Petronila and Her Family Story

We Are Just Surviving, Getting By On GOD'S MERCY And POWER OF GOD."

These heartfelt words from Petronila Martinez echo the plight of her family. Perched high on a mountaintop in Nicaragua, the family’s shack resembles a child’s playhouse. It’s made from twigs, with a dirt floor and plastic sheets for a roof. The flimsy structure could easily collapse with one well-placed kick. Petronila and her family built the makeshift shelter when a kind neighbor allowed them to live on his land.

This desperate mother, along with her daughter, Socorro, 36, and her sons, Isaiah, 10, Gerardo, 5, and Juan Carlos, 2, are trapped in poverty. They barely survive by eating only yams and a few beans daily. The children are severely malnourished.

Within their dilapidated shack, the family’s possessions are meager. “Look at the beds we have to sleep on,” Petronila told us, pointing to the homemade beds made from tree limbs. – –– just surviving “This is not a life, but we are thankful for this house because it is all we have.”

The family has no land and little food. Three years ago, they joined other poor families who live by the roadside near Nicaragua’s capital — a location chosen to alert government officials about the families’ homelessness.

“We said, ‘Let’s go to Managua because we have no land and no house,’” Petronila told us.

The family erected tents of black plastic, slept on the grass and lived on a handful of rice and bananas. They did all this in hopes of getting their own land, a house and a better life.

But hope turned into tragedy one fateful day: completely helpless, Socorro watched in horror as a drunk driver hit and killed her little girl.

Clarita was only 11 years old. A passing bicyclist had given her a fifty-cent piece, and the young girl was playing with the coin by the highway when the driver swerved unexpectedly. Socorro is still traumatized by her daughter’s tragic death. “I saw everything that happened,” Socorro says softly. “I saw the truck hit her. I saw her all bloody. When I picked her up off the ground, she was already dead. I was in shock and fainted.”

Socorro’s family desperately wants to start over again. They’d like to live in a house where sad memories don’t linger, and which has a garden that will allow them to grow food and earn income. “If I could just have a little piece of land, I could grow anything,” Petronila told us. “This is someone else’s land. We got this little corner so we could stay here. I don’t have anything.”