Sick 3-year-old is the “little miracle” of this struggling Honduran family in Miami
On a recent visit to the Vaquiz family home in Brownsville, its youngest occupant — Jonathan, a curly-haired 3-year-old — was a flurry of activity.
Sometimes with pants on, and sometimes without, he hung upside-down from the arms of his 15-year-old brother, Pablo. He tumbled around with the family’s new puppy — Lassie, a rabble-rousing Labrador. Jonathan sneaked into his parents’ car and honked the horn.
But Jonathan’s most uninhibited moment came when he held court outside the house’s front door, and bopped along to his favorite reggaeton song: J Balvin and Willy William’s “Mi Gente.”
“He’s my little miracle,” said Jonathan’s mom, Mayra Esperanza, with a smile.
It can be difficult to square Jonathan’s effusiveness with his harrowing medical history.
Born with DiGeorge syndrome, a rare chromosomal disorder that causes a string of defects in vital organ systems, Jonathan struggles with both chronic lung problems and congenital heart disease.
Because of the malformations in his lungs, breathing has been a battle since birth. Mayra remembers holding Jonathan’s bruised-looking body after her C-section, barely feeling his hot breath on her chest in the cold operating room. He never found the strength to cry, and he wound up spending 25 days in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), where his oxygen levels slowly ticked up.
Jonathan’s first major surgery, a nine-hour long operation to insert a stent in a pulmonary vein, came when he was 7 months old.
“But the worst of it all started a month later,” said Mayra, with tears in her eyes. After a short-lived discharge from Jackson Memorial, two consecutive bouts with viral infections brought Jonathan right back — a product of the compromised immune system his chromosomal disorder is also associated with.
“It was incredible. The doctors couldn’t understand why he was getting sick so often. They would address one virus and we would just come back with another. I remember crying. I didn’t want more hospitalizations,” Mayra said. “Each time we got to the ER and they told us he was going to be hospitalized, I would burst into tears. Not again, not again.”
At that moment, Mayra could still count on the support of her “right-hand man:” her husband Pedro, a construction worker. The pair met as teenagers 23 years ago in the small village of San Lorenzo, on Honduras’ Pacific coast. They moved to Miami in the early 2000s.
Two sons who had stayed behind in Honduras — Alexis, now 19, and Pablo, now 15 — joined their parents five years ago. And two more sons were born on U.S. soil: Josef, 6, and Jonathan.
Pedro helped provide for the family, in Mayra’s telling, by “doing a bit of everything,” invariably getting home at night exhausted and covered with sweat. He would fix roofs. He would paint.
On occasion, Pedro took Alexis to construction sites. “It was his way of setting an example,” Mayra said. “The message was, ‘study hard so you don’t end up like me, working outdoors from sunrise to sunset.’”
Alexis remembers that message well.
“A pencil weighs less than a shovel,” he said. “That’s what he would tell me.”
It was at a construction site in March 2017 that Pedro suffered a head injury so severe that it caused a stroke and irreparable brain damage, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down and unable to speak.
To make matters worse, Pedro’s six-month-long hospitalization in Aventura overlapped with Jonathan’s most serious illness to date, a bloodstream infection that had him fighting for his life at Jackson Memorial.
“That was just a really difficult stretch of time,” said Mayra, who spent hours driving back and forth from her husband’s hospital to her son’s.
The loss of Pedro’s income — and the doubling of full-time care-taking responsibilities for Mayra — tipped the condition of the Vaquiz family’s well-being from complicated to critical.
“It wasn’t just my husband’s health or Jonathan’s health. It was our economic situation. It was rent, it was car insurance, it was food. It was everything,” Mayra said. “I would tell my other kids that we were fine, that I was going to take care of us. But when they weren’t around, I would get in the car and grab the wheel and yank my hair out, crying and yelling. I remember asking God, ‘What am I going to do? My whole family is coming apart.’”
To help make ends meet, Mayra took on a night time shift at Burger King. When she got off work in the mornings, she’d take her children to school, then hurry home to feed, clothe, and wash her husband. She earned about $300 a week and slept two hours a day. “I realized I was stronger than I thought,” she said.
But it proved hard to keep adversity at bay. Early last year, Pedro grew depressed and became prone to suicidal thoughts. (“He thought he’d be of more help to the family if he wasn’t around,” Mayra said.) And a few months later, Jonathan was back in the operating room, this time for a 12-hour-long open-heart surgery to replace his pulmonary valve.
Mayra, who had to quit her Burger King job to look after both Pedro and Jonathan, was afraid the family would find itself without a home.
“When we were in those crises, my biggest fear was that we would end up on the streets, and that they would take my kids away from me,” she said. “You know, we’re in the U.S. Here, if a child is sleeping on the streets, they take them away. It doesn’t matter if you are the most spectacular mom in the world. They take them away. And I didn’t want that to happen to me.”
Nowadays, Jonathan’s health is better, but Mayra knows his condition will make him vulnerable to serious illness the rest of his childhood. The state of the family’s finances, on the other, remains precarious.
Occasional sales of home-cooked meals at flea markets help bring some money in — Mayra, with her children’s help, prepares everything from ceviche to pork and chicken tamales. Donated items from a nearby church also provide some relief, as do members of Jonathan’s medical team, who offer to pitch in for rent during particularly difficult months. The only consistent source of income comes from Jonathan’s disability benefits, which total around $750 a month.
Looking back on the tumultuous past handful of months, Mayra said it was Jonathan’s sunny outlook in the face of all-too-frequent suffering that helped hold the family together.
“Jonathan’s attitude has always been happy, joyful. At the hospital, he’s always blowing kisses to the nurses, to everybody. He just never lost his smile, despite everything that happened. And he knows that that helps me,” she said. “I would tell myself, if he can be that strong at his age, with everything he went through, why would I, an adult, hang my head down? He gave me strength.”
Genny Raffo has seen Jonathan’s positive attitude firsthand. She’s the director of nursing at the specialized pediatric care center that Jonathan visits six days a week.
“The other day, I asked him if he liked me. At first he said he didn’t. But when he saw that I got sad, he came running up to me and gave me a kiss. He’s very friendly, very affectionate. And he’s a fighter. A real fighter,” she said. “The family is poor, but they do everything they can so that Jonathan can be a happy kid.”
As the end of the year gets near, the Vaquiz family is in great need, especially since their landlord wants them to move out of their home by December 31. Among the things that would come in handy in their new dwelling — which they still haven’t found — are furniture (particularly beds and mattresses), a small fridge to store Jonathan’s medicine, a washer and dryer, and a computer for the children to do homework.
“Some toys would be nice as well,” said Mayra. “To help make Christmas a little bit more enjoyable.”
HOW TO HELP
Wish Book is trying to help hundreds of families in need this year. To donate, pay securely at MiamiHerald.com/wishbook. For information, call 305-376-2906 or email wishbook@miamiherald.com. (The most requested items are often laptops and tablets for school, furniture, and accessible vans.) Read more at MiamiHerald.com/wishbook.
