Coping with Tragedy

Biography & Photo

By Keri Bugenhagen

A week shy of her first birthday, Jessica Salvador played near her uncle Hernando’s third floor, U-shaped balcony in Bolivia, while he watched. He turned away briefly, just as she crawled to the edge. From the far side of the balcony, her two-year-old sister Natalia pierced the air with her screams as she witnessed her baby sister slip through the wide, white balcony bars, then dangle dangerously from her right arm.

The screams alerted Salvador’s mother, and she dashed down the winding stairs, frantically trying to reach the ground before her innocent baby fell.

But she was too late.

Salvador’s little body struck the tin roof beneath the balcony, then bounced head-first into the gravel-laden pavement.

“I was still awake, but I should’ve been unconscious,” Salvador recalled many years later.

Her mother found her broken body bleeding from a gash in her head and lying nearly face down, but still peering at the world around her. Strangely, the baby did not cry.

That moment would define the rest of Salvador’s life. As a child, she needed constant physical therapy to keep her left arm working as well as possible, and she needed clumsy metal braces to keep her legs growing straight. The impact of Salvador’s fall caused her brain to collide with her skull, leaving a gaping hole in the left frontal lobe of her brain, affecting motor skills, speech, emotion, and causing seizure-like episodes throughout her life.

Countless doctor visits were in store as well as prescriptions. Doctors said she would be a vegetable. But through her difficult and sometimes painful life, Salvador, now 26, perseveres. She is a Counterterrorism major at Roosevelt University in Chicago, expecting her bachelor’s in December.

Still, Salvador’s mother and uncle find it difficult to cope with the resounding guilt of her tragic fall every day...

Read more!

Rains came down and floods came up

Scene and Photo
by Peggy Porter

Hours earlier, it had been just an ordinary Friday evening and the planned neighborhood block party for Saturday seemed on schedule. But a brief glimpse of the front yard Saturday morning while getting the newspaper showed there had been some rain overnight. Standing water quietly rippled as cars drove past.

The rains continued, changing from a sprinkling to a downpour, eventually swallowing up the grass, except for some green along the edge of the street and yard. The rain pounded and poured steadily for four more hours, then intermittently for 12 more.

No grass was visible anywhere in the neighborhood as water splashed menacingly onto the front steps of homes. Abruptly, the area was on a high alert for possible flooding. A call to the village to verify that the pumps in the lagoons were working received only a meaningless machine saying to leave your number.

Residents soon stashed the appetizers and desserts meant for the block party and instead anxiously called home supply stores for sandbags, and searched for trucks to rent in case their furniture had to be rescued from the flood. Nervously, they also checked the sky, hoping to see signs of clearing.

There was only more rain.

Read more!

Sights & Sounds of a City Campus

Read more!