Thread: If he had only come here legally....

http://delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll ... 10316/1006

This following is the featured article on the front page of the LOCAL section
of our newspaper. It goes without saying (literally) that Mr. Sastra is an illegal alien. A legal Mexican immigrant could, at the very least, seek assistance from medicare:

Latino community rallies around man

Businesses, nonprofits attempt to raise money for kidney transplant
By ELOISA GONZALEZ / The News Journal
06/11/2005GEORGETOWN -- For the last three weeks, the donation buckets set up in many Latino-owned businesses in this southern Delaware town have been filling up with coins and dollar bills. Workers at a Georgetown community center have been distributing the containers and fliers at stores, churches and anywhere else that will take them.

With a photo and a story pasted on the containers, they explain their plea: an olive-skinned man with a goatee and tubes attached to his body who may not have much time to live.

Last December, Lincoln resident José Francisco Ochoa Sastre went to the doctor thinking he had the flu. That's when the 25-year-old was handed down a terrifying verdict. Doctors told him his kidneys weren't working properly. Without dialysis, he would die soon. The man who made his living as a construction worker was suddenly weak. He was placed in intensive care at Kent General Hospital.

Without a transplant, doctors told him, he may not live long enough to help raise his 16-month-old niece Carol, who plays happily around her sick uncle in their Lincoln home, to support his 46-year-old mother when she reaches old age, or to someday have a family of his own. In that one moment, all those goals were reduced to one: to live.

For now, Ochoa's goal has a price. And it's the $50,000 he needs to begin the process of getting a kidney transplant. That amount doesn't include the cost of the medications he'll need if he receives a transplant.

Though many members of Georgetown's Latino community don't have much money, they have been trying to help Ochoa, a Mexican immigrant. Most of them, said the Rev. César Gomez, are struggling, blue-collar workers just like Ochoa, yet they've donated $10, $50 -- anything they can afford -- determined to raise the money needed to help him live.

On May 28, the Spanish-language radio station Digital 900 AM held radiothon for Ochoa. Gomez, who tends to the Latino parishioners at St. Michael's Catholic Church in Georgetown, went on the air to broadcast the man's plight. He asked people to contribute. Organizers raised $5,000, Gomez said.

MarÃÂ*a López, a receptionist at La Esperanza community center that works with Latinos in Sussex County, made 200 fliers that the center distributed at Hispanic businesses and other centers in the region. The center and its workers have been the driving force behind the effort to help Ochoa.

'Your heart breaks'

But perhaps the most involved volunteer is Ochoa's older brother Elvio, who has traveled to Washington, D.C., and throughout Delaware to ask for help.

"When you are living it and you see your loved one suffer and needs help, your heart breaks," Elvio Ochoa said.

When Elvio Ochoa isn't working in construction, he is at churches asking for money that will help buy time for José.

His concern is the ticking clock for his brother, now a frail man in rocking chair. He is a remnant of the José they used to know, "a happy boy," said his mother. He arrived in Delaware five years ago from Mexico and worked in various construction jobs, sending the money he saved to family in Mexico.

"Right now, I have much desire to live," said José Ochoa as he swayed his body, which has carried months of stress and depression, in a rocking chair.

"I want to get married and start a family," is about all he can say because he struggles to talk.

Most of the time, Elvio Ochoa or others who are helping him do the talking.

Hard times

Though many in the Hispanic community are helping José Ochoa, they are far from raising the amount to start the procedure. As the family and the community struggle to find supporters and money, José's chances for survival are decreasing.

And even if they get the money, he still needs to finance future treatment, which could cost up to $20,000 a year.

In a moment of desperation and examining the seemingly impossible task, Elvio Ochoa comes close to losing hope.

"There isn't much to do [anymore]," he said sadly. "I have no money."

But at La Esperanza, which means "hope" in Spanish, they haven't given up yet.

"[José] is a member of the community that needs hope," said the center's supervisor, Marissa Chávez-Vonville. "For a lot of people, we are a place of hope."

Contact Eloisa Gonzalez at egonzalez@delawareonline.com.

Sastre is his mothers last name

Sastre is his mothers last name

Thank you for the correction..though I can assure you, this oversight was unintentional.

We Americans are familiar with the last name used in a persons title as being..well, their last name. Case in point: As a kid I used to think Englands royal family had the last name of Highness.