? Absolutely not. They also have the stats on the site hits. That’s why their site has to be beefed up. That’s why their URL is mentioned at the end of each story, and that’s why they friend everyone on who cares to ask.

That being said, it is important to mention that social media is measurable and strategies can and should be established before organizations begin investing resources in them.

Finally, there was a brief discussion about monetization. Social media is not a quid pro quo in terms of monetary value. Social media is better appreciated in terms of social capital, and is better appreciated in terms of audiences.

• Example 1: When Michael says that the money is not with the teens, but rather with their grandparents, he’s right because he perfectly understands his audience.

• Example 2: When Lance says that a future desired skill will be face-to-face communication, he’s right because he understands his own set of audiences.

Both Michael and Lance have audiences of aural connection who can interpret body language.

This last point brings me to perhaps the one I didn’t have time for: the fact that I was introduced as a social media guru does not make me the prescriber of social media as the panacea. Perhaps I disappointed those who were expecting a mouthful of acronyms and a few references of the coolest, latest apps. I just prefer to describe my self as a message maven who prescribes a medium according to the audience.

Admit it: you've forwarded cyber-panic

Being the consummate translator, here’s how my brain automatically interprets the phrase Urgent Message in an email subject line: elimina y sonríe (hit the delete button and smile).

It’s a primordially human reaction. Think of a newborn’s first adoring little gases. First-time parents looking at the baby’s precious face might even say “Awww, her first smile!” But the nurses know better: when the infant is passing gas, the exertion makes her lips contract into a gentle, Mona Lisa smile.

I began to delete and smile soon after I started using email, back when the 486 PC Dinosaurs were still roaming the earth, and it surprises me how many people my age and older still forward a forwarded email with the subject line Urgent Message.

To be specific, the subject line looks something like this:

Fw: Fw: Fw: Fw: Fw: Fw: Urgent Message

Recently, one of my contemporaries sent me a message with the subject line Una preguntita (Quick Question), but the content was surprising. She’s an international reporter who has worked border violence stories in Mexico, and she was trying to do what responsible journalists do: confirm before repeating.

So, here’s her question:

“En Monterrey está circulando este correo [adjunto]. Quizá no es nuevo ni cierto pero como sabes mi familia está allá […] me gustaría saber si [la policía] sabe algo de ésto y si tiene alguna información que compartir con mi familia.”

(The attached email is circulating in Monterrey. Perhaps it’s not new or true, but as you know my family is over there […] I’d like to know if [the police] knows anything and if [they have] any information [they] might share with my family.)

The surprising part was that the attached email included the letterhead of a Mexican government official. However, the content is as old as the first messages transmitted over phone-line Internet connections.

In summary, it warns the population that a particular street gang is initiating its recruits by making them drive with the headlights off. Knowing that people tend to alert distracted drivers by flashing their own headlights, the recruit’s mission was  (supposedly) to murder the occupants the first vehicle flashing it’s headlights. This was supposed to happen on a particular weekend in Montrerrey, Nuevo León, México.

You have probably seen emails like this. They are characterized by particularly large, colorful fonts, and the random use all-caps and exclamation points, thus breaking the 2^nd commandment of email messaging –the first one being “if thou must re-forward, do not violate everybody else’s right to privacy by leaving their email address on the message.” And admit it: you’ve probably re-forwarded a few of these urgent messages yourself… just in case.

My friend asked me the police’s opinion because I used to work as a Public Information Officer (PIO) at the Houston Police Department (HPD) and I currently work with an organization called Transborder International Police.

What I shared with my friend and her relatives is that, back in the pre-9/11 days at HPD, I received an email from a TV reporter who had received the exact email. The only difference was that the Urgent Message was in English and focused in the Houston area.

Back then I asked police officers I knew in several HPD divisions, ranging from Solo Motorcycle Units, to East Command, to Accident Reports, and Homicide. They all replied something along the line that they had not seen or heard of any police report resembling that description. An officer in a Gang Task Force was bold enough to tell me that this was most likely a hoax.

The reporter was disappointed that he didn’t have an exclusive story to air. But, again, I give him credit for investigating. Some just thrive in creating/augmenting panic. Happily, several weeks came and went, and sure enough, we received no reports even remotely resembling the circumstances described in the infamous Urgent Message.

That’s what I relayed to my friend together with a warning to take prudent precautions when driving at night.  I told her that unconfirmed messages like that only add to the general panic people are already suffering. Finally, I replied that the fact that the letterhead of an official was on the message does not imply any kind of official confirmation. It most likely means that the Mexican official received the so-called urgent message, did not confirm it, and forwarded it to friends, and then friends re-forwarded, and so on. Otherwise, if the official really wanted to warn the regiomontanos (citizens of Monterrey), she could have issued a news release.

What about the slight chance that any of these urgent messages might have an iota of truth in tem? Would you want your friends to roam the streets carelessly and then feel guilty if, Dios libre (God Forbid) something should happen? Of course not. But you can’t prevent every incident your loved ones are involved in, so if all you want to do is cover that “just in case” feeling, just preach awareness. Always.

Back in the HPD days, awareness of your surroundings was our crime prevention mantra. Today, it’s still a personal one. Between then and now I’ve deleted hundreds of urgent messages. I am still safe, knowing that if a message really needed my immediate attention it would actually state the subject in the subject line. So don’t panic upon receiving an Urgent Message. Just do your friends a favor:  breathe-in and hit the delete button; then breathe-out and smile. Namaste.