Ana Soares

Because it is Lent, if you are thinking about bringing flowers, please do a plant instead, or donate to Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church in honor of Ana.

At eight years old she helped her mom to cook for the farm workers. When they needed more hands in the fields, her mom would start the meal and my little years old mom was responsible for stirring the food not to burn. She was so small, and the pots were so large on top of the stove and my mom would pull up a chair to do her job. When the food was ready, she couldn’t move the pots off the flames not to burn the food. Seems like an impossible task. Not for Ana. She’d pull the burning logs from under the burners to let them rest on top of the flat part of the clay stove away from the food.

We learned from her to be responsible and to find solutions to problems at a very young age.

At 16 years old she got married and took care of her three daughters and our cousin who was left with us. She was devastated when she lost a baby older than I, due to lack of proper medical help.

We lived in a small town. My father spent most of his time at the farm. To make ends meet, she cooked for others, sewed, and did everything to keep us fed, with shoes on our feet, and taking vitamins, which was a rare commodity in a small town. She studied culinary and decorated beautiful birthdays and wedding cakes for extra money.

We participated in school plays, and at any new event possible that would enlighten our lives. I was introduced to acting at the age of ten. Hansel and Gretel, directed by her culinary teacher.

In May, for the coronation of the Blessed Mother my mother and others would build ladders on both sides of the altar and a platform behind the altar to connect them. And we would dress like angels with white wings, in white clothes decorated with sequins. All the children looked like pictures in the catechism book. She was amazing. My childhood was great!

Even though we didn’t have much money, she made sure to help the needy. It’s common to say to our children: eat your food because there are hungry children in the world. It’s true, good words, but…my mother took it literally.

At the table we ate as much as we wanted, but we could not waste food. “Get more if you’re still hungry, but don’t over fill your plate and don’t eat it”. Outside our home were people waiting with tin cans. Tin cans were very common in the fifties. We would go outside and bring the cans to the stove, and mom would fill them up with them for the poor.

When my father lost the farm due to an arson fire, we had to leave everything behind and look for other horizons. In the late fifties workers migrated to the center of the country to build a new capital, Brasilia. Dad went first, we went later.

My dad got a job in construction with the government, ran by an American company, which offered a cantina for the engineers and to help workers when they first arrived. Mom worked as a nurse assistant at the hospital, the only in town. Lots of construction, tons of dust, but we all lived in harmony.

Mom never lost that sense of helping people, especially children. She discovered that in the cantina they had lots of leftovers. Off course, she arranged to get whatever extra they had to help the needy, so set a long table in front of the church, and we’d help her to distribute flour, powdered milk, rice, beans, all sorts of goods every time they had extra food coming from the food US.

Mom loves America. America do Norte, that’s way we say in Brazil. In a collector’s album she had photos of American and Brazilian actresses and actors. She loved the arts.

In 1972, on a bright Brazilian day my mom shook the family roots. She announced she was moving to the ‘Estados Unidos da America’. My sisters cried. My aunts gossip behind closed doors. Everyone had something to say. I was in college and because it was during the seventies, and the whole world was in a turmoil, it didn’t upset me, so for a few weeks I saw myself in and out of government places getting her passport, vaccines and so on for her to leave us, not knowing that it was for a lifetime. She had gotten a job as a nanny for a Bolivian Ambassador and came with them to NEW YORK CITY!!!

She wrote letters. She was amazed how tall the buildings were. Our tallest building in Brasilia was the Congress, twenty-eight floors. She wrote letters to us talking about people. How polite the American people was. “They say good morning to people on the streets, they are very respectful to the elderly. The New Jersey gardens are full of flowers, the snow is so white, and sky is so blue, you can’t believe.” Mom loves America.

The Bolivian Ambassador was being relocated to Europe. He invited her to go come with them, but mom would not leave her darling America. She moved to New Jersey to work for a family as a nanny for two beautiful kids. The family signed her legal papers, and she became a legal immigrant and an American citizen, which happened as soon as it was possible.

I had finished Architecture at the University of Brasilia, so I came to the United States in 1974 to visit mom. I got married and moved to Los Angeles, and when I had my first child, mom moved in to help us. I can’t thank her enough.

Mom produced a Brazilian dance show at the Rosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, and meanwhile she helped me with the kids.

In 1989 she wrote to President Bush requesting a children’s day in America because Halloween was not for children. Halloween was bad. We lived in Los Angeles, and crime was so bad that every candy and fruit had to X-ray at a hospital to prevent problems. That was not a holiday for children, she thought. Also, her argument was that every country in the world celebrates the children’s day. America didn’t.

It took a long time. She didn’t give up and kept writing to congress. Finally on 1996, President Clinton signed the first proclamation to celebrate The National Children’s Day on the first Sunday of October. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-6939-national-childrens-day-1996

After the proclamation was signed, she kept writing to schools and calendar companies to talk about the National Children’s Day. She wrote poems, and songs. Newspapers interviewed her. But the credit went to a congress man. She received letters and a print of the Proclamation. We didn’t like that her name wasn’t mentioned, but she would say: “It doesn’t matter, what’s important is that now we have Children’s Day in America”. With no advertising machine, the date is fading into the clouds.

After the last big earthquake in LA, she left town and moved to Virginia. She could walk to the Pentagon in Washington, DC.

Here in Seminole, she walked to Publix and attended mass every day, prayed 10 rosaries a day and had a long increasing list of people she prayed for. At church she sat next to the children during their Wednesday mass. She loved them and wanted to be among them.

Mom, mother of Deusa, Belinha and me, grandmother of Chris and Jonathan, Italo, Etore, Erika, Fabiano, Tristana, Liz, from my sisters and three girls of my cousin whom she raised as her own son. Eight grandkids and fourteen great grandkids, Mark, Gabriella, Erick, Julianna, born in the US, and lots more in Brazil whom she visited every year and brought them gifts individually wrapped with their names on. Her Brazilian retirement savings, she divided among the ones in need every time she went to Brazil.

That was Ana, my mother, my hero.

Jardelina