Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [25]
Gabby wished she had taken the bus. But looking back as an adult, Gabby realized that surviving her mother’s costume antics actually made her tougher and more immune to criticism. If you can live through this kind of childhood mortification, the embarrassments of adulthood are easier to handle.
Gloria and Spencer also had other techniques for toughening up their daughters.
When summer came, they’d load the kids in the car, drive them to the middle of Mexico, and drop them off at a camp where none of the other kids knew English. This was Mexican summer camp. Gloria and Spencer figured it would be a good way for the girls to learn Spanish. This total-immersion experience might have been daunting for other kids, but Melissa and Gabby mostly enjoyed themselves. They liked hanging out with kids from other countries, and even came back with a smattering of French, which pleased Gloria and Spencer.
While Gabby and Melissa were struggling with their Spanish, Gloria and Spencer would disappear into Central America. Later in the summer, they’d pick the girls up and, on the drive back to Arizona, they’d stop in tiny towns collecting artwork, meeting the locals, and tasting another culture.
They’d also learn about poverty.
Gloria and Spencer taught altruism by example. Each year, they sponsored scholarships at a school in Belize, the only Central American country where English is the official language. In 1975, they invited one recipient, a bright boy named Francis, to come live with them in Tucson for a year. (Francis would go on to become a veterinarian and school vice principal, and Gabby still considers him her brother. His connection to Gabby would make national news in Belize after she was shot.)
In part because of her upbringing, Gabby was a kid, and then an adult, who developed a deep concern for other people. But as Melissa sees it, the example set by their parents doesn’t fully explain Gabby’s sense of compassion. There was also something inside Gabby, something Melissa decided was pretty rare.
“Most human beings care about a relatively small group of people,” Melissa says when she’s asked about her sister. “They care about their family, their friends, their neighbors, some of the people they work with. Maybe that adds up to fifty people. Gabby’s number is way past fifty. Her number is in the hundreds of thousands—or the millions. I started realizing it when we were kids. That makes her different from the rest of us.”
Gabby had a kind of empathy that would sometimes backfire on her. When she was in eleventh grade, she traveled to Spain to be an exchange student, and she was hosted by a wealthy family with children her age. The family had servants who took care of all the chores around the house, and that made Gabby uncomfortable. She was always trying to help them out, which upset her hosts.
“Stop doing the dishes,” they told her. “Stop making the bed. Stop helping the maid.”
As they saw it, she was setting a bad example for their children. It was a class issue. The help was there to help.
But Gabby ignored the family’s admonishments, and kept doing the dishes and offering to help the maid. A month into her stay, her hosts came into her room. “Make your suitcase,” they said.
She wondered what that meant. They said it again. “Make your suitcase.”
She realized they were kicking her out. In disbelief, she started packing. Because not everything would fit in her suitcase—she’d bought gifts for her family back home—her hosts gave her a large cardboard box that cartons of tampons had come in. They dropped her off at the train station with her suitcase and that giant tampon box. Near tears, she called her parents collect.
The exchange program was able to find her somewhere to stay that night, and eventually she was placed with another, far more welcoming family. But Gabby had learned the old lesson that no good deed goes unpunished. Things don’t always go well for people who are too nice.
Gabby wasn’t completely selfless, of course. Mixed with her urge to help people was a sense of political savvy that Gloria and