By Belize Live News Staff: Nobody has counted. That is probably the truest measure of what she did.
Milagro Garel has died, a month after a ruptured cerebral aneurysm on July 28 sent her from Belize to a hospital bed in Guatemala.
She was stabilised here first, then flown out. Surgeons operated. Weeks in intensive care followed, with her husband Joe posting updates as she came back to consciousness in pieces. Every small movement, every response, went out to a country that was watching.
Belizeans put up the money. Between $95,000 and $140,000 for the flight, the surgery and the hospital stay, raised because people knew who she was and what she had done for their children.
For over twenty years, Garel connected Belizean families to surgical care that did not exist here and that they could never have afforded abroad. She did it through World Pediatrics, through Friends of Pediatrics, through whatever door she could get open.
The children she helped are grown now, some of them. Others are still small.
“Rest peacefully, Milagro,” her family wrote. “Until we meet again.”
Belize owes her more than it can say.
