My Father's Archives #10

I started this series with my beautiful mother,. and then I lost sight of her while talking about the people and life in the Brazilian sertão. There is not a single day when my thoughts don't take me back 40 or 45 years to that time and place. During the period of Christmas and New Year this has happened more frequently and there has been one figure that has dominated my memories more than any other. 
My mother is the kind of person who quietly gives all she has to help people around her. As a nurse, she saved lives under the most difficult of circumstances (one time, she helped a woman give birth in the back of the jeep pictured above while my father was driving her to the nearest hospital a day trip away; on another occasion, she made sure I stayed alive after swalling a coin that got stuck in my throat, taking as on an odyssey across much of the Brazilian Northeast in search of a doctor equiped with a tool that would reach into my throat and pluck the coin out). As a missionary, she gave love in abundance (and I suspect it was my mother who taught my father to love these people as passionately as he still does today), and people rewarded her with love. 
When my memories take me back to the sertão, that's what I remember above everything else: a childhood full of adventures, but always safe, because I lived immersed in motherly love. 
Nothing is more infectious than that.