With our latest issue of Journeys magazine due to arrive in mailboxes any day now, let’s get a behind-the-scenes look at a story we featured from Mexico. In “Something to Hold On To” we introduced you to Rosa, a single mom with two boys, struggling to make ends meet.

Elsa Oviedo, our communications coordinator in Mexico, visited Rosa and her boys several times to report this story. She interviewed them, took photos and recorded video. Here’s her insider’s look at what happened one visit after she turned off her voice recorder. And be sure to check out her video clips too.

I thought that my interview had ended so I turned off the voice recorder and closed my notebook, when suddenly Rosa started saying, “You know, after you left my home, I was up in the middle of my one-bedroom house and I started to think about poverty. I hadn’t thought about that before, you know,” she said, starting at me. “I see other people’s houses and then I see mine….” After a small pause, Rosa said these words, that still now after a couple of months, are in my head, “Am I poor? Do you think I’m poor?”

That was the third time that I had the chance to meet Rosa, mother of two children receiving sponsorship benefits (the youngest is pictured). At that time I felt really ashamed. I mean, a simple “no” or “yes” wouldn’t have been the best answer, right?

But more than my answer, what really caught my attention was the fact that she would ask herself that question.

Unfortunately we’re used to putting people into a lot of categories and, at the same time, we also “fit” into one, but almost nobody stops to think carefully about whether he “belongs” to that one.

But what is poverty? Why didn’t Rosa feel poor? I think that the biggest problem about “being poor” is the fact that people don’t realize that things could be so much better. It’s like they’re locked up into an often uncomfortable and small shell full of disadvantages, until something or somebody makes them aware of the outside world, and then this shell is open to a much brighter and bigger ocean.

That’s why I love being in contact with our sponsored families, because I see how we help them, step by step, to see beyond their own reality.

In this case, thanks to a special donation, Rosa and her two boys will have one of their biggest needs met – a bathroom. And I think, more than this, they’ll realize that their life conditions can be improved.

My biggest wish is that not just Rosa and her kids, but all the sponsored families (and non-sponsored also) would have on their minds all the time that we’re able to make our lives better if we give it our biggest effort.

Listen to Rosa discuss how she manages to feed her family.

Hear Rosa talk about how poverty affects her family.