# Evidia Álvarez González

**Categories:** Science, professor, Doctor

Nurse

With a life dedicated to alleviating human suffering amid natural disasters, in Haiti and Ethiopia and in the most diverse circumstances, nurse Evidia Álvarez González from Sancti Spíritus became the first Latin American to receive the Florence Nightingale medal awarded by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

At eight years old Evidia dreamed of being a nurse. She saw herself then in front of her mother, whose burns took away even her breath. In the health clinic some women dressed in white never stopped attending to her mother.

At 14 years old she held her first syringe. From then on and until today—for a long time that I cannot pinpoint—Evidia Álvarez González has been only that: a nurse.

To greet her with a kiss on the cheek you must kneel down, as if in prayer—even though you end up truly revering her—and I'm not exaggerating. She must have always measured something over one meter, unless the curvature that weighs on her back over the years has shortened her by several more centimeters.

She may have worn the same white uniform always with one or another hem if anything; but the cap, if you look at it well, seems like the only large thing amid her black hair from dye, even though she says it has never weighed on her in her life. Evidia, the teacher—the only name known to everyone despite also carrying the names Álvarez González—has only been that: a nurse… and a Nursing teacher and Nursing director, even now when she already has a few extra wrinkles and fewer bones.

Thus, with her tiny stature she must have surprised the country folk of Zaza del Medio when she stood in the doors of the hamlet with pencil, primer and manual in hand.

"In 1961, like almost all the youth of that time, I joined the Literacy Campaign in a rural area in Zaza del Medio. When it ended Fidel met in the Plaza de la Revolución with the 100,000 young volunteers who had made it to the end. He told us: You must study. From there on I studied the Nursing career in Havana. First we worked for five months, then they gave us a test. I started the course at Hospital Joaquín Albarrán, in 1962.

"It was three years of study, but it was reduced to two because we had to face the situation that Cuba's hospitals were in at that moment. Many doctors had left the country, also a large number of nurses, especially to the United States. Back then, Nursing was a career for the privileged, for white, pretty women. The country had to chart new strategies and I joined them."

She had barely even started walking the paths of nursing when Evidia was already waiting for hard tests, very hard ones. In 1963 Hurricane Flora stubbornly pounded the eastern region of Cuba. During those five days in October death walked, tragedy… and a helping hand. It must have frightened the residents of Aguas Verdes, on the banks of the Cauto River, when the helicopter dropped her, in the middle of Hurricane Flora's winds, barely 14 years old with a backpack of syringes and medicines to save those who were slowly flooding with so much rain.

It would be the second time she would meet Fidel—the first was in the Plaza de la Revolución when she was part of the Conrado Benítez volunteer teacher brigade and the Literacy Campaign was concluding—and now that she tells it I imagine the giant almost bending down to be able to look at her closely and order her yes, to get back in the helicopter with the doctor and get that man out of that damned water. "The hardest part of my career was when Hurricane Flora came; thousands of people drowned there—Evidia would confess to my provocations—. I was just starting my career and it impressed me, because everything was surrounded by water and there were people who lost their entire family and others who were saved without knowing how because they climbed on top of houses and were swept away until they reached that hill."

And the tiny girl, very tiny, returned from the East. Her professional itinerary was barely beginning; she enrolled in a Health Administration course. Soon she would be knocking on the doors of bohíos in the mountains of Escambray, in central Cuba, in the midst of massive immunization campaigns. "We practically didn't rest; we vaccinated against diphtheria, tuberculosis, poliomyelitis, tetanus…"

Founder of the Rural Medical Service, Evidia was part of the faculty of the Martha Abreu School of Nursing in Santa Clara. In the mid-1960s she returned to Sancti Spíritus, where the deficit of health personnel was significant.

Perhaps it was her debut in the trials of fire. Then would come one after another: shortening the Nursing career and graduating and taking specialty courses to improve herself and the same as starting polio vaccination on the island as being the protagonist of the tuberculosis program to get patients out of hospitals; arriving at what was then the province of Las Villas, barely 20 years old, to teach in Santa Clara, Sagua la Grande and Cienfuegos to train more nurses and becoming then, overnight, director of the first comprehensive polyclinic in the central region that would open in Ranchuelo.

It was 1966 and they had already asked her to return to Sancti Spíritus to found, to teach. "They told me: 'Evidia, the people there are in loincloths'; but it was convenient for me because I was from here, from Cabaiguán, and so I opened the School of Nursing and was the regional head of nurses.

From 67 to 68 we graduated about 500 Nursing auxiliaries who had sixth grade and in 69 I opened the nursing school to upgrade the auxiliaries."

She would plant schools even in the most remote places. In Ethiopia, amid bullets and wounded she would train nurses and in Haiti, in a remote village without electricity or water, she would leave other marks: those of saving lives. But she had already practiced healing over and over here, with the tubercular, with children under one year old for whom she enrolled in that necessary project to reduce mortality that would later be called the Maternal and Child Care Program (PAMI)… with everyone.

In more than five internationalist missions she knew hardship, the true latitudes of pain. Ethiopia in the early 1980s always appears in the path of her memories.

"The children died and the parents buried them anywhere, without a coffin or anything. No one knows how much you had to appeal to face that. In the hospitals you found many orphans from the war, all with different diseases. Tarecú became something special for me; his health conditions were very bad, he had a disease called Kwashiorkor, due to lack of protein, insufficient amino acids. Because of all that he had a lot of edema, he was practically a monster.

"I would bring him food from home, I would pamper him, and with the work not just mine, but of the Cuban pediatrician who was also with us we saved his life in nine months. I must confess that it hurt me very much to leave him there. I worked in the hospital in Nekente, in Weullegas, south of the capital."

And from Haiti's memories, how much remains of those realities in Evidia's eyes?

"In Haiti one feels close to one's roots. When you get there poverty and ignorance are so great that it seems difficult to carry out any activity; but as time passes, as one goes deeper, you realize that within that ignorance there is much nobility."

In that nation the functions of the woman from Sancti Spíritus took on preventive profiles and other nuances. She intervened in mass vaccinations, organized circles of grandparents and adolescents, applied surveys related to AIDS. She treated more than 5,000 patients, distributed in about 380 houses.

"We trained nurses because there is a tendency there to give birth at home. The cost of childbirth in a hospital is very high. Therefore, many women give birth at home and those who deliver are midwives. We gathered all of them and taught them what we understood they should know so that the woman wouldn't get infected, among other procedures."

That's why she had been in Panama in a special course offered to her by the World Health Organization for her work in disease prevention and in PAMI.

Behind the desk she can barely be seen; however, she has not needed even a millimeter more to lead the nurses of the entire province, to direct—as a professional cadre of the Provincial Assembly of People's Power for two years—Health, Municipal Services and the Electric Company; or to stand in front of a classroom full of boys who are twice her height; "but nothing, girl, so you can see everyone respects me."

It has been her whole life and "I stayed single because of it—she confesses—, because back then no man allowed a woman to arrive at any time and to be looked for at any time." Perhaps she doesn't know how to do anything else and at this point wouldn't learn, because even when she fractured her hip and had to stay in bed for a few months she declined the offer they made her: "When I recovered they told me: 'You go there and take a little stroll and come right back here' and I told them: not like that."

She still has several projects left to carry out like writing a book on Geriatrics, "because there isn't much bibliography on that—she tells me—and it hasn't been given all the attention it deserves and more now with the aging population and the decline in birth rates."

She may lack years and have strength left to do it. Otherwise she wouldn't still be supervising one by one the clinics, controlling the Senior Care Program and walking from one end of town to the other dragging, sometimes, a cane that serves her more as company than as support.

She has the body and soul of a child, the only strange things are the lines on her face, her bent back and the cap so wide, that kind of altar to which she has dedicated herself and that she wears, invariably, every day on her head.

But what age do you have?—I ask, now intrigued.
She only laughs and then, as if she doesn't care much, suggests: "Put there what you think."

As the years fell away, memory remains. In her pilgrimage, Evidia only knows that she eased the pain, no matter what the latitudes, the races, the creeds. "I wanted to live for others and the reward I had was the Florence Nightingale medal."

Awarded by the International Committee of the Red Cross, this decoration recognizes the exceptional devotion to humanity. Every two years 36 nurses and volunteer auxiliaries are honored throughout the planet.

This woman from Sancti Spíritus is reborn in each fragment of her story, and the greatest reward comes to her when she remembers that in Ethiopia and Haiti there are little girls whose mothers preferred to name them Evidia.