Zully Alvarado, her head held high, is walking with the help of a cane through her Ravenswood shoe and clothing shop. She’s told me she wears a size-one and a size-six shoe, but I can’t tell which is which.
“I like to say I’m making a living,” says Alvarado. Then she adds, “I look at my shoes not as a business but meeting the needs of society.” That’s the way she’s come to look at most things.
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Father Lauro wanted to fly her to Chicago for surgery and physical therapy that would help her walk on her own, and her parents agreed to let her go. The little girl, now nine, was terrified. “I didn’t quite understand why I was leaving. All I can remember saying to my parents was that I would promise to learn not to fall, that I would be more careful. I was just promising all this stuff to them, that I would be good, to please not let me go to this strange planet.”
The day Alvarado and Father Lauro arrived in Chicago they discovered that the hospital didn’t have enough beds, so he left her with his brother’s family. It was her first time in a big city, her first time in a home with electricity and running water. She had lived in a dirt-floor shack in a town so small it was known only as “kilometer 31,” where “even to buy a candle was a luxury.” What impressed her most in the Lauro house was the mirror in the living room, because she’d never seen herself before. She remembers spending hours smiling, making faces, and staring at herself.
At Mount Assisi Academy in Lemont, Alvarado dreamed of becoming a fashion designer. She made clothes for a few friends to pick up extra money and for herself “to hide my legs, my feet.” Her high school years weren’t easy. “You question why your friends get to go out and have dates all the time, and why was I not chosen? That’s what society teaches you–if you don’t have breasts or legs you’re nothing.”
It was in the late 1980s that the pain and weakness returned and she had to quit her job. She began taking night classes at the International Academy of Merchandising and Design. “Just to play with fabrics, the feel, it brought life back to me. It helped me forget my physical pain.”
Soon she had set up Causes for Change International, and last month she and three volunteers went to Ecuador to visit the orphanage where she’d stayed as a child. There they found 150 girls and young women who’d been abandoned or whose parents couldn’t provide for them. She asked the people running the orphanage how they kept it going. “They said they depended on the Lady of Providence. I thought it was an independent organization, but what I discovered was that it was God. They have no plan of any kind to be able to raise funds and provide for the needs. One of the major needs I found was for a roof for the various barracks. They also need floors. They need special medical care. They need clothing. Just everything–even food.” Alvarado has since persuaded friends in the pharmaceutical business in Saint Louis to send them free medicine.
