HISTORY:
My name is Rodrigo Ochoa. I live in New York with my three daughters. In 2010 I started a nonprofit foundation called Little Faces of Hope with the mission of helping children who live in extreme poverty. I would like to share with you how it started. To know the existence of starving children is sad and fills your heart with anguish. Seeing how they suffer can break your heart. Ev
en worse is the knowledge that some have actually died from malnutrition. Day after day I have had to deal with the feelings of helplessness and the inability to end this plague of poverty. I have seen shoeless children in the street asking for money to buy food. I often spoke to my mother and wife about helping children and elderly people who have no food or place to live. We also spoke about helping kids who want to go to school but are unable to pay for the year’s tuition, books, or uniforms. That was our dream, but for my mother and wife it couldn’t come true. In September and October of 2006 they passed away, but that dream is still with me. I was always a strong and healthy man, but in December 2009, at 43 years old, I was diagnosed with Stage 3 Melanoma. This is an aggressive and deadly cancer. I began to think of the dream I had and thought that it would surely end along with me and my life. On December 14, 2009 in a great hospital in New York and with the angelic hands of Dr. Brady, I had two major surgeries. Unfortunately, it left me in bed for quite awhile but I lived and I was ever so grateful. I did not want to die and leave behind my unfulfilled dream and my three daughters, ages 2, 13, and 15, without a mother and without a father. Three months after my surgeries, around my daughters’ birthdays, with the hopes and prayers of my family and friends, I received a gift from God. A Miracle; I was free from cancer. Back in my home country (Colombia), I had met some extraordinary people. They were very caring people with great hearts. Now they wished to help me fulfill the dream my mother, wife and I had. God gave me another opportunity to live and I thought of how to give that opportunity to the children I have always wanted to help. With the help of a wonderful group of friends and family, I started to raise money. With the money we collected, we were able to give light to the dream we now call the Little Faces of Hope Foundation. Since then we have been dedicatedly working to help children. At this moment we have a group of children from the ages of 3 to 12 years old, but there are many more faces of hope, and we want to keep our dream alive to help others.
