Pinita Gurdian: "I was impacted by seeing how much thinner Ana Margarita is"

After 43 days since the last visit, we were allowed another visit. Ana Margarita felt it was a gift from her father who, 9 years ago on April 30, left us for the embrace of the loving Father who was waiting for him with open arms.

It was a very hard day for me because in the morning I had to receive a transfusion of a liter of blood.

I was impacted by seeing how much thinner Ana Margarita was, which is true each time I see her. All the political prisoners in El Chipote suffer from hunger and not everything that we are able to get the jail to receive for them each day manages to get into their hands.

But more than her thinness, I was impressed by the person who, through all the suffering, isolation and conditions of her captivity, far from frightening or embittering her, are making her a better person every day.

They have not been able to erase her sincere smile or the purity of her gaze that reflects a compassionate and generous soul. She works every day, turning all the suffering into something positive.

More than worrying about herself, she is concerned about others who are in worse conditions than she is. She told me that at first she was irritated by the bad treatment she received, but she realized that her irritation only made things worse for her, and so she has managed to transform that irritation into compassion for the people who exercise what they seem to think is power.

She meditates, she prays, and she thinks of all the good she has received during her life and of the people who have most influenced her and have been role models to inspire her to grow, demand her rights and demand the rights of others.

She sings the songs of the Mejía Godoy brothers quietly to herself. She believes that Nicaragua has not yet fully recognized the greatness of all that potential, that legacy that has been an inspiration and will always continue to inspire.

She thanks all the people who preceded her in true political vocation, people full of ideals who have built in her a path to follow. Because for her, only politics that encompass the whole of society is capable of changing the unjust structures in which we have always lived.

For her the dawn is beautiful, just as the dawn of a new Nicaragua will be. To see it, she stands on tiptoes on her bed slab to peek out and enjoy a little bit of the beauty of nature.

She thinks about everything she will do when she gets out. So much to do and to change. But among other things, one thing she wants to do is to enjoy eating pork from a curro pig fattened up in Esteli….

As the lawyer she is, she says that absolutely none of the rules of international law have been complied with even minimally for any of the political prisoners. She has protested these violations and will continue to protest them.

Ana Margarita is a prisoner held in isolation for love.

I left the visit crying, recognizing the greatness of her soul and pondering that I am her mother. And that her father and Father Fernando and her brother-in-law Irving succeeded in influencing her to be the person she is today, after almost 11 months of deprivation, of total isolation.

Examples like the great Mandela and Pepe Mujica are evidence of how pain and loneliness are capable of revealing the greatness of the soul.