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    Senior Member Brian503a's Avatar
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    Counselor serves as a guiding light for immigrants

    http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/13331515.htm

    Posted on Mon, Dec. 05, 2005

    Counselor serves as a guiding light for immigrants

    BY VALERIA GODINES
    The Orange County Register

    SANTA ANA, Calif. - She watched him lead the 40 illegal immigrants out of the house. One group was going to Florida, another to Texas. The 19-year-old waited her turn.

    It never came.

    She asked the smuggler when she would leave. He told her she wasn't going anywhere and she better keep her mouth shut. Then he began locking all the doors in the empty house in Las Vegas and disappeared for a few minutes.

    It suddenly hit her that she was going to be raped.

    She froze, her heart pounding. She found an unlocked door, slipped through it, sprinted across yards, with the smuggler chasing her. He was gaining on her. She scaled a wall and, as if by fate, landed in the back yard of a retired policewoman who came to her rescue.

    And here, in this small office at the Mexican Consulate on a busy Santa Ana, Calif., street, she found herself being rescued again. This time by a psychotherapist.

    Pilar Ocampo, 39, offers her counseling services free every Tuesday at the consulate. It's a rare luxury that even the Los Angeles Mexican Consulate, the biggest in the country, doesn't offer.

    She listens to all sorts of tragic stories from immigrants, mostly undocumented. The near-rape. The woman who was profoundly depressed because her family back home expected great things of her.

    And especially the man who turned to alcohol to forget what happened in the desert.

    When Ocampo is counseling patients, she tries to get them to draw a life lesson from their suffering. She believes suffering has meaning, and it will make you stronger.

    "You see the suffering," Ocampo says. "It doesn't matter how many stories you have heard in your life. Each story is different and each story breaks your heart."

    She knows this all too well. She gained her most valuable lessons in life while nursing her father.

    It started with a backache. Doctors in Mexico dismissed it, saying it was muscular. After all, he was Don Rafael, who rode horses and worked the farm. By the time they found the tumor, it had spread.

    Her dear father, who called her alma, his soul, while she called him corazon, her heart, was dying.

    Always a daddy's girl, she focused on nothing but her father. She didn't eat or sleep. Friends became concerned. One day, when he was in severe pain, she left his room, desperate. She sat down and cried. Hit with a thought, she suddenly lifted her head.

    "Listen, you have two choices," she told herself. "You either let one part of you die with your daddy or have one part of your daddy live with you. Those are the options. Which one are you going to choose?"

    She chose life.

    Her lesson learned: love without attachment, remaining dignified and moving on in the face of pain.

    She pushed him to be independent, even while her heart was breaking. And Ocampo made sure her father's dignity remained intact.

    "You will always be the man of the house, no matter how sick you are," she told him.

    "He went from being a very strong man to a man in Pampers. I used to tell him that a Pamper won't take your dignity away. I never allowed him to feel sorry for himself."

    He passed away in her arms, while she whispered chiquitito (my little dear one) in his ear. She told him, "Go, my love. Go with God."

    It's a Tuesday and Ruby, the 19-year-old who was nearly raped, walks into Ocampo's office. Wearing a braid and a touch of lipstick, the woman from Chiapas sports a trendy backpack.

    She says that she is recovering and is grateful for the counseling. It is already paying off. She was so scared that her brother had to bring her to her first visit with Ocampo. The following week she felt confident enough to come on her own.

    "She has helped me so much," Ruby says. "She feels like a friend. It makes me not afraid. I don't have fear. I have a desire to fight."

    Dangerous journeys aside, the life of an immigrant is hard, she says. "Yes, you can send money home. Yes, you can have a house. But at what price?"

    She's decided she wants a career, either in law or psychology, and is in the process of becoming a legal resident.

    Ocampo opposes illegal immigration, because of the risks involved, preferring instead that immigrants invest their money in their small towns instead of on smugglers. But she stresses that mental health comes first, regardless of immigration status.

    "The service is not in order for people to stay," she says. "It's for people to feel better so they make clearer decisions. So if they realize they made a mistake, they should go back."

    That's a hard decision for migrants whose families have sacrificed to get them here.

    "I was talking to one woman and she was saying the hardest part is that she can't go back to Mexico. She would love to go back, but her family sold their animals to pay the coyote so she can't go back and say she couldn't make it," Ocampo says.

    "All immigrants come here with a dream, but in order for you to reach that dream, to make that dream happen, you need to be emotionally stable inside," Ocampo says.

    Ocampo has reached her dream. She has a clinic in Oaxaca, where she trains psychotherapists and medical doctors in methods of therapy.

    She came to Orange County two years ago after she married an Italian she met at an airport. She was returning from Paris, he from Acapulco. Their eyes locked, and they struck up a conversation. Today they own a Domino's pizza in Santa Ana.

    And she's fulfilling her mission in life - helping people.

    "I am not doing this for the money. If I were on the other side, I'd want somebody to help me. Life is like this. Sometimes we are on one side, sometimes we are on the other."

    They had been walking for hours under the unforgiving sun in the desert. His wife became dehydrated and died. Several hours later, his 9-month-old daughter died in his arms.

    Cradling his dead daughter in one arm and carrying his dead wife with the other, he turned himself into authorities. They deported him and sent the bodies to Tijuana.

    The 27-year-old wanted to go home to Mexico City, but his family told him to stay away. His wife's family blamed him for her death and might kill him.

    He made the dangerous journey again and this time ended up in Orange County. Lonely and depressed, he worked by day and drank tequila by night.

    He broke down crying as he told Ocampo the story. He never imagined he'd end up like this.

    With the consulate's help, the man, whose name is being withheld because of patient confidentiality, is now in an alcohol rehabilitation program. She plans to visit him on his birthday, on Dec. 12.

    "If you share what you have, it is a way to say thank you, a way to thank God because you gave me this opportunity and now I can give it back to the people," Ocampo says.
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