The girl who grew: Nancy Gabriela's story

A story about faith, a mother's love, and the young woman Nancy Gabriela is becoming.

I have been a nurse practitioner for a long time, and I have learned not to be easily surprised. But I still remember the morning that Lilian walked into my office at the mission, her four-year-old daughter's hand in hers, and placed a folder of medical paperwork on my desk.

Nancy Gabriela was four years old and barely wearing size two clothing. She was small in the way that stops you — not the smallness of a petite child, but the smallness of a body that hasn't been able to do what bodies are supposed to do. Lilian had already done the hard work of getting bloodwork drawn, which in Honduras means waking before dawn, crowding onto a public bus, and riding three to four hours to reach a public hospital — and then hoping the doctor shows up. The results confirmed a growth hormone deficiency.

I looked at those results. I looked at that little girl. And I thought: we have to find a way.

Every Sunday

The treatment Nancy needed was daily injections — temperature-sensitive, requiring refrigeration — and it cost approximately two thousand dollars a month. For a single mother raising three daughters in a modest home in Honduras, that number was not a hardship. It was an impossibility. The treatment might as well not have existed.

I spent over a year trying to solve this. I contacted colleagues in the United States. I looked into purchasing the medication in Mexico or neighboring countries where pricing might be different. I explored shipping options while trying to keep the cold chain intact. Dead end after dead end.

Every Sunday at church, Lilian would find me. And every Sunday, she would ask: “Have you found anything?”

I will be honest with you: I started to dread seeing her. Not because of anything she did, but because I had no answer to give her. I am a practical person. I am a problem-solver. And every week I had to look this woman in the eye and say, not yet. I began to quietly wonder when she was going to accept that this wasn't going to work out.

Lilian never wondered that. Not once.

She would tell me, calmly and without a trace of desperation: “It's okay. God is going to bring a solution for my child.” Every week. For a year. She wasn't wishing. She wasn't hoping in the fragile, fingers-crossed sense of the word. She was stating something she already counted as promised.

A Sunday with News

Because of Lilian's faith — and I say this sincerely — I decided not to give up. If she wasn't going to stop believing, I wasn't going to stop trying. I shifted my strategy: instead of searching for cheaper medication, I would raise the money to pay for it.

A large church in Houston heard about Nancy's situation. On a single Sunday, they took up a special offering. They raised forty-five thousand dollars.

The following Sunday, when Lilian found me after service and asked her question, I finally had different news to give her.

Here is what I want you to understand about her reaction: it was not the reaction of someone who had been rescued from despair. It was the reaction of someone watching a promise come to pass. She rejoiced — deeply, genuinely — but not out of disbelief. I was the one who was surprised. Lilian had been expecting this all along.

She is, without question, one of the greatest examples of faith I have ever witnessed in real life. She is my mustard seed. She is the one who moved the mountain — because she never stopped believing it could move.

The Girl Who Grew

Once Nancy began her daily injections, the change was almost explosive. Within months, she had energy she'd never had before. She wanted to move. She wanted to walk. Her body began catching up to itself, making gains she hadn't been able to make in four years of life.

Around that same time, we helped Lilian leave a dangerous marriage. Her husband had other families, was abusive, and was violent. It took two tries — she went back the first time out of fear, then found her way out for good. When that door finally closed, all three of her daughters exhaled. They were safe. And for the first time, they could begin to imagine a different kind of life.

I think of this family the way you might think of the family in Little Women — no strong male figure, but a mother at the center who is a stalwart, who leads her home with humility and quiet, unbreakable strength. Lilian worked hard. She found employment. She made sure all three of her daughters graduated from high school, and she did it by showing them — not telling them — why education matters.

Nancy Today

Nancy Gabriela is now in her final year of a university psychology degree.

When I think about why she chose psychology, I think about what her childhood actually looked like. A chronic illness in a country with too few specialists, too few resources, and too little infrastructure means that every medical appointment requires waking before the sun, walking to a bus stop, riding a crowded bus for three to four hours, arriving at a public hospital and hoping the doctor came in that day, finding somewhere to stay because it cannot all be done in one day, and going home the next. It means navigating a system that was not built for people like her — and doing it again and again, year after year.

That experience can make a child bitter or fearful. But in Nancy's case, it made her curious about people — about what they carry, about how they endure, about the inner life that keeps someone going when the outer circumstances give them every reason to stop.

Hope Scholars Honduras has been honored to support Nancy in this degree program. And as I watch her prepare to finish, I find myself thinking about that four-year-old in my office — the one in size two clothing, quiet and small, while her mother laid her paperwork on my desk and refused to accept defeat.

How Miracles Work

I want to tell you something about how I believe God works — not in theory, but from what I have watched with my own eyes.

I don't think miracles usually arrive from nowhere. I think God moves miracles through people — by activating compassion in human hearts. Any one of us, individually, is fairly powerless. But when compassion moves through a community, through a church, through a group of people who decide together that someone else's child matters — that becomes a force to be reckoned with. That Houston church didn't know Nancy Gabriela. They just heard her story, and they gave. Forty-five thousand dollars, in a single Sunday offering. It funded approximately three and a half years of treatment.

Here is where the story gets even more remarkable.

In rare cases, growth hormone treatment can do something extraordinary; it can jumpstart the body to begin producing the hormone on its own. To find out whether this is happening, you take the child off treatment and monitor their growth over the next six to nine months. If they continue to grow steadily without the injections, the treatment can be withdrawn permanently.

As the donated funds were running out, we reached exactly this moment with Nancy.

I will be honest: I was dubious. I'm a medical person. I know the odds. I tried not to let myself hope too hard for this particular outcome. (I also caught myself using the word “lucky” and had to stop and correct myself — because luck has absolutely nothing to do with anything in this story.)

Nancy's body had learned to do what it needed to do. She did not need to continue the injections. She had received exactly the treatment she needed — not a dollar short, not a day over — and then her body carried the rest.

She and her mother and sisters are all petite women — I tower over them at five foot eight — but they are exactly within the range of normal for their ethnicity and genetics. They are, in every sense, exactly where they are supposed to be.

To be a medical provider who gets to be present for the full arc of something like this — the diagnosis, the search, the treatment, the resolution, the outcome — is an honor I do not take lightly. I was only a small part of it. But being a witness to it? These are the stories that you never forget. These are the ones that burn a hole in your heart, mind and spirit forever.

What I Have Learned

I have been changed by knowing this family. Lilian looks up to me, and I am genuinely uncertain why — perhaps because I have had means and opportunities that others have not. But what I know for certain is that I look up to her.

She has taught me what it looks like to thank God before things come to pass. She has taught me that faith is not passive — it is the most active, most courageous thing a person can practice. And she has modeled that for her daughters, who have carried it forward into their own lives.

That is what Hope Scholars Honduras is meant to do. Not to rescue people, but to walk alongside them — to share the means and opportunities that can unlock what is already there. Because everyone is deserving of the chance to improve their lives. And sometimes, all it takes is one person willing to keep trying while another person never stops believing it will work out.

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